The Times Quotidian

The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire, Getty Villa
by Guy Zimmerman

When, in a crowded casino, the endangered hero of a lousy movie grabs his girl and jumps into a car that’s on display to zoom out through shattering windows into the neon-lit boulevards of Las Vegas, it’s all about generating a moment of surprise. When Teardrop, in the film Winter’s Bone by Debra Granik, grabs his niece Ree by the hair and tells her “I told you to shut up once with my mouth” we are caught off guard, and in that shocked opening we engage anew with the world. When Shakespeare writes “And pity, like a naked new-born babe…” he varies the um-pah, iambic rhythm in the last three syllables to surprise us, and then focuses our opened minds on that vivid closing image. And surprise – subtle, awakening shocks – are what Velazquez is after when he drops the sharp diagonal of the table edge between the curving shapes that compose the Water Seller of Seville. With art (even in its degraded forms), it’s all about the surprise that frees us from conceptual filters and opens us to the seamless emergence of the present in all its vivid complexity. These thoughts came to me at the Getty Villa looking up into the vacant eyes of the Tzitzimitl, which is an artifact designed to do precisely the opposite.

A monument to the depravity of human beings in authoritarian mode, the Tzitzimitl leans forward in the main gallery, hands reaching out, grinning with a lecherous avidity. Small holes perforate the top of the Tzitzimitl’s head. Here, the priests would pour bowls of human blood, and the blood would seep down through the open ribs to drip off the pod-like liver that hangs below the rib cage like the clapper of a bell. A demonic figure dredged up from Aztec Mexico, this life-sized terracotta statue must have been terrifying in the shadowy dark of the temple pyramids, shrouded in smoke while those dying under the sacrificial knife wailed and groaned. The Tzitzimitl is an instrument design to deliver psychic collapse.

We mill around the Tzitzimitl’s legs, me and the other visitors to the Getty Villa, as if the dark and repellent energies that surround this grim artifact have entirely dissipated. But something in me is alarmed, as if I am crossing a line that should not be crossed. A feeling of dread rises up as I watch the tourists scan the explanatory plaque, and then shuffle off under those vacant but watchful eyes. No surprise here: you are defined totally by the reductive narrative of the social hierarchy, the Tzitzimitl whispers, and you must submit and obey its imperatives, even unto your untimely death.

Through the use of this kind of terror, the Aztec priesthood maintained a regime of conquest and domination for the two centuries preceding the arrival of Hernan Cortes in 1519. The curators of the show, “The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire,” take pains to connect the power structure and practices of the Aztecs with those of Imperial Rome, and I would not argue the point. The human urge toward conquest and domination observes no historical, regional or ethnic boundaries. In fact, I’d be willing to extend that analogy to the kind of overt, directly coercive American empire advocated by Dick Cheney and others on the virulent right wing of American politics. The comparison might seem outlandish…except if you are don’t happen to be an American. While thwarted, at least temporarily, in their overt political aims, the right’s communications infrastructure – the infamous, Fox-centered Right Wing Noise Machine – continues to seep polluted thought into the cultural mind stream like a malignant tumor. Rather than work cooperatively to confront the very real and quite alarming environmental and social challenges unfettered Capitalism has created, we are forced to battle disinformation at every turn.

I went to the Getty Villa thinking about the issue that’s come up in recent posts about how the brain is shaped by experience, and how concerted efforts must be made to to alter such “hard wiring.” I’m curious about the collective correlates of this individual effort, which connect for me with the very pressing issue of sustainability – our ability as a species to outrun our own destructive capacities. No doubt there were Aztecs, perhaps a great many of them, who recognized the inherent absurdity (not to mention the barbarity) of human sacrifice, but were powerless to alter a deeply rooted pattern of ritual that was also linked to the tangible benefits of a militaristic empire. In contemporary America we are not in the habit of cutting beating hearts from living victims…but we consume way too much of everything and it’s arguably a more destructive habit in the long run. Authoritarian elements in American cultural life are being energized by how desperate huge segments of the population are to avoid even modest changes.

Recent research into the fine-grain neuronal structure of the brain underscores the roles of “invariant memories” and pattern recognition play in human intelligence. To form predictions about what will happen next, the brain reaches back through the vast, neuronal archive and builds on what has happened before. When predictive statements about how the world operates reach a certain level of complexity we call them stories. Stories are comforting, but when we forget that they are also artificial, stories quickly lead us astray. Reality is inherently non-conceptual. If the stories we tell ourselves are not continually readjusted the invariant memories that drive them inevitably deliver imbalance.

As an institution, the Republican party seems to understand all this. Representing the interests of the top one per cent of the population they have become adept at manipulating the story elements buried in the national consciousness, and then frame every issue in narrative terms that resist the influence of reality. As we approach the 2010 midterms they seem determined to wring short term advantage from every situation regardless of how increasing imbalance leads at some point to a crash. Course corrections can be traumatic, involving opening to direct experience unmediated by protective conceptual frames.

For anyone familiar with tragic drama, “direct experience unmediated by protective conceptual frames” begins to sound like a description of catharsis, the shattering moment in which the tragic hero suddenly sees how radically off target his (or her) conceptual picture of things has been. The hero of tragic drama is forced down into the experience of the present moment. There he confronts the somatic voltage of unprocessed traumas directly such that they no longer distort his vision. The shock of this moment is conveyed to the audience watching the tragedy of Oedipus or Lear unfold on stage. The experience is cognitive but also deeply emotive, rooted in the collective body as well as the mind. It’s no accident that tragic drama flourished most powerfully in Athens and Elizabethan England, which are arguably the two most transformative and dynamic societies in the history of man.

As individuals, one action we can take to escape confining narrative and conceptual frames, is to go to the body. How we do this in a collective way is a big subject, clearly. But it’s hardly an abstract issue today. After my encounter with the Tzitzimitl, I found the opulence of the Getty Villa oppressive. Weighty panels of multicolored marble buttress the impression that in the hierarchy of social values you are near the very pinnacle. The last thirty years have seen a remarkable transfer of wealth up the socio-economic ladder and today income inequality is greater than it was in the 1920s. Many of my friends in the arts community are suffering today, their livelihoods in question. Our ability to inquire about root causes of our situation begins to ramp down as we are forced to focus on issues closer to home. In this way economic trauma confers a short term advantage to authoritarian forces, but only on the way towards the chaos of collapse.

Stepping back to look at the longer term I’m compelled to quote from the opening of Knowledge and Politics, by the remarkable Brazilian social theorist Roberto Unger:

“In its ideas about itself and about society, as in all its other endeavors, the mind goes from mastery to enslavement. By an irresistible movement, which imitates the attraction death exercises over life, thought again and again uses the instruments of its own freedom to bind itself in chains. But whenever the mind breaks its chains, the liberty it wins is greater than the one it had lost, and the splendor of its triumph surpasses the wretchedness of its earlier subjection. Even its defeats strengthen it. Thus, everything in the history of thought happens as if it were meant to remind us that, though death lasts forever, it is always the same, whereas life, which is fleeting, is always something higher than it was before.”

Unger, who until recently served as a minister in the Lula government in Brazil, certainly deserves several posts of his own. For now let us hope his former student, Barak Obama, learned enough to break some of the more destructive patterns clouding the American mind.

Alice Neel: Paintings, LA Louver Gallery, Venice, California, May 20-June 26, 2010
by Tom Wudl

Alice Neel’s biography confirms what all true artists know. There will be pain at either end of the equation that attempts to reconcile creativity with survival. For all true artists it is create or die. The difficult negotiation between the need to create and the longing for the promise of domestic stability and companionship has been a source of pain for both artists and their families always. Even the stoics who tough it out by themselves don’t escape loneliness. And for Neel there too existed a marginalization by the declared professionals of the day; the same sycophants who now cannot find praise enough, ignored her work within the confines of her own generation. An unkind adversity many an artist is condemned to suffer.

When standing in front of her paintings I get the sense that everyone who posed for her is implicated in her suffering. When you sat in the chair you enlisted to have your fortune told by a diabolical mind reader who could and would penetrate every barrier unconditionally. When you got up you could not possibly have the same pretensions about yourself that you had before the sitting (Linus Pauling excluded; still deluded by his own insipid smile). And as viewers we too are implicated in this seance of truth and see a particular part of ourselves clearly in the faces on the canvas. With the exception of a few sympathetic children and other chosen innocents, no one is given a pass.

Last but not least is technique: To the uninitiated the paintings may look like the casual improvisations of a well meaning yet untutored primitive. But to those who are in possession of a visual syntax, Alice Neel’s virtuosity is striking and it makes me think of shorthand; shorthand as used to encode quantities of information into a symbolic economy that when deciphered discloses every word and every letter representing the contents of the subject, in its completeness. That’s exactly what she did. She invented a shorthand that permitted her to record every detail of her clinical analysis of what is visible and invisible to the eye and that in turn in the fullness of time unfolds itself in the eye of the viewer.

Tim Hawkinson at Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles, May 22-June 26, 2010
by  Michelle Plochere

In contrast to the morbid formality and enforced quietude of the Blum and Poe gallery space, the cold, dead hand (culled from rotten apples and banana peels), that greets the visitor at the start of the Tim Hawkinson show, seems comparatively warm and welcoming as it emerges, zombie-style, from its hygienic white display column, more alive in its organic state of decomposition than anything else that is to follow. This literal reveal of the hand is a thematic precursor for the show, as it foregrounds the play between the animate and inanimate, motion and inertia, the useful and the useless, entropy and evolution, craft and junk.

In the next room, a sculpture of cardboard tubes, cylinders and wheels made from rolls of tape and other useful products, almost casually tossed in the corner, suggests not the dog of the title so much as a kinetic sculpture waiting to be spun and twirled – an improvisational toy harvested from trash cans in an alleyway. A large pen and ink drawing becomes a meditation on circular forms, suggesting an elaborate four-level freeway interchange to nowhere – a closed system in which the mark of the hand and the process itself are left visible through penciled outlines; it is decidedly imperfect in its ode to rationalist form – rationalist form in service of the irrational.

The hands appear again in a collage piece, as clasped fingers become the tread of a tire in Bike, and the body is re-made into machine, but again, the closed system, of possible/impossible motion, is represented – wheels will spin, but go nowhere. And another piece presents entwined fingers and toes —rough, frayed and imperfect yet insistent on their grooves and rivulets — echoing circularity turning inside itself.

But there are two major set pieces in the show, that, along with the opening hand (a proper pun), form a Gothic narrative for the 21st century that slowly unwinds itself through the gallery rooms as such aforementioned ancillary pieces build upon one another.

Orrery, taking its title from the word for a mechanical model of the solar system, utilizes the leitmotif of the spinning wheel and makes it literal, if not functional: an 8 foot tall crone sits at a wheel, her dress pattern kaleidoscopically rotates, the bun in her hair spins, her eyeballs turn in their sockets, and the mechanical movements are sticky and imprecise. Her skin is made of melted plastic grocery bags, that, in spite of the still-visible logos, coalesce into an eerily realistic color, and the entire cross breed of sculpture – construction – engineered attraction is made from what are, to all appearances, entirely recycled materials. And even as it is the detritus of consumer product that is put on display, it is process and craft that are revealed – much is left undone in this piece in which the works are exposed, even though a tautology of motion is the only thing being produced.

The denouement of the show, a bookend to Orrery, is Candle, an over-scaled mechanized candle of dripping foam, in which cascading material is taken in at the bottom, and returned through a pulley system. A door at the back shows us the mechanical contrivances inside, and the interior it exposes is shiny and gold, reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel’s oven/crematorium. The candle holds symbolic value, but its flame is inert and stagnant, in spite of its constant machine-driven flickering. In its perpetual, relentless “recycling,” it serves in memoriam to a wasteful and onanistic consumer-driven culture that is less dying than undead; the narrative is brought full circle and a hand again reaches up from its grave.

The Art of Pam DeLuco
by Naomi Pitcairn

On a recent foray to Michael’s – “The Arts and Crafts Store”, amidst a jungle of fake flowers and pre-assembled memories I had an “epiphany beside the wall of Easter Bunnies”. It would appear that hand made has not only lost its place in “art” but also its place in craft. It seems to have morphed into a ready-made elite pastime fashioned on figurines, stickers and plastic jewels. As we carefully decorate, glue and frame with pre-packaged stuff made in far away lands, are we not just supporting the art of mega industry? In our attempts to feel a feigned sense of loving hands of home are we not undermining the very politics of hand made?

The time honored politics of “hand made” are those of self-sufficiency; the practice of traditional craft an act of independence. Now in the face of an extinction trend, the skill and personal production of useful objects have become potent form of protest. The convention of the reactionary has produced a new kind of rebel. A post-modern protester whose work involves an intimate connection both to their materials and to the land.

Philip Leider

The Bay Area has always been a petrie dish for all movements of protest and one such notable group of rebels is chronicled by Philip Leider, then editor of Artforum (June 1962–December 1971), who upon returing from a road trip to the West Coast in 1970, published “How I Spent My Summer Vacation… Or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Fransisco and Utah.” Leider had become disillusioned with the political potential of art and looked to the pastoral craft ethos as a possible solution.* Leider argued the future of not only political radicalism, but art making itself, lies in an intimate connection to the land instead of New York art galleries. He found, in the separatist commune near Berkeley, named Canyon potential. [In Canyon] “it is worth your life to cut down a tree” as the inhabitants are determined to “effect no change in the natural ecology of the region.” Leider was particularly keen on the leader of the Canyon commune, David Lynn, a sculptor from Berkeley, who had rejected the avant-garde to become a house builder. “…it seemed pretty clear that as far as Lynn was concerned, every sculptural idea he ever had was in his building. The revolution in Lynn’s art, if there was one, was dictated by the terrain…”

Like the Bay Area innovators of Canyon, whose work involved an intimate connection both to their materials and to the land, so does current SF based artist Pam DeLuco practice her art. There is an ethos behind the work. Ethos defined as “morality, expertise and knowledge.” Her pieces are an exploration of their own provenance, investigating the origins of materials and techniques involved by the cultures where they are practiced. Years traveling and living with people in remote areas of Central and South America gave DeLuco the opportunity to study up close the Ngöbe women of western Panamá where the elaborately patterned Chácara bag is crafted and The Choco people of Panama where the fruit of the jagua tree is used to produce decorative pigments for body paint.

Back state side, she uses the deep crimson dye, carmine, extracted from the female cochineal larvae and indigos collected from the Indigofera tinctoria, a member of the pea family. Cochineal is one of the few water-soluble colorants that resist degradation with time while her Indigo is processed using the preindustrial method of reduction (chemical alteration), dissolving the indigo in stale urine. Not an easy system to put into routine practice.

Behind the innocent facade of a crocheted pillow cover lies a patient connection to the hand-spun, 6-strand, Tussah silk, cable yarn and end medallions from her hand-reared Bombyx mori silkworms. Over a period of 60 days she carefully charts the progress of the eggs as they hatch, eat their way through tasty Mulberry leaves, become fat juicy worms who then cocoon producing the silky fuzz that is spun into thread. Allowing the cycle to complete the moths emerge, mate, reproduce and the new eggs are stored until the following spring when the process will repeat.

When the fur of an animal required, DeLuco is unflappable in her sympathetic acquisition of raw materials. The hand-knit sweaters require only the hand-spun Angora from her house pet rabbit, Jambo. The braided horsehair tassels, belts, hatband, and stampede strings are procured from the horses under her care. When hand-spun Qiviut down is required for knitted gloves, Pam is there at the San Francisco Zoo collecting the precious material off the fence.

As newcomer to the Bay Area, where artists and craftsmen like DeLuco have migrated in order to be with like-minded thinkers and rebels, I, like Philip Leider and others before me, am humbled. These practitioners are our seed banks, protagonists in the technique of know-how and self-reliance. More than a self-conscious authenticity, or token tribute to ennoble the vernacular, DeLuco is prepared, indeed steeped in the politics of hand-made; not a backwards looking nostalgia, nor revivalist idealism, but a proactive pursuit to find equanimity within our time.

North Atlantic, Wooster Group at REDCAT, February 10–21, 2010
by Guy Zimmerman

Many things went through my mind walking away from REDCAT after seeing the Wooster Group’s North Atlantic, but one of them was surely hats off to the company’s artistic director, Elizabeth LeCompte. First created by LeCompte and company in 1982, North Atlantic holds up remarkably well. The writer, James Strahs, pulled from texts by Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Gertrude Stein, and the company, anchored by Francis McDormand, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, hit their marks with style and precision. Set on an aircraft carrier moored off the coast of Holland, the piece juxtaposes tough-talking military exchanges with kinky sexual banter, presenting life during the Cold War as a fever dream full of violence and desire. Devoid of the multi-layered video projections that play a major role in later Wooster Group productions, North Atlantic features the fast noir rhythms and the Grotowski-esque physicality that define the company’s approach to performance. Evidently LeCompte remains as sharp as a tack.

North Atlantic was created shortly after LeCompte took the reins from founder Richard Schechner and changed the company’s name from the Performance Group to the Wooster Group. Schechner had been one of America’s earliest and most energetic proponents of the visionary Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s laboratory aesthetic. This past summer I saw Schechner at the Grotowski Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, where the elite of the global avant-garde gathered to pay tribute to the legendary Pole. Schechner spoke to our group about Grotowski’s impact on American theater, the rigor and seriousness he demanded from performers in every aspect of their craft. The Wooster Group’s highly physicalized performance style and their intensive working methods are among the most visible examples in America of Grotowski’s belief in theater as transformative ritual grounded in fully embodied presence in action. Beyond any rigid doctrine, the stamp of Grotowski is the absolute conviction that theater is linked in crucial ways to our collective sanity and, as such, merits the highest level of commitment.

At the same time I got the sense that Schectner’s earthiness and urbanity helped to limit the transcendent aspirations of Grotowski, pushing things in the direction of a kind of neo-Brechtian irony and spectacle. Or perhaps LeCompte is the source of those qualities in the Wooster Group’s basic affect. Either way, part of the reason the Group has found favor with the American art world is that they don’t mess all that much with depth. If American theater is a vast inland sea, wide and shallow, the Wooster Group is one of the bigger crocs, sunning themselves on their mossy log just North of Canal. Their productions are best thought of as comedies that don’t really have time for a sense of humor. It’s interesting to compare with the Polish company Theater Zar, which is Grotowski-inspired work at its most achingly transcendent. Unlike Zar, the Wooster Group does not traffic in reverence; leave the tragic dimension to the Eastern Europeans and pass the smutty jokes.

Rigor without transcendence manifests as kinetic energy, which is LeCompte’s forte as a director. Energy is where the agenda of art links up most easily with the American mindset, and this helps to explain why a counter-cultural enterprise like the Wooster Group has managed to slip past the informal censors that guard American sensibilities from challenge. One searches in vain, in a Wooster Group production, for the subversive silence in which self-recognition can bubble up. And yet one reason North Atlantic holds up so well is that America has matched the shallowness the piece is intent on satirizing. North Atlantic feels much darker now than it would have in the early 1980s. The addition of a Moslem call to prayer way in the background and some references to water boarding are all LeCompte needs to remind us of Abu Graib and Blackwater – of how far we have fallen. North Atlantic does not lack edge, it just aims its edge at tissue where the nerve endings long ago died.

For me the most successful Wooster Group piece was Hamlet, which came to REDCAT in 2007. The piece showed LeCompte’s command of a full high-tech barrage working to support her performers, and the brilliance of her meta-theatrical staging. And yet despite all the distancing and irony, the grandeur of Shakespeare’s mythic text came through loud and clear. To me, and as a playwright I am fully biased here, theater remains at root a literary activity. It’s when rigor in performance meets an original text with true depth that the full transformative display of the art form arises. This is why the highest points in the history of world theater tend to center around a significant playwright rather than a director. Think of fifth century Athens, Elizabethan England, the European era of Ibsen, or to a lesser degree the post War Europe defined by Brecht and Beckett; the playwright-centered convergence seems to occur when a culture begins to run a kind of maximum energy, an energy that translates into a willingness to collectively engage with the radical freedom of the present moment. We do not seem to be currently living in such a time, but perhaps the best way to move in the right direction is to pretend that we are.

[View with PicLens]

That said, it’s impossible to overstate the challenge of maintaining an American new work theater company over the last thirty years the way LeCompte has done, much less a company that has consistently produced such excellent and original work. Theater is pre-eminently an emergent art form, each performance resting on a huge web of complex social and artistic interactions. From the banality of board meetings to the Shakespearean treachery of inter-company politics to the ecstatic energy of performance, an artistic director like LeCompte has to engage with the full spectrum of human experience and remain operative. We are lucky to have artists as strong as LeCompte and her Woosters, and we should treasure every performance.

R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis, October 24 – February 7, 2010
The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, October 4 – January 3, 2010
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
by Rita Valencia

It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that the author of Zap and Mr. Natural, Robert Crumb, has undertaken the Greatest Illustration Project Ever Drawn–the Book of Genesis. Any narrative with all those “begats” would have to exert a certain charm for Crumb. The generally naughty R. shows himself to be extraordinarily obedient to this text, and demurs from any interpretive flourish in his cartoons–a wise decision, as the plain act of Crumb undertaking this work is its own statement which promises plenty of fun. His cast of characters includes a scowling, hirsute God, thunder-thighed Crumb-girls, and swarthy hangdog males, all tormented by the kind of terrible behavior that makes it obvious why God needed to give these people the The Ten Commandments.

R. Crumb’s drawings possess sweaty rigor and sturdy line. It makes the live ink on display in his Genesis cartoons glisten in a sensual and oily way. You can feel the fleshiness of his human figures; you can almost smell their dank perfumes. Slightly simian, utterly approachable, like soft homunculae you could take in your hand, the actors Crumb has drawn to populate the often horrifying saga of Genesis are as profane as Mr. Natural and Devil Girl. The irreverence is the point: there is no mystery to Crumb’s cartooning, only dogged workmanship, and a passion for drawing, indeed his project seems to reinforce a literal, mundane and pragmatic view of the “sacred” literature he is illustrating.

Genesis is probably more widely read by the general public than any of the other literature in my library, even though the ornate and downright strange prose can be daunting. Crumb’s graphic treatment brings you through the semantic jungles into the real juicy narratives whence all of our western values emerged: stories of Jacob, whose shrewd practices of animal husbandry and entrepreneurship out-maneuvered his crafty, deceitful father-in-law; or Joseph, the best of Jacob’s sons, who became the equivalent of Chief Executive Officer in Pharoah’s organization, and foresaw advantage in laying away grain for years of drought and famine. (Once the drought arrived, he finagled a way to swindle the starving farmers of Egypt into selling their land to Pharaoh in exchange for the grain he had been prescient enough to store.) Although there are stories here that are shocking in their seeming brutality (Noah’s Ark, Abraham and Isaac) Crumb’s sensual, expressive pictures, with their unsparingly frank visual style, seem to enhance the pathos in the narratives. Perhaps because Bible stories are a staple of kid’s literature, it seems natural to see the Word of God in cartoon form, and Crumb has performed a magnanimous coup with this new work, proving himself again as a consummate illustrator and, surprise, a Bible scholar. [Be sure to read the Commentary to the book, where Crumb writes about some fascinating research by a feminist Biblical historian that explains some curious anomalies in several of the stories.]

Charles Burchfield, like Crumb, was an artist who became a great commercial success, but he was never as sanguine and straightforward about it. As a designer and illustrator, Burchfield defined a certain look in the 20’s& 30′a both in his floral motif wallpapers (I grew up with floral wallpaper derived from his designs) and stolid magazine illustrations which were both comforting and promising. He was set to work during his military service designing camouflage patterns. In the late 20’s he quit his day job to become a very successful watercolorist who made images that captured the zeitgeist of depression era Americana.

The recently closed Hammer show was a comprehensive retrospective that covered his entire body of work, including occasionally unsettling quotations from the artist:

“What is man composed of anyway? I shudder when I think of the bestial impulses that so often flood my imagination. I am considered a decent citizen because I manage to keep these mental debaucheries from becoming antisocial actions; but as far as I, a lone individual, am concerned, I am that depraved being. And perhaps these orgies of imagination are all the worse because they are never relieved by actions. Yet may God confine them always to the mind (if they must exist anywhere and it seems they must.)” —Charles Burchfield. Gardenville, April 10, 1938

This quote appeared in a gallery full of somewhat creepy–though vigorously beautiful– paintings of snake like trees and burnt looking houses, ashen skies and the occasional insect-like floral motif. This soulful, strange and eccentric work gives pause to wonder what sort of “mental debaucheries” he was talking about, and one suspects they are something on an entirely different level than ravishing the odd wood nymph. The fascination with Burchfield’s work must be entirely connected with his psychological and spiritual journeying, for these paintings are more than pastorals, they are diagrams of nature overlayed upon a human personality and consciousness: an excruciatingly personal language and alphabet. Although his career trajectory coincided with the great cultural shifts of Modernism, Surrealism, and later, Expressionism; and despite his fame and populist themes, there is an outsider quality to much of his work.

Counterposed to Burchfield the accomplished designer/painter and placid family man, there was Burchfield the brooding transcendentalist who rejected the religion in which he was raised, but passionately sought the sacred imprints of spirit in the forms of nature. Early in his life he had a special affinity for nature, carefully digging up favorite plants he found in the forest and transplanting them to his garden. Late in life, after twenty years of success, he rejected the work that had brought him renown and refocussed on a series of glyph-like drawings he had produced during what he called, his “golden year”, 1917. These curious drawings, made with graphite and china marker, are simple biomorphic forms with unsettling titles: Fear, Morbidness (Evil), Insanity, Hypnotic Intensity. They are collected in a folio; its cover an age-stained sheet of manila paper with the following title drawn in pencil in a very controlled, but rather puerile hand: “Conventions For Abstract Thoughts”. This was the first in what became dozens of these sketch journals. In his maturity Burchfield underwent an epiphany in revisiting the work of his youth, realizing that he had ignored its mysterious power and so reconnecting with what he saw as its seminal virtues. In the late work of Burchfield, motifs and obsessions coalesce; he builds out with paper from core imagery often created in his early career, and so the drawings grow in an almost vegetal way. Plunging himself into the sacred character of the landscape which he came (again) to see as an objective correlative to his inner life, Burchfield seizes upon the demonic within but never with the notion of exorcising, only guiding and bending it into form.

Autumnal Fantasy 1916-1944

“All at once I felt that I was the most lonely person on earth, and it seemed to me that I could not endure the solitude; and yet it was so overpowering I could not leave it. I was, as it were, a prisoner who loved and hated his isolation.” —Charles Burchfield. Gardenville, November 6, 1947

Visages.1&.2 is a single book that can be flipped in one direction, turned and flipped in another. Each direction displays a different face. It measures 3.875? x 3.125? and includes 52 hand drawings. Below is an English translation of the text, followed by a slideshow and followed again by the original text in French.

Visages.1, Visage.2
Sculptures by Jean-Luc Degonde

Writings on Art, Editions Manucius
This artwork was printed in 100 specimens – including 40 in 4-color prints (quadrichromy), numbered and signed by the artist, which stand for the original edition.

The epigraph is by Heraclitus
While changing, he is resting

ENVOI
by Jean-Jacques Gonzales

The visual arts have this thing in common that they cannot do without referring to the world [externality] either, posing as a window, by being subjected to it [figuration], or by liberating itself from it [abstraction]. It goes without saying that the variations are infinite between the two limits, beyond which the work disappears. All this to say that the question of resemblance – by excess [a painting by Richard Estes, Big Man by Ron Mueck, for example] or by defect [a monochrome by Yves Klien, a stele by Brancusi for example] – is the very heart of the matter treated by Jean Luc Degonde ’s last sculptures, which appear to disturb the ancestral and peaceful division between the work and the world.

The subject could not be more academic; it is about portraits. Here we are, thus taken right away into the privileged field of resemblance, because a portrait is always a portrait of…

Yet here, under an outer shell of a classicism that we could qualify as purified [structure, line, framework, volume] although not deprived of flesh [brushwood, woodland thoroughly assembled], something else is coming together that exceeds it and agitates it, that suddenly breaks: in the halation of a perfectly identifiable human figure, the portrait frees itself from resemblance without abolishing it, and this being not under the worn paradigm of allegory, symbol or any rhetorician figure, but on a radically new mode.

Here, surprisingly, the portrait resembles itself; a strange proposal of a properly internal resemblance, without a world, recluse. Merely turn around these singular objects to be convinced. Take a little time within the space that circumscribes them. Or flip over successively, quickly with your thumb, the booklet pages in which these lines are written, where are registered fifty successive points of view of a single portrait so that the miracle happens and comes to disturb the ordinary experience of a volumetric object, which entails that none of its faces can see the others simultaneously, that each one is something else than the others, and that however, mysteriously, it appears to me in the whole of its shine.

Here, the mystery vanishes; in the kaleidoscope of multiples faces, only one comes to appear, infinitely opposing its resemblance while preserving it. Whatever the moment is, whatever the point of view is – let’s not forget that it is here strictly about sculpture – everything is visible at the same time, all resembles itself and it is always one and only showing, that doesn’t exist the same way a stone, a stock or a devil does.

An enigmatic presence, a light without shade shedding in the portraits of Jean Luc Degonde, impossible to interpret, a paradoxical resemblance finally freed from the weight of the world or the soul. A pure immanence crossed with a trembling shift.
A full presence rested on itself in its infinite metamorphoses. The face. The work.

The original French Envoi is located below the slideshow.

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Visages.1, Visages.2
Écrits sur l’art

Cet ouvrage a été tiré à 100 exemplaires dont 40 en quadrichromie, numérotés et signés par l’artiste, qui constituent l’édition orignale

L’exergue est d’Héraclite
L’envoi de Jean Jacques Gonazales
Les sculptures de Jean-Luc Degonde

Se transformant, il se repose

ENVOI
Les arts plastiques ont ceci de commun qu’ils ne peuvent se passer de la référence au monde [l'extériorité] soit, et pour faire vitre, ens’y asservissant [figuration], soit en s’en libérant [abstraction]. Il va de soi que les variations sont infinies entre les deux limites au-delà desquelles l’oveure disparaitrait. Tout cela pour dire que la question de laressemblance – par excès [une toile de Richard Estes, le Big Man de Ron Mueck par exemples] ou par défaut [un monochrome d'Yves Klien, une stèle de Brancusi par exemples] – se trouve au coer meme de l’affaire traitee par les dernieres sculptures de Jean Luc Degonde qui viennent perturber l’immémorial et reposant partage entre l’oeuvre et le monde.

Le sujet est on ne peut plus académique; il s’agit de portraits. Nous voici donc embarqués d’emblée dans le domaine privilégié de la ressemblance parce qu’un portait est toujours un portrait de…

Mais ici, sous les apparences d’un classicisme, disons épuré [structure, ligne, ossature, volume] mais non dépourvu de chair [brindilles, sylvestres minutieusement assemblées], quellque cose d’autre se noue qui l’excède et le trouble, qui vient à se briser: dans le halo d’une figure humaine parfaitement identifiable, le portrait se libère de la ressemblance sans pour autant l”abolir, et clea non pas sous le paradigme usee usee de l’allégorie, du symbole ou d’une quelconque figure rhétoricienne, mais sur un mode radicalement nouveau.

Ici, étonnamment, le portait se ressemble; étrange proposition qu’une ressemblance proprement interne, sans monde, solitaire.

Il suffit de tourner autour de ces singuliers objets pour s’en convaincre. Prélever un peu de temps dans l’espace qui les circonscrit. Ou de faire glisser successivement d’un saeul et rapide coup de pouce le feuilles de livret en lequel ces lignes sont écrites, où sont consignés cinquante successifs points de vue d’un seul et meme portrait pour que le miracle s’accomplisse et vienne troubler l’expérience ordinaire de l’objet volumétrique, qui veut que toutes ses faces ne s’y puissent voir simultanément, que chacqune soit autre que les autres, et que pourtant, mystérieusement, il m’apparisse dans la totalité de ses éclats.

Ici, le mystère se lève; dans le kaléidoscope de multiples faces, une seule vient à se montrer, différant infiniment sa ressemblance tout en la conservant. Quel que soit le moment, quel que soit le point de vue – n’oublions pas quil s’agit ici strictement de sculpture – tout est visible en même temps, tout se ressemble et c’est toujours un seul et même qui se montre, qui n’existe pas à la manière d’une pierre, d’une souche ou d’un diable.

Presénce énigmatique, lumière sans ombre qui se dispense dans les portraits de Jean Luc Degonde, sans reste, ininterprétable, ressemblance paradoaxle enfin délivrée de la pesanteur du monde ou de l’âme. Pure immanence traversée d’un décalage tremblant.

Presence pleine, reposée en elle-même dans ses infinies métamorphoses. Le visage. L’oevre.

Visages 1 and 2, by Jean-Luc Degonde
by Nancy Cantwell

When you grab hold Visages.1-Visages.2, by Jean-Luc Degonde, you realize that you have quite a phenomenal object at hand. Then when you take the book for a spin flipping through to rotate its two heads one is caught up in a delightful experience of perceptual perplexity. On the simplest level, the eye brain coordination plays tricks on you. The faces, disoriented in space and disassociated from surface tension, rotate in a seemingly random manner. Is it left to right or forwards then backwards? But the real discernment takes place when one recognizes how each physiognomic profile contributes to the whole. Every stop frame is a portrait in the most classic sense.

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Visages.1

Degonde asks us to identify with the question of who we are more than the assembling of the fact. We negotiate faces daily and more and more the idea of individuality, of identity is obscured by technology. We now have an abundance of representation options ranging from playful avatars to the deadly serious facial recognition systems that can quantify full body data for security processes. It is actually this abundance that Degonde puts to test. These are not mapping systems designed to capture the prodigious detail required to simulate an appearance, but instead stripped down slices of an affectionate assembling of just the necessary information needed to find the expression of resemblance.

The impulse to produce Visages came from the desire to give the viewer a tour around the larger original sculptures created by Degonde. The sculptures are produced adhering to the most classical of methods. Using a live sitter Degonde first fashions a clay model from which a waste mold is made. Then plaster is placed into the waste mold creating a reproduction of the clay original. The plaster model is then fitted with the wood branches of a Chinese Willow tree, sometimes referred to as a “Tortured Soul” because the way the twigs grow in a spiral, twisting manner. The pieces are chosen for their ability to best describe an accurate resemblance with the least amount of information. The branches create a continuous contoured likeness that calls into question the corporeal nature of sculpture. The once solid object becomes a fluid circumscribed path that holds close in its relationship to the line drawings of Visages.

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Visages.2

Degonde uses the words sentimental, modest and accessible when talking about his work. The portraiture of Visages surely thrives on the simplicity of the concept, paired exquisitely with its execution. Published by Editions Manucius, the edition of 100 books – including 40 in 4-color prints (quadrichromy), numbered and signed by the artist, measures 3.875″ x 3.125″ and includes 52 hand drawn faces. In his introduction to Visages, Jean-Jacques Gonzales notes each drawing registers “fifty successive points of view of a single portrait”and “none of its faces can see the others simultaneously”. With every flip of the book a new unique portrait is created, never to be repeated. Every person will flip in a different manner. The appearance of each face changes with every run through. Our habitual perceptual structures, charged with constituting a fixed personae, breakdown giving way to non-fixed identities. Even as we grow to know and recognize these faces as familiar the question of the who we are grows more elusive. Indeed a flip book is a modest and a sentimental vehicle, but a powerful instrument with which to explore the fragile nature of identity.

Jean-Luc Degonde is an artist and educator living in Paris, France.
Contact: jeanlucdegonde@gmail.com

The Walworth Farce
By Guy Zimmerman

The longer you work in theater the more intriguing it becomes. The basic fact that audiences are able to look across an imaginary line and see into a different time and place becomes more remarkable the longer you ponder it. The embodied nature of theater – that there are bodies up there speaking the words – also seems to accrue significance. In a subtle way the embodied present of the speaking actor pulls against the basic truth claim of the words themselves, opening a little window of freedom. The fact that dramatic characters are almost never attuned to this freedom only makes statements on stage inherently poignant and ironic in a way they can never be on the page. When playwright, director and performer are sensitive to such subtleties, theater rises to another level. And so, to me, it’s not at all reductive to say I love theater most when it’s “about” theater. Seeing Enda Walsh’s celebrated play The Walworth Farce at UCLA Live last week only underscored this fact because The Walworth Farce is a very good play, and every moment of it is “about” theater.

The characters in The Walworth Farce are trapped in an extreme feedback loop of memory and action. Confined to a tiny flat in London, a father (Dinny) and his two sons (Sean and Blake) spend each day re-enacting the same horrendous sequence of domestic murders from a decade earlier in their native Ireland. Embracing this conceit with gusto, Walsh dramatizes what psychiatrists call “repetition compulsion” – our tendency to endlessly re-enact the very worst things that happen to us. The play demonstrates how emotional traumas warp our perceptions of reality, forming controlling narratives that follow us around, defining and also confining the range of our experience. By constantly replaying the family trauma, the murderous Dinny keeps his feelings of guilt at bay while also diverting the rebellious energies of Sean and Blake, who might otherwise destroy him. When love, with its illuminating power, enters the apartment late in the first act, the jig is up.

The public response to The Walworth Farce suggests that the issues addressed by the play are timely ones. The night I attended you could feel a certain gratitude in the air; troubling aspects of our lives were being illuminated with compassion, wit and clarity. Even the most balanced among us glimpse now and then a greater freedom that lies just out of reach. Way back our sensitive gray matter was marked by the trauma of birth, and then again by the traumas of infancy, childhood and what comes after. The stories we concocted to ameliorate and make sense of these traumas have come to shape our organs of perception. Now, unable to step outside conditioned perception these stories have become scripts we can no longer revise. We recruit the people in our lives to play assigned roles in the ongoing dramas forced upon us (more or less) by brute chance. The Walworth Farce presents a more extreme version of basic psychological tendencies that limit us all to one degree or another.

This picture of the human psyche can no longer be dismissed as literary or poetic conjecture. A short distance from Freud Playhouse at UCLA is the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Like similar institutions breaking ground across the country, Semel is devoted to researching exactly how experiences, and particularly traumatic ones, get hard-wired into the brain. Issues of mindfulness and embodied mind that were once the province of esoteric awareness traditions are now being mined scientifically for their insights into healing human dysfunction. It’s one of the developments that give one hope for our common future – that the transformative power of the material sciences in the West might be married to the equally transformative insights of the wisdom traditions of the East.

But while Walsh’s play is to be celebrated for its content, The Walworth Farce seems least interesting in one area where people are praising it. In interviews I’ve read Enda Walsh can be dismissive of, for example, the realism of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. To my ear the two playwrights are not so dissimilar in their aesthetic. Despite all the fun Walsh has with the lurid stage business his characters deploy in their endless looping drama, The Walworth Farce does not traffic in meta-theater. The playwright does not put any pressure on the conventions of the traditional realistic play. The characters do not break frame and address the audience. Walsh has been careful to keep the line of separation between spectacle and audience inviolate such that we are not implicated in the events on stage. And his indictment of the authoritarian Dinny never resonates in any larger social or political context.

Think about a playwright like Sarah Kane and you realize how conservative Walsh is. In 2004 I saw Kane’s remarkable 4:48 Psychosis at the Freud. It was the night George W. Bush was re-elected and Kane’s pitch-black anthem for three turned out to be the perfect play to see on that dark night. Here, at a moment when the Big Lie was reaching its zenith, simple truths were being told. On a formal level the play was pure meta-theater, the actors speaking from a place halfway between the separate stage space and our own world, and the effect was somehow devastatingly intimate. Perhaps we can’t afford that intimacy any longer. Today, five years later, the nation seems ever more locked in its own repetitive farce, with authoritarian figures pressing sensitive cultural buttons to keep a traumatized population circling endlessly the same tired clown show. Despite Obama’s victory demons stalk the land.

Like it or not we are accountable for what our national demons do. Tragic drama has always been one of the best ways to keep track of such creatures and to find out what makes them tick. In a presentation over the summer the ebullient David Sefton, Artistic Director of UCLA Live, commented on how remarkable it is that anyone attempts to create theater in America because there is simply no money for it. If art is analogous to the dream life of a culture then America is like a man who has decided he will not dream. This, of course, begs the question of whether it is better to have our psychoses acted out on stage or in the Oval Office. Regardless of how we answer this question, insightful writers like Enda Walsh (and vibrant cultural Institutions like UCLA Live) are to be supported whenever possible in this troubled time. So do us all a favor and go see Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom at UCLA Live next week.

Conversation with Enda Walsh on the Walworth Farce