Modern Men

Woods Cathedral, Detroit

War Games installation displaying
"Surrealist, Conceptualist and Minimalist works by 12 artists,
including Anders Ruhwald, Hannah Perry, Simon Denny and Yngve Holden." [source]

I've said for a long time that modern men are doubters. They will acknowledge in some civilizational manner the presence of God, or at least the tradition of God, but waiver around their committment to God.

Here is an article at VDare, where James Kirkpatrick discusses Lawrence Auster's recently published book Our Boarders, Our selves.

Of course, it starts with the requisite "Auster was prickly" introduction. Why bother with that? And, in reality, who isn't prickly, some more so than others?

But the crunch of the article is here:

Auster counters that without a “publicly authoritative moral understanding,” individuals have no way to understand their social role. Nations are unable to define, defend, or preserve themselves. Thus, he makes the startling claim that “the grounding of rights in nothing beyond the whim of the individual leads directly to open borders and multiculturalism.”

And a little later on:

Auster argues that, while there may be conceivable “non-Christian ways of rebuilding a normal sense of peoplehood and racial identity among whites,” it can only really happen through the “rediscovery of the classical and Christian understanding that we Westerners have lost.” He argues that a Western worldview, which he attempts to define, gives us a way to “see reality whole,” placing values into their “natural rank and order” instead of destroying ourselves by trying to make “human values into gods.”

In other words, Auster says that without the underlying morality of God, a cohesive Western worldview is not possible.

But James Kirkpatrick, the author of the VDare article, subtly disclaims this by adding other doubters in the mix:

Of course, others like Oswald Spengler have argued Christianity itself inevitably led to the kind of liberalism Auster decries. Tom Holland’s recent book Dominion makes the same case from a more positive perspective. Auster doesn’t really confront this possibility.

No, because Auster has recognized the inherent difficulties Christians have when following the words of Christ, having critiqued the two major bodies of Christianity, Catholicism and Protestanism, as Kirkpatrick himself writes in his article:

Besides attacking liberal Protestantism, Auster accuses the Roman Catholic Church (to which he nevertheless converted shortly before his death) of adopting “the very heresy of modernism” it had once condemned, putting “man’s well-being” and the “dignity of man” at the center of the Faith. Instead of recognizing man’s basic sinfulness, it celebrates the “cult of man,” symbolized by the post-Vatican II practice of the priest facing the congregation than the altar when he consecrates the host.

I wrote this as one of my many proposals (and still going) from my book project Reclaiming Beauty: Saving Our Western Civilization

Reclaiming Beauty will be the first book on beauty to make a comprehensive, historical, cultural and societal review of beauty. It will describe the moment (or moments) when beauty was not only undermined, but eventually abandoned, as a paradigm of civilized life. Rather than attributing beauty to a Godly goodness, philosophers, writers and artists began to view beauty as their enemy, and as their nemesis. They saw God as a judge who would not let them do as they wished. In order to pursue the image of beauty they desired, they began to look elsewhere. They began to abandon God, and by abandoning God, they began to change their world, filling it with horror and ugliness.

When nations practice true Christianity, they are not at war with God, and will not let the horrors of ugliness fill their world, as I write later in the article, by

...putting “man’s well-being” and the “dignity of man” at the center of the Faith. [Auster]

Without God, there is no dignity, and the "dignity of man" crumbles into dust, sooner or later. Man's well-being becomes the be-all of existence. And what does this mean? Gourmet dinners? Vacations to Paris? Extra large popcorn at the movies? Churches converted into museums?

Here is a post I wrote in Larry Auster's VFR, commenting on a discussion on beauty and ugliness:

There is something holy about beauty. We react to it in a reverential manner. We attribute it, at our best, to God. We realize when we see someone beautiful, it is not necessarily what the person did, but some preferred state he is in. A truly beautiful person, or thing, is a little frightening, a little other-worldly. Beautiful works of art are also hard to achieve. It takes time, training, skill, talent and some mysterious spirit to create a beautiful work of art. Not any ordinary person can create something beautiful. An ugly painting is immediately recognized for its slovenly quality. Also artists can create beautifully ugly pieces, but the beauty is a channel to alleviate the ugly story, incident, or place. That is why people have such a hard time with beautifully made horror films, for example. A beautifully made horror film is like the work of the devil (i.e. it is evil), as though the devil is using the tools of beauty to lure us into his world.

Modern Men

Woods Cathedral, Detroit

War Games installation displaying
"Surrealist, Conceptualist and Minimalist works by 12 artists,
including Anders Ruhwald, Hannah Perry, Simon Denny and Yngve Holden." [source]

I've said for a long time that modern men are doubters. They will acknowledge in some civilizational manner the presence of God, or at least the tradition of God, but waiver around their committment to God.

Here is an article at VDare, where James Kirkpatrick discusses Lawrence Auster's recently published book Our Boarders, Our selves.

Of course, it starts with the requisite "Auster was prickly" introduction. Why bother with that? And, in reality, who isn't prickly, some more so than others?

But the crunch of the article is here:

Auster counters that without a “publicly authoritative moral understanding,” individuals have no way to understand their social role. Nations are unable to define, defend, or preserve themselves. Thus, he makes the startling claim that “the grounding of rights in nothing beyond the whim of the individual leads directly to open borders and multiculturalism.”

And a little later on:

Auster argues that, while there may be conceivable “non-Christian ways of rebuilding a normal sense of peoplehood and racial identity among whites,” it can only really happen through the “rediscovery of the classical and Christian understanding that we Westerners have lost.” He argues that a Western worldview, which he attempts to define, gives us a way to “see reality whole,” placing values into their “natural rank and order” instead of destroying ourselves by trying to make “human values into gods.”

In other words, Auster says that without the underlying morality of God, a cohesive Western worldview is not possible.

But James Kirkpatrick, the author of the VDare article, subtly disclaims this by adding other doubters in the mix:

Of course, others like Oswald Spengler have argued Christianity itself inevitably led to the kind of liberalism Auster decries. Tom Holland’s recent book Dominion makes the same case from a more positive perspective. Auster doesn’t really confront this possibility.

No, because Auster has recognized the inherent difficulties Christians have when following the words of Christ, having critiqued the two major bodies of Christianity, Catholicism and Protestanism, as Kirkpatrick himself writes in his article:

Besides attacking liberal Protestantism, Auster accuses the Roman Catholic Church (to which he nevertheless converted shortly before his death) of adopting “the very heresy of modernism” it had once condemned, putting “man’s well-being” and the “dignity of man” at the center of the Faith. Instead of recognizing man’s basic sinfulness, it celebrates the “cult of man,” symbolized by the post-Vatican II practice of the priest facing the congregation than the altar when he consecrates the host.

I wrote this as one of my many proposals (and still going) from my book project Reclaiming Beauty: Saving Our Western Civilization

Reclaiming Beauty will be the first book on beauty to make a comprehensive, historical, cultural and societal review of beauty. It will describe the moment (or moments) when beauty was not only undermined, but eventually abandoned, as a paradigm of civilized life. Rather than attributing beauty to a Godly goodness, philosophers, writers and artists began to view beauty as their enemy, and as their nemesis. They saw God as a judge who would not let them do as they wished. In order to pursue the image of beauty they desired, they began to look elsewhere. They began to abandon God, and by abandoning God, they began to change their world, filling it with horror and ugliness.

When nations practice true Christianity, they are not at war with God, and will not let the horrors of ugliness fill their world, as I write later in the article, by

...putting “man’s well-being” and the “dignity of man” at the center of the Faith. [Auster]

Without God, there is no dignity, and the "dignity of man" crumbles into dust, sooner or later. Man's well-being becomes the be-all of existence. And what does this mean? Gourmet dinners? Vacations to Paris? Extra large popcorn at the movies? Churches converted into museums?

Here is a post I wrote in Larry Auster's VFR, commenting on a discussion on beauty and ugliness:

There is something holy about beauty. We react to it in a reverential manner. We attribute it, at our best, to God. We realize when we see someone beautiful, it is not necessarily what the person did, but some preferred state he is in. A truly beautiful person, or thing, is a little frightening, a little other-worldly. Beautiful works of art are also hard to achieve. It takes time, training, skill, talent and some mysterious spirit to create a beautiful work of art. Not any ordinary person can create something beautiful. An ugly painting is immediately recognized for its slovenly quality. Also artists can create beautifully ugly pieces, but the beauty is a channel to alleviate the ugly story, incident, or place. That is why people have such a hard time with beautifully made horror films, for example. A beautifully made horror film is like the work of the devil (i.e. it is evil), as though the devil is using the tools of beauty to lure us into his world.

Steven Heinemann and Scorched Earth

Steven Heinemann
Ceramics
Terra Ruba, 2004
Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam
69cmX42X34

For a potter working with pots, Steven Heinemann seems obsessed with closing them off. No flower will adorn his creations, nor will water pour from his jugs. Heinemann is not interested in function, but

prioritizes process, material, and the non-functionalobject to create autonomous sculpture

writes Rachel Gotlieb in Steven Heinemann: Culture and Nature, an exhibition he held in 2017 at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto. And a footnote to this phrase, Gotlieb directs us:

For discussions on the autonomy of the art object within the realm of craft see Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997); Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007); and Bruce Metcalf, “Replacing the Myth of Modernism,” First published in American Craft, February/
March 1993, 53, no. 1, accessed March 1, 2017, http://lib.znate.ru/docs/ index-53911.html.

I discuss Adolf Loos, the anti-ornament modernist here in Throwing Out Ornament, asking (rhetorically) if

architecture hadn't regressed. "Think about the medieval cathedrals, or the renaissance palaces. All we do now is glass boxes. Lego for grown ups. We're back to simple squares and circle, just a little above the line in the sand drawn with a piece of stick."

I could add for pottery: simple curved shapes.

And simple curved shapes is what Heinemann produces, however asymmetrical, and therefore (falsely) complex shapes they may be. Although asymmetry is a more natural, inartistic, tendency, and a circle far harder to reproduce. Heinemann thus desires to work with asymmetry, imperfection, and ultimately, the non-aesthetic.

And this leads to my final point. Heinemann's vessels. An article on Heinemann at the Canadian Encyclopedia describes one of Heinemann's techniques as:

"controlled crazing" (fine cracks on the surface of a glaze layer) during firing as his primary method to investigate issues of containment, volume and decoration.

Thermal stress weathering, in nature,

...results from the expansion and contraction of rock, caused by temperature changes. For example, heating of rocks by sunlight or fires can cause expansion of their constituent minerals. As some minerals expand more than others, temperature changes set up differential stresses that eventually cause the rock to crack apart.

This is the impression I got when viewing his ceramic objects, with their cracked interiors, and which clearly will not be vessels for water. The first word that came to mind was "scorched." And indeed they are scorched, resembling the barren, empty, and lifeless desert regions which bear this description.

For an art form which has functionality as its primary goal, these objects close themselves off to any form of human use, and instead become aesthetic objects. And they don't succeed even in that goal, their aesthetics having been compromised by Heinemann's relentless pursuit of the anti-aesthetic.

Heinemann's intent all along is to give us a dystopian scorched earth, where we will live in the extremes of "Climate Change" as we are destined to according to our postmodern spiritual guides - our scientists, activists, and artists - as we struggle with pots that wont even carry the droplets of water we may find.

Heinemaan, who lives in this current world, and who needs to pay his bills (ask Van Gogh how living for "art" alone worked out for him), sells his pieces ranging from $7,000 to the $11,000. And people are ready to buy dystopia and hang it in their living rooms. Wealthy art collectors, that is. And his works are available in museum collections across the globe, who purchase his scorched clay, and as no acts of charity.

Art and dytopia generate money!

Heinemann is the husband of textile designer, Chung-Im Kim, about whom I wrote here:

Here are her fungal-like growths which she designs with felt, and which she sells for over $6,000 each. She categorizes them on her website as: Living Geometry.

Crawling fungi might be the only vegetation that grows on scorched earth.

Here's a great article I wrote on Goethe, Newton, and color. It is unpublished, but you can see my other published and unpublished articles here:



Goethe's Morality of Color

Newton tried to keep color in the realm of an independently provable entity by analysing that light refracted from a prism was separated into a spectrum of colors. He tried hard to maintain objective observations and had an assistant help him make his readings to avoid his own subjective perceptions. He avoided “colors in a dream or what a mad man sees”, and emphasized a quantifiable, objective analysis of color. His works on color and light were published in the much celebrated "Opticks" showing that light was made of colored rays.

It is chemical and physical scientists who have shown the most interest in measuring and studying color, and not the artists who would rather use it rather than analyze it. Yet, alongside the very lucrative paints (and other color industries) which they propagated, these same chemists have realized that the history of color is not just a numerically speculative phenomenon, but involves other values such as emotions and morals to which artists espouse. In fact, the history (or the understanding) of color is closely intertwined with these objective scientists and the more subjective artists.

If one were to place Goethe in this continuum, he would definitely figure at the other end with the artists and other poets of color. Goethe insisted that color should be studied as the human eye perceives it, rather than as instruments measure it. In his unparalleled “Theory of Color Theory”, he spent many experiments trying to show the role our eyes (our perceptions) play in determining the effects of color.

For example, he studied the phenomenon that is now called ‘after-images’ where after looking for a prolonged time at a certain color, when switching to a blank white canvass, we see the ‘contrasting’ color on that white canvass – blue instead of yellow. His premise became that color is not a fixed entity, but depended on many other human and non-human factors in order to be seen. Goethe was convinced that color affects us morally, physiologically, and psychologically; that we react subjectively to color. He eventually started to establish his theory on the ‘morality’ of colors, introducing us to his color polarities starting out with specific colors, and incorporating subjective values on to them: Yellow vs. Blue; Force vs. Weakness; Brightness vs. Darkness; and one is tempted to add Good vs. Evil. Of course, these may only be his subjective views, and another artist may decide that it is red and green that are in such opposition.

Goethe’s emphasis on the perceptions of color, what colors meant, emoted, symbolized, how they affected our senses, feelings and morals influenced the direction and importance of color in painters from there on. Color, up until then, had been give a secondary role to drawing, where line, light and shade dominated. Earlier painters had always delegated a secondary role to color finding no way of equating it with line and form. If Newton were to critic Goethe, I’m sure he would side with these earlier artists and put more emphasis on the straightforward drawing, rather than Goethe’s elusive perceptions of color.

Despite the differences that Goethe found between his and Newton's work, he eventually reconciled these differences, asserting that both objective and subjective views were possible. Newton also had never rejected the idea that color can be a subjective phenomenon. Ultimately, it is this supreme interest in color that unites Newton and Goethe. But Goethe was perhaps more right than wrong in emphasizing the elusive nature of color, and in disagreeing so vehemently with Newton at the beginning of his studies. Color has continued to be as elusive, subjective and ephemeral as he had suspected it to be. Perhaps both Goethe and Newton opened a pandora's box when they decided to put color at the fore-front of their inquiries.

Still , in just a matter of decades, we go from Newton’s predominantly ‘objective’ "Opticks" to Goethe’s ‘subjective’ "Theory of Color". From quantitative measurements to subjective perceptions. How did this come about? Why was Goethe interested in demonstrating the subjective, while Newton insisted on the objective?

I believe it has to do with transcendence. Both Newton and Goethe profoundly understood the human 'will'. Newton wanted it subservient to and Goethe wanted it at the center of man. Newton stressed, in his method of inquiry, that something beyond man determines things. Goethe’s central figure is man himself, and man’s perceptions are the primary factor in his life. It really was a battle between the supremacy of God, and the supremacy of man. In Goethe’s world, man finally wins. By allowing man to focus on his will and whim, Goethe put a stop to this transcendence. Color became the easiest way for artists to win this battle (if they were fighting it in the first place). It was no longer necessary to accurately depict lines and, in Newton’s heroic attempt, colors. Artists no longer had to describe, as best they could, our natural, external world. They could only be expected to personally interpret it, where wilful perceptions finally take over.

Color became a manifestation of the artist’s personal feelings, personal will, personal interpretation and personal desires. Goethe’s "Theory of Color" became the gateway for artists to focus on the much easier human will rather than on Godly transcendence. This led to color being the most important element in painting, and eventually dominating the whole canvass. Later on, this would also result with the distortion of line, form and even content subject to the artist’s interpretation. Color released the artist from any outside commitments, and allowed him to be accountable only to himself. This is essentially the attribute of the modern artist. “What does this mean?” becomes a common question directed at most modern paintings.

Since color is really a manifestation of the modern artist’s personal interpretations, it becomes all about the artist’s feelings. Thus, emotions (or sensations) play a very large part in these paintings. Monet may have attributed his bluish/pinkish haystacks to the time of day, and type of sunlight falling on the dried grass, but it is essentially his subjective and exaggerated interpretation of that particular moment of the day. This later became much more pronounced in his Rouen series, where a blue Cathedral finally exists. This is only a step before Van Gogh’s who tried to “express the terrible passions of humanity by means of reds and greens…” in his Night Cafe. No longer are we subjectively describing a scene, but expressing and interpreting it emotionally as well. Artists even suggested choosing colors "from their palette than from nature".

Feelings are naturally unstable – one is not always happy, or always sad, or always angry. Van Gogh’s deep sense of alienation in red and green could just as soon turn into the calm accommodations of pastels, which he did use in his "Almond tree in Bloom". With nothing to ground these paintings, and focussing on shifting personal sentiments and emotions, artists can say and paint anything they want, and then change their minds about them. Kandinsky, after seeing Montet's variously hued haystacks said, "Deep within me the first doubt arose about the importance of the object as a necessary element in a picture". Now, even the object, the epitome of form, is no longer required as a reference to the external world. The artist can draw anything he wants, and color it anything he desires. Even the title to Kandinsky's paintings is indicative of this belief.

With no external responsibilities, or a sense of transcendence to force these artists beyond the self, this battle of relevance has now raged for more than a century. I think it all started when color, that fickle, deeply personal, ephemeral quality, took precedence over the drawing. When previous attempts at objectivity were superseded by subjectivity. This unwillingness to face the difficult external world, and perhaps humbly attribute it to something greater than oneself, changed the focus of the artist from the external world to his internal landscape. The color field aritsts of the 1960s epitomize this attitude, where nothing but color dominates the whole canvass. This has been the saga of modern art.


References:

Gage, John. Color and culture : practice and meaning from antiquity to abstraction. Boston ; Toronto : Little, Brown and Co., c1993

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethe's color theory / Arranged and edited by Rupprecht Matthaei. New York : Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971.

Postmodern Christians

Postmodern Christians (despite all fervent arguments to the contrary) LOL!

I wrote in my last post A Basic Guide to Liberalism and Conservatism, Part I: From the Orthosphere:

I have made a major decision in the way I am to approach recent events. And as my last few posts show, I am getting a shower of support! Is this a sign from God :).

Well here's another one from The Federalist:

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What Life Is Like For Artists In The Time Of Trump
By: Maureen Mullarkey

Donald Trump’s victory has affected even the artists’ listserv I belong to. A December 3 broadcast touted an ‘action plan’ to stop Trump.

“I am an artist, you know. It’s my right to tell you what to think. I’m chosen. You’re not.” That is the nutshell version of a long-standing effort to wrest art away from bourgeois aesthetic concerns and onto political ones. This tug is at work in every branch of the arts. But for economy’s sake, I will keep to the words art and artist as shorthand for the range of disciplines.

Today’s arts culture—the segment of it that appeals to museum curators, faculty hiring committees, and awards panels—mimics the intellectual fray of the 1960s, itself an imitation of contests begun in the 1910s and ‘20s. From the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, through assorted utopian declarations of the 1960s, on to the hectoring of Mike Pence by the cast of “Hamiliton,” artists have been on a steady, determined march toward ideological preachment.



“The truth of art,” wrote Herbert Marcuse, “lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.” What is taken as real by graduates of university art departments are the biases that flatter the university’s view of itself as a progressive institution. Coloring that view is the old myth of the artist’s divine spark, a tradition fuelling the mystique of an avant garde.

It is a heady brew. It repudiates inherited models of aesthetic worth, dismissing hard-won mastery as technical hokum. At the same time, it seduces art majors—novel creatures, historically—to see themselves as an intellectual class commissioned to awaken audiences from acceptance of the status quo. The ultimate aim of the contemporary artist’s training is not facility, not ease with one’s métier, but the political or social message. Since there is no end to things to be anguished about, Hope ‘n’ Change can last forever.

I Thought Artists Were Against Censorship

Right now, the art-and-culture bubble is iridescent with gloom. Election Day was an alarm to mobilize combatants in the culture war to lift the yoke of our oppression. Here in my inbox is a “Dear Colleague” letter from the board of the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), a nongovernmental organization founded in 1950 by the newly formed United Nations:

We’re getting in touch to let you know it is time to renew your membership. But first we’d like to say how deeply troubled and saddened we are by the responses of hatred that we’ve been seeing and hearing about following the results of our presidential election. One of AICA’s founding principles was a statement against censorship. As art critics and writers, we are committed to contribute to mutual understanding of visual aesthetics across cultural boundaries, and to defend impartially freedom of expression and thought and oppose arbitrary censorship. We can’t know what 2017 will be like, but with your renewed membership, AICA-USA will work to redouble our commitment to these values as we head into uncertain times.

Who is doing the hating? Perhaps the board missed Matt Welch’s column in Reason last March: “During her October 2015 testimony in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, she [Hillary Clinton] issued the remarkable claim that the murdered cartoonists of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo ‘sparked’ their own assassinations by drawing caricatures of Mohammed—the free expression equivalent of blaming rape victims for wearing short skirts.”

Someone forgot to tell the board of directors that their preferred candidate thought there ought to be a law, with federal penalties attached, against controversial entertainment—including movies that criticize a politician named Hillary Clinton. This same board stood proud when AICA held its annual international congress this past October at the Museo de Belle Artes in Havana, where freedom of thought and expression are non-issues.

The eminent College Art Association (CAA) encourages attendance at its 2017 Annual Conference with this: “Given the political climate in the United States right now, CAA knows it is of utmost importance to address issues at the intersections of race and contemporary art, colonialism in art history, and the Black Lives Matter movement at the 2017 Annual Conference.”

Conference highlights include a discussion on “Public Art in the Era of Black Lives Matter;” “Picturing Social Movements from Emancipation to Black Lives Matter,” a panel titled “Post-Black and Liquid Blackness” in contemporary African American art; and a talk by Evie Terrano, PhD, an art historian whose topics include challenging the authority of the Confederate flag.

Brushes Aside! We Have Politics to Do

Trump’s victory has affected even the artists’ listserv I belong to. The list began as a handy way to circulate useful information among visual artists in and around New York City. It affirms Picasso’s contention that only critics natter about form and content. When artists get together, they just want to talk about “where to buy cheap turpentine.”

Postings usually keep to methods and materials, the cookery of things. (“If your umbers are drying too quickly, try a little clove oil.”) Subscribers help each other out with the vital questions: Who has the name of a low-cost art mover? What are they paying studio models these days? Can anyone recommend a plumber?

But since Election Day, politics has been gaining ground. This is every cultural worker’s hour to repudiate formalist hocus pocus and encourage solidarity in the arts in service to the noble cause of building . . . no, not communism. Just left-leaning liberalism epitomized by the First Woman not-yet-President.

A December 3 broadcast touted an “action plan” to stop Trump. Remember, he still has not been elected. That happens in the Electoral College on December 19. There were only 16 days left.

Innocuous ornaments like the easel-picture could wait. Better to sign and distribute an Electoral College petition to make Hillary president. Initiate individual contact with specific electors. Keep this Change.org petition in the public’s consciousness by contacting TV stations, reporters, and bloggers. Organize and direct grassroots action; man phone banks; write letters. Promote protests in state capitals on December 19.

A fabric artist—whose hand-stitched work eyeballs the worldwide immigrant crisis, gun violence, health care, and marriage equality—stepped forward to offer her own efforts to the new cause:

Because of the election of Donald Trump I am planning on periodically posting information of events that are in reaction to Trump’s presidency. These events could be demonstrations, teach ins, lectures, study groups, art exhibits, calls for art, readings and performances. If you know of any events that you would like to share on this list and if you would like to receive this list please contact me at . . . .

Westbeth, an affordable housing complex for artists on the former site of Bell Laboratories, jumped into the ring to promote “Write Now: A Participatory Installation” assembled to address a world suddenly “in upheaval” by giving artists and visitors to Westbeth Gallery an opportunity to address their feelings. Participants receive Post-It notes in four different colors. They can use as many notes as needed to express their pensées. They can draw, collage, paint, write, or sculpt on them before sticking them on gallery walls.

In addition, participants are encouraged to donate to four recommended charities. The character of Westbeth’s policy preferences is clear in their selected endorsements: Planned Parenthood; the Ali Forney Center for gay and transgender teens; God’s Love We Deliver, a service for HIV/AIDS patients; Cabrini Immigrant Services, a boon companion to illegal aliens seeking social services.

You’re Fueling Trump Again, People

Dark times are upon us. Now more than ever, artists are needed to save us from the snare and the pit. An excerpt from one painter’s lengthy morning-after listserv reflection illustrates the current sense of mission:

I have a responsibility to engage in our communities. In fact, I must admit I feel artists might even bear more responsibility than the general public, as we have special gifts to offer. . . . We offer personal strengths unique to us as artists. I’ve noticed that the anti-fracking community is composed of an inordinate number of artists, and often wondered why. My sense is that because artists are well-educated, more able than most to think ‘outside the box,’ accustomed to taking chances in their art and risks in their lives, artists are among the first to recognize a societal problem, and among the first to search for solutions. . . . Artists perform every type of role imaginable, and have been critical to any of the successes we’ve had. . . .
Now it is time for each of us to act in whatever way feels right to us as individuals and as artists, but definitely to act.

Here is a pitch-perfect sample of the elitist self-regard that contributed to Trump’s victory. The writer, a painter, takes for granted his own rectitude. He also assumes his audience is equally offended by an election that went against the grain of worthier preferences. Worthiness, you see, is a natural result of intellectual superiority. It comes with those special gifts and unique strengths unavailable to lesser sorts.

It never occurs to the arts community that it has no more political insight or civic savvy than its neighbors. Like the “anti-fracking community,” the fraternity might have less. Its image of itself as occupying a privileged place in the moral universe is a distorting lens through which self-congratulation looks easily like discernment.

Your ‘Education’ Consists of Indoctrination

Stay for a moment with that term better educated. There is humor in that. Since the post-World War II era, when art training began to shift in earnest from the atelier to the campus, artists have breathed the same infantilizing culture that infects academia.

Consider the University of Delaware’s current pitch for its master of fine arts program. Second-year MFA students are invited to a 9-day frolic dubbed “Barefeet and Birthday Suits: MFA in Berlin.” Tuition is free for this “unique international experience partially funded by private charitable donations.” (Any wonder why millennials went for Bernie Sanders?)

Imagine a program for medical or law students hawked in terms more suggestive of a nudist colony than professional expertise. But then, expertise is an outmoded concept in an area of activity to which the word discipline is hard to apply. Painters, sculptors, and gifted craftsmen still exist. But they are outnumbered by contemporary artists adrift in a sea of undifferentiated “practices,” a portmanteau word for holding whatever posture an MFA drops into it.

By their Post-It notes you will know them.

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Maureen Mullarkey is an artist who writes on art and culture. She keeps the weblog Studio Matters. Follow her on Twitter, @mmletters.

Photo Photo by Maxwell Leung for CAA
Photo William Murphy / Flickr

Moving Forward in Multi-Culti Mississauga

I received an email recently with the phrase "moving forward" in the concluding paragraph.

It is a variation on "going forward" which I have never really understood. Moving forward/going forward toward what? With what? An agreement? A dissolution (of a partnership or a relationship)? Is it good this going forward? Is it a bad thing? Who is doing the forward moving, the one who declares it or the one who receives the invitation? It sounds less of an invitation and more like a threat. What if the invitee doesn't want to move forward in the same direction, or at all?

Fascinating, the language of the modern liberal era.

In any case, it is some kind of jargon which now crops up in all kinds of places and with a faint aura of a threat behind it: "Moving forward, or else." (I typed "ora" in my online dictionary as in oratory, spoken word etc. but no results. I then simply googled "ora" and found this!)

Besides the initial humor (incredulity is a better word) at least that I found with the whole thing - the cops were involved as the email sent to me was cc'd to the Mississauga Square One Security Office, which is linked to the Peel Regional Police - I realized that this is all dead serious. There is a war that has been waged, and the sooner we on the "other side" acknowledge this, the better.)

Here is someone who feels the say way I do about this "inane" phrase:

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Going forward, let's consign this inane phrase to history
By: Mark Seacombe

Superfluous, meaningless but ubiquitous, it arrived from corporate America and now permeates every area of our lives


Barack Obama does it, David Cameron does it; film stars and advertising people do it; even national newspaper editors do it. But let's not do it. Going forward, let's not utter or write the superfluous, meaningless, ubiquitous "going forward".

It is impossible to get through a meeting today without being verbally assaulted by this inanity. And it nearly always is verbal; you have to be truly unthinking to commit it to paper. When I hear those two words it is my signal to switch off and think about something more interesting, such as Preston North End's prospects going forward. See how easy it is to lapse into this vacuousness.

It is sometimes deployed as an add-on – a kind of burp – at the end of a sentence; sometimes, as with "like" or "you know", it seems to serve as punctuation. But it is especially infuriating when used with the word plan. I heard somebody say a few days ago: "Going forward, the plan is … " How can a plan be about anything but the future? Planning the past would be a remarkable facility.

Why do people speak like this? The online Urban Dictionary offers two possible explanations: the first defines "going forward" as "a phrase that business people use to mean someone completely [messed up] big time but we don't want to dwell on whose fault it was; instead can we all just adopt an optimistic outlook and please can we all start thinking about the future, not the shithole of a present that we're in?"

The other, less scatalogical definition is: "Going forward is purported to mean 'in the future' or 'somewhere down the road' when in fact it is an attempt to dodge the use of these words, which generally indicate 'I don't know'. A newer development in corporate doublespeak, in most companies it is grounds for dismissal to release a press release without mentioning something 'going forward'. Going forward, you will likely see this turning up everywhere: 'Our company expects to make a profit going forward'; 'We don't expect any layoffs going forward'."

I blame the businessmen and women of America – still the undisputed world leader in abusing the English language. It is difficult to pinpoint the birth of "going forward". But my former colleague at the Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway, has accused the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Given the mess that American capitalism is in, we should not be surprised to learn that the body that regulates the nation's stock exchanges, among other things, specialises in obfuscation. Kellaway has fought a valiant but ultimately doomed campaign against "going forward".

Another attempt was made by a British website, the Institution of Silly and Meaningless Sayings (isms), which kept a "going-forward-ometer" until the people running it gave up, exasperated, nine months later, after recording hundreds of instances.

It cites nonsenses such as: "He's coming back to help going forward"; "We cannot back down, going forward"; "Problems for England's backs, going forward"; "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, going forward." The last one was a joke, of course: Abraham Lincoln would never have perpetrated such a solecism.

While it may have started in corporate America, "going forward" has now penetrated every area of British life. It even came from the mouth of the multilingual Emily Maitlis on Newsnight the other evening. Comically, her interviewee shot back with a "going forward".

You would think that Formula 1 was an organisation that, self-evidently, did not need to underline the direction in which it was moving. But when F1 in the US appointed Steve Sexton as president it announced: "He will be a tremendous asset to our operation going forward."

I want to know, guys, about your races going backwards.

Hidden Garden

Queen Elizabeth Jubilee Garden, Mississauga, Ontario
[Photo By: KPA]

The Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Garden is a tiny space located behind Mississauga's City Hall. The grass needs patching, and a blue bench in the far corner needs some paint. This is indicative of the absence of recently retired Mayor Hazel McCallion, the forceful, formidable leader of Mississauga, who never lost an election, and who had to retire when (because) she reached her nineties. The entire city center is full of her touches, giving this rather bland Toronto suburb a character of its own. I fear, though, like the park, there may not be other dedicated leaders to continue McCallion's legacy. They are more interested in promoting multiculturalism. The link leads to Mississauga's yearly festival Carassauga which tells us that "Over 72 countries [are] represented at 28 Pavilion Locations, throughout Mississauga" - note the 72 countries all represented in Canada! This is not an international event, but a local and national one. This clearly refers to the multicultral and not international nature of the event. Dedicating parks to English monarchs is far from the agenda of Mississauga's, and Canada's, leaders.

Here is more from Mississauga.ca on the park:

The Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Garden is located at 300 City Centre Drive and was originally named Civic Garden Park or the Rose Garden. It is 0.17 hectares.

This garden has been part of the Civic Centre since it was originally dedicated on July 18, 1987 by The Duke and Duchess of York. Fifteen years later in October 2002, Buckingham Palace agreed to have the garden formerly named The Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Garden in commemoration of Her Majesty The Queen's 50th Anniversary of Her Accession to The Throne. (The full article is available at Mississauga.ca)

As always with beautiful things in our modern world, we have to deal with the ugly alongside it, competing for space and for attention.

Right in the middle of the garden, there is a hideous, rusted iron "sculpture." I tried to find its title, and its creator, and was able to do so at the Mississauga.ca website.


Anne Harris (1908)
Canadian
Northern Eye
Bronze
1995

Here is how the website describes it:

The sculpture the Northern Eye done by Anne Harris is cast bronze and steel and is a more humanized example of Harris' work which tends to be more geometric and mechanical in character. This piece evokes a definite sense of vulnerability and is a provocative and dynamic piece as it displays the artist's interest in interior and exterior space and also poignantly references the human body as a vessel and the body, metaphorically, as a wound.

The author of this description is at odds about how to describe a work he clearly dislikes, but he cannot be forthcoming about his opinion, where the Art God reigns supreme in modern culture.

Below is Harris's Monarch. A faceless head-like structure. I wonder why the park chose Northern Eye, other than its obvious Canadian reference? The park is after all commemorating Queen Elizabeth. Well, the committee which made this decision was wary even of the Northern Eye, and I would think that its members couldn't find it in them to put this lump of "monarch" bronze in the garden dedicated to their queen.

This little garden is hidden in many aspects. It is hidden from view. This diminishes its importance and its association with a British monarch. It is hidden in intent where codes and representatives have to be used to deflect, or to diminish, its original and true intent. Harris becomes its cover, and Queen Elizabeth is put on the periphery. It's grandeur is hidden, or diminished, where the flowers and plants are small and unassuming, considering it was set up to celelabrate Queen Elizabeth's jubilee.

I am therefore at odds about it. Its small size, and removal from a grand and open space, gives it charm and character. But it is too small for what it represents. It would have been better to have given it another name altogether, and to remove Queen Elizabeth's identity. Better to have no monarch at all than one with such diminished presence.


Anne Harris (1908)
Canadian
Monarch
Bronze
1974
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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The Great War and a World Shattered

A World, Shattered
By: Sage McLaughlin
Posted at What's Wrong With the World

The spiritual crisis engulfing the West entails not only revisionist academics’ skepticism concerning the Resurrection as an historical fact, or of the doctrine of the Trinity. So decadent and thoroughgoing is the skepticism of modern man that a willful embrace of ugliness, a worship of personal power for its own sake, and an unrestrained exaltation of the self are the most obvious features of our culture and our public life. A rejection of form as such is implicated here. There is a calamitous discordancy in all our public rituals. Our national anthem is seldom performed with reverence and beauty, being reduced to wild and extravagant displays of “range” on the part of the performer. The confused Novus Ordo Catholic liturgy celebrated in virtually every contemporary parish lurches from the sudden, crashing onset of noise, to awkward silence, is afflicted by incessant contradiction in the movement of the unconsecrated to and from the altar, and suffers from a near-complete absence of coherent form that is the necessary picture frame of ritual. Disorientation is our preferred orientation.

The last hundred years would seem to bear out Fr. Seraphim Rose’s contention in Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age that Western man, having once received and accepted the truth of Christian revelation, could not but descend into nihilism and madness if ever he rejected it. I will not bother trying to defend that proposition, though of course there are many people who would dismiss it or find it offensive. Still, what in economics has been referred to as a hermeneutics of “revealed preferences” might be worth something here; that is, the truth about people can be discerned not by asking them what they think about a subject, as in a public opinion poll, but by watching what they say and do under relevant conditions. And we can say that the disintegration of the Christian consensus, the embrace of a thousand heresies that put man and his politics in place of God and His divine Law, and the rejection of the “Old Order” of the European monarchies ultimately manifested itself in the mechanization of mass murder known as the First World War. Thus when the German Expressionist painter Otto Dix (1891-1969) went to fight in the trenches on behalf of the Kaiser, he said that he carried with him two texts: the Holy Bible, and Frederich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra.

The Great War was, in one sense, the end of the world. Dix’s often grotesque, desolating works in the years during and after that war (which I do not recommend beyond their interest as objects of analysis) do not so much portray the visible destruction of the European cities, which were left largely unmolested by the shells; indeed, one could have toured Munich, Paris, London, Budapest, or Prague in those days without detecting that there even was a war. Instead, the images Dix crafted are of a world shattered, and it is striking to me just how closely the artistic style of the period resembles nothing so much in aspect as a broken mirror, a lugubrious expression of angst by a civilization that no longer knew what it was, but was haunted by the terrible knowledge that all things were now twisted and misshapen. His self-portraits vividly show us the transmogrification of the Western man, beginning with the scowling 21-year-old Dix’s Self-Portrait with Carnation (1912):

Self-Portrait with Carnation (1912)

By the end of his first few months during the “Phony War” of late 1914, we see the piercing, knowing eyes recede into anxious blots of doubt, lurking beneath the prominent golden sun of the gunner’s insignia, the bright baubles of state obscuring the increasingly faceless and uncertain man:

Self-portrait with Gunner's Helmet (1914)

By the time of Self-portrait as Mars (1915), the human being is annihilated, having been reduced to the raw material of the apocalypse, a metallic figure with a wheel in place of his heart, the self now scattered as shards in a maelstrom:

Self Portrait as Mars, 1915

The Western art world, influenced by cubism and led by Expressionists like Dix, was belching forth an endless stream of content that was evocative of cataclysm, of a world broken and devoid of beauty. This visual style, replicated in thousands of similar images from the interwar period, was perhaps most famously delivered to a mass audience by the classic Robert Wiene film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Robert Wiene (1873–1938)
Scene from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920

It is a remarkable point that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is sometimes credited with introducing the concept of the “twist” ending in cinema, and that the particular twist envisaged here is the now-shopworn script in which the main characters are revealed to be the inhabitants of an insane asylum, the entire story a homicidal delusion. Such was the logic of the cosmic cul-de-sac of post-Kantian modernism, which promised a morality that was both universal and a product of the human mind.

Robert Wiene (1873–1938)
Scene from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920

All of this was brought into focus for me by a piece of architecture that was not, surprisingly, the work of a corrupt American Cardinal of the Catholic Church. Nor was it the work of Daniel Libeskind, whose original concept for the post-9/11 reconstitution of Ground Zero was an adolescent expression of avante garde contempt for ordinary standards of beauty and form (his colleague Jeffery Kipnis probably said more than he intended about the contemporary art world when he remarked of Libeskind, “There’s only one Daniel in the world of architecture. I’m glad there’s Daniel, and I’m glad there’s no other.”) No, I am myself a modern man, so of course what actually got me thinking about this particular continuity in our art and architecture was the new football stadium for the Atlanta Falcons. Though long an enthusiast of organized sports, I just cannot imagine what would attract a person whose only knowledge of the subject was this artist’s rendering to take part in anything that happened in that building.

The incessant braying of our loud, vain, ugly public rituals signifies terminal decay. Now having been inured to it, there is next to no offense against beauty and dignified public order that will not find its defenders, all the more if it is packaged as entertainment. Spectacles of apocalyptic violence and destruction are more popular than ever. They are no longer even expressions of introspective horror, but of positive delight at the cleansing of a world devoid of meaning and coherence, and a return to something simpler--the void. Incredibly, this was the “promise” of the First World War which, many people do not realize, was in its beginnings very popular and a cause of exhilaration and even optimism across Europe.

It occurs to me that what all this imagery prefigures for the human race is indeed a cleansing fire, but not one of our own making. In contrast to that unhappy thought, in my next post I will take a glimpse back at the beauty and the order that still was, even amid so much turmoil and confusion, and still might be, if only in our own little gardens. But now, to bed.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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From Error to Truth

St. Thomas of Aquinas
Detail from The Demidoff Altarpiece, 1476
By Carlo Crivelli (1430-1494)
The National Gallery of Art, London

Laura Wood, from The Thinking Housewife, writes:

“The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth.”
— St. Thomas Aquinas

Contemporary depictions of saints, and other biblical personalities, including Jesus, render them in soft light with benign faces. I think that couldn't be farther from the truth. The guidance from error to truth is a tall order, but also requires the greatest of humility. Those who undertake this, with the saints and Jesus as their guides, must realize the enormity of their task. Jesus knew this. And Saint Thomas of Aquinas shows this burden in his portrait above.

Below, on the left, is Diogo Morgado as the 21st century rendition of Jesus, from The History Channel series The Bible. Even if this Jesus were to get angry (in front of the temple, for example), or he suffers on the cross, he would end up looking like a Ken doll. (Would Mary then be a Barbie? I should work out this "artitist" project and make myself famous at the next Venice Biennial). A feature film is planned for February 2014, "inspired by the success of The Bible," as this site tells us. What epic can a Diogo Morgado, the actor slotted to play Jesus, inspire?

Ken Doll and G.Q. Jesus
The tattoo and the stigma are interchangeable.

Jesus from Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 The King of Kings
Played by H. B. Warner

Hollywood directors and actors of the 1920s and 1930s, and perhaps as late as the early 1960s, who produced the majority of Biblical films (worth watching), gave us the best filmic renditions of Jesus and other Old and New Testament forces. H. B. Warner played Jesus at age fifty-two. Granted that Jesus was a young man of thirty-three in the scriptures, but what contemporary actor that age can convince us of the path from error to truth? Perhaps the serious Leonardo DiCaprio might do so,


But not him, or him, or him, etc., etc.

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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In Vogue, and Out

Vogue Magazine Cover from the 1950s
They don't make them like this anymore

I got the latest Vogue for "free" because of my accumulated Chapters/Indigo points. I do like going through the magazine's glossy pages, although I'm always disappointed at the non-fashionable fashion that makes the cut these days. We have come a long way from the heyday of Vogue, when glamorous models and women fronted the magazine (and its interior, too).

The front cover of the September 2013 issue has a pouty actress, one of the new breed that's taking over the media scene (television, magazines, movies, gossip columns). For what it's worth, it is Jennifer Lawrence (I doubt that she'll stick around long enough to be a memorable cultural icon).



Besides her pouty presence, the magazine has crowded the front cover which so many headlines that it looks exactly like the gossip/fashion magazine Cosmopolitan, which I haven't bought in years.


Salacious and crowded cover of Cosmopolitan Magazine
for September 2013


Farah Fawcette on the Vogue cover of July 1978.
Much less crowded.

I suspect I will continue to avoid buying Vogue in the future (except to redeem my card points).

In this September's issue of Vogue, I skipped through a mannequin-like pose of what I thought was a model. "Another emaciated, dead-looking fashion shot for an uninteresting dress," I thought, as I turned the page.

I found out, as correspondent David J., at Laura Wood's The Thinking Housewife writes:

Good day! While perusing the CNN website recently, I came upon a nearly cheesecake photograph of Marissa Mayer, the current CEO of Yahoo! The picture, intended for this spread in Vogue magazine, immediately reminded me of the following maxim by the late Lawrence Auster.

David J. quotes Lawrence Auster's maxim:

When men occupy a high office, it is for the purpose of doing a job. The job comes first. When women occupy a high office, it is for their self and their vanity. Public boasting about their “power” comes first, along with displays of themselves.

And he continues:

what amazes me about Ms. Mayer is that, despite her reputable academic accomplishments and immense merits in Silicon Valley, she still apparently places her sexual beauty at center stage.

Laura relies:

Well, what would you expect her to do? Of course, she’s using her attractiveness and the novelty of her position to seek attention. She is doing her job. I am sure that’s partly why she was hired though, of course, it would never be openly stated. She would be remiss in not fulfilling these expectations. She is doing her job.

The rest of the interaction is here, with other comments added.

Women may still want to look feminine and men may still want feminine (and pretty) women around, but the image of the pretty woman has changed.

We now have skinny, sculptural women who look like the manequins that pose in store windows. They have dead, expressionless eyes, and stiff wooden bodies. I suppose men are going for this since it shows some kind of prestige. After all, in this feminist world, a working woman, who can also pose for glamour magazines like Vogue, is a big catch. And her skinniness and quasi-inhumanness is a small price to pay for the prestige.

Still, I wonder how long it will be before men outright refuse to be around women like Mayer, who can probably be charming and feminine in her interactions, but who at some point will have to behave like the business woman she has to be in order not to run her company to the ground.

Or, she might assume a subsidiary, but superficially glossy position, and give the real meat of the running of a company to a ruthless male. They can call him all the names, while she gets all the praise.

Again, this is temporary. There is no guarantee that the "ruthless" male won't run her down, or out, while she's busy arranging child-care schedules and fashion shoots with ladies' magazines. Actually, I think that there is ample guarantee that a male colleague will do just that.


Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, posing in a rubber-like dress for the prestigious fashion magazine Vogue,
in the September 2013 issue.

She is wearing a Michael Kors Sheath (that's how the magazine describes the dress) for $1,896

Wikipedia describes a sheath dress as:

...a type of dress designed to fit close to the body, relatively unadorned [which] typically falls around the knees or lower thighs.

The dress looks like its made out of rubber (and that is probably the intended effect), but a closer look in the magazine photo shows that it is wool. Strange, on many counts. Mayer looks like she's lounging on some kind of pool-side chair. And wearing wool? The dress is short-sleeved. Wool dresses are meant for keeping one warm, but Kors and Mayer are not after practicality, but glamour. And finally, this rubber effect gives an S&M quality to the image. Is that how a CEO wants to portray herself? Apparently so.

Here are some hilarious Vogue 2009 shots titled "Pregnant in Prada" of Mayer in maternity wear, and the various Vogue selections to enhance her pregnancy wardrobe:


"Pregnant in Prada"
Mayer in 2009 Vogue

Here is the 2009 Vogue "Tuesday" ensemble, for the pregnant CEO, from a select group of designers:


Clockwise from left:
Boy. by Band of Outsiders leather-trim blazer, $1,395
lagarconne.com

J Brand 340 leggings-style maternity jeans, $195
net-a-porter.com

Proenza Schouler PS1 iPad case, $685
barneys.com

Reed Krakoff oxford leather loafers, $625
net-a-porter.com

Stylish, they are not. But practical and comfortable, for the busy pregnant lady, with the huge pocket book.

Women have come a long way. Actually, not so long. Look at Jennifer Lawrence's Vogue pose from above, a twenty-three-year-old woman who is pouting like Nabokov's pre-adolescent Lolita.


Left: Sue Lyon as Lolita, in Stanley Kubrik's 1962 film Lolita (after Nabokov's 1955 book, Lolita)
Right: Jennifer Lawrence on Vogue's 2013 cover

Women will be women, and girls will be girls. If left to their own devices, they will simply start to pout, or arrange day-care schedules from their top-floor, glass offices.

And back to CEO Mayer.

Paul, at the Thinking Housewife, writes, referring to a 2013 photograph of Mayer:

And she is not even beautiful. She might have been at one time, but no more. She needs to cut her hair.

This may be a harsh, but Mayer asked for it. She is so busy scheduling executive meetings and nanny pick-ups, that her glamour shots of previous years have gone down the tube.

Hers is the look of the veteran do-it-all female of our era.

Here is the 2013 photograph:



The caption to the photograph reads:

Pictured in 2013, Mayer has often been named one of the most powerful women in business. "I didn't set out to be at the top of technology companies," she told Vogue magazine. "I'm just geeky and shy and I like to code. ... It's not like I had a grand plan where I weighed all the pros and cons of what I wanted to do—it just sort of happened."

Good excuse: she's just geeky and shy, with a million-dollar wardrobe budget.

Here is Mayer, a few years ago, in 2008 (left), pretty and smiling, and the toll on her "it just sort of happened" face in 2013:



As Paul said: "And she is not even beautiful. She might have been at one time, but no more. She needs to cut her hair."

Of course, she had to upgrade (re-upgrade, I wonder how long it took to make her look that good) her look for the September 2013 Vogue article, but its back to business when she gets back to business.

Back to the Vogue issue. The eccentric photographer Annie Leibovitz has done a great job of portraying the Irish landscape, with her series of photographs. The clothes, as is usual in the 21st century depiction of style and beauty, are atrocious, but the scenery is stunningly beautiful. Here's one:



But this is its only redeeming quality.

More dead mannequins in the September 2013 Vogue:


The caption reads:

Tripping The Light Fantastic

Built for women who seem to be really, really going places: practical, everyday chic—no fidgety patterns or trims to muck up travel, intergalactic or otherwise.

The models have names:

Raquel (standing on the right) is wearing:
- Narciso Rodriguez tangerine shift, $1,895
neimanmarcus.com. Céline necklace. Michael Kors heels.

Toni:
- Balenciaga wool-mohair sweater with plaster effect ($1,545)
- Balenciaga Crepe pants ($1,235)
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Strands of Connection: Leading us to Abstraction

Strands of Connection
Unpublished article originally written in November 21, 2007
By: Kidist P. Asrat

Paul Strand’s basic idea never changed throughout his photographic career. Starting with his early, slightly out-of-focus 1916 prints to his much later views in Time in New England as well as his huge collection of portraits, his underlying theme has always been to connect.

Photography is a visual medium. But modern artists have a tradition of cross-referencing the sensations – known as synaesthesia. The most famous example of synaesthesia is Scriabin's Clavier a Lumières. Scriabin worked out a system of 'playing' colored lights with the keys of the piano where certain notes would cause certain colored lights to project, thus merging visual and aural experiences. Many other examples abound of artists describing colors that elicit tastes, and sounds that conjure up smells.

The sensation of touch is the least openly discussed of the modern artists' exploration of synaesthesia. Perhaps it is the most sublime or subconscious. And the most personal. It is easier to talk about more distant ideas like the color of sounds or the taste of shapes. To incorporate touch into one's art, both as a physical act and an emotional condition, suggests a vulnerability and a lack or human associations - the art becomes the contact. It no longer becomes an idea, but a necessity.

I believe this is where modern art makes one of its most hidden contributions. When perspective and depth, refined in the Renaissance painters, was slowly removed from the modern artist's technique, the canvass or the surface started to take on an important role. The surface, which started to take on a pronounced presence with the early modernists, continues to be so today.

Many modern artists talk about the material or the medium (the paint, the canvass, the paper) as having equal importance as the colors, forms, concepts and any other dimensions that help them create their art. Modern painters often evoke the surface of their canvass by adding layers of paint to distort the smoothness of the painting and to encourage us to touch these hanging pieces of sculptured paint. This exploration of the surface, both for the artist and the viewer, becomes part of the piece.

We see this reliance on surface in Strand's earliest photographs. His 1916 Chicken: Twin Lakes, Connecticut achieves this by the slightly out-of-focus, grainy quality of his print where the softened surface and tiny dots provides a textural as well as a visual effect. The photograph is also flattened, with no clear perspective, and the chicken dotted around as though patterns on a flat piece of cloth.


Chicken, Twin Lakes Connecticut 1916
His later abstracted - but still recognizable - works appear to lose this soft, dusty effect with their clean-cut and sharply focused prints. Yet, they too are very much concerned with the surface. Under the influence of the cubists, Strand would start to experiment with the geometric shapes that so befitted the angular buildings and streets of his New York series. As his 1915 Wall Street shows, he is using pure basic shapes of rectangles and straight lines (with his famous angled shots) to lead us into abstraction. His shadowy people act more as linear props than human characters. City Hall Park is still using formal structures with the curves and weaves of the linear footpath, and the more willowy human figures, to create recognizable forms. Eventually, he would produce his almost unrecognizable Chair Abstraction in 1916.


Left: Wall Street 1915
Right: City Hall Park 1915


Chair, Abstract 1916
But we shouldn't be deceived by these dehumanized figures and distorted daily objects. Although they do play a structural role in his photographs, the whole exercise is still about touch. The geometry and scattered patterns once again flatten the image, guiding us to explore the surface (and touch it if the museum wardens would let us), rather subsume us deeper into the picture.

All these ideas, I believe, lead to Strand's most beautiful work: "Time in New England". Its themes, the most important of which I think is connecting with America, can be glimpsed in this 1916 precursor "White Fence" shot in Port Kent, New York. Besides the iconic image of the idealized American fence, this is a photograph of pure geometrics. Rhythms and basic shapes (squares and rectangles) dominate to give us once again that disconcerting flatness where we expect conventional perspective. We are invited to connect with, touch, this image of an American landscape.


White Fence Port Kent 1916
Strand’s "Time in New England" was part of his life-long interest in taking pictures of specific locations. He was an avid traveler and took photographs in nearby Mexico and Quebec and as far afield as Morocco and Ghana. Yet "Time in New England" touches us the most. After all, it is his home. It is America. These were the years when he was concerned for his America out in the war fronts in Europe as by what was happening (in his views) internally. He had just completed "Native Land"; his patriotic documentary. “I wanted to look with vivid and intimate clarity into the past” says Strand in "Time in New England". All the more need to connect with those things that appeared to have been lost and bring them back to the surface, and to the present.

His most memorable photograph in this series is plainly titled “Church” which he took in Vermont in 1946. Once again, it appears to be a simplistic view of a quintessential American landscape – the plain New England wooden colonial Church. One can now call it iconic. It seems at though Strand were physically constructing this little church by placing the basic shapes – squares, triangles, the tiny circular window and even the swirls of clouds and scrawled of branches - directly onto the photographic paper. Perhaps it is something he wishes he could actually do, rather than click the aperture and make such a quick reproduction without contact with the parts.

We are also made to feel as though we could pick up these pieces of plank and build our own version, reuniting us with the pioneers who sawed and nailed the wood with their own bare hands. The rhythmic repetition of the horizontal planks provide a roughened texture to be stroked, much like a piece of fabric made out of coarse wool or flaxen. The distorted angle reminds us that we’re looking at a recreated structure, refusing us a suspension of disbelief that a perfected, right-angled building would induce. We are looking at, rather than into, this photograph. Finally, the croppings on the side and on top are an invitation for us to complete the picture, in our computer screens, in our own imagination or into our living rooms. Strand’s pictorial guides encourage us to be part of this picture, to touch it and connect with it, and to reach back into history and perhaps feel the energy and effort put by the plain folk who made this historic contribution. We have touched them, and Strand has touched us.


Church 1944
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References:
Paul Strand. Time in New England: Photos.Text selected and edited by Nancy Newhall. New York: Aperture, 1980
Why people photograph: Selected essays and reviews. Robert Adams. New York: Aperture, 1994
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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"Bill on Bill" Don Quixote Fighting Windmills

The text reads:

City in Bloom

The nonchalant look prevails at the Union Square Greenmmarket on Sundays. A bunch of poppies plopped in a bucket were not arranged by a designer, and yet they have an appeal that would attract an artist's eye. The same is true with the shoppers' attire. It's New York at its most relaxed style moment, excluding the kids who look like summer butterflies in their print dresses and shade hats. The new Andy Warhol statue, a few yards from his Factory, peers over the square from its column perched in a seating area north of the park. It wasn't long before Campbell's soup cans were decorating the pedestal, some holding flowers.

[Photo and text from On the Street, the New York Times Style Section, June 5, 2011]



Bill Cunningham closing in on a burgundy hat. His quest for beauty often brings him up close, usually to color. He probably also liked her yellow clutch. He uses whatever palette he's given, but I imagine he goes out of his way to avoid drab blacks and greys, unless he's infusing some sense of humor into this "colorlessness."



The famous Christian Louboutin red soles, and with leopard print and fur trims. Worth crouching down for. But then again, I would imagine Cunningham was looking for the contrast between the sneakers and the stylish ankle boots. He might even have a narrative: Well-heeled lady with scruffy boyfriend. That seems to be the trendy coupling of our era.



Louboutin originals run for about $1050, knock-offs for around $160. I doubt that the "street boots" on Cunningham's model are the real thing. This fits with Cunningham's "style in the street" vision. And I doubt that he cares too much whether they are real or not. Why not look good for a fraction the price? Equality in beauty. Still, he would know, and everyone else would know, that these are not really the real thing. To see that, one would need to go to the high class, high society functions. There is a hierarchy in beauty, after all.



Cunningham takes a photo of model and actress Carolyn Murphy, which is printed in the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar. I don't know who she is, but it is typically likely that Cunningham does. His shot looks spontaneous enough that he wasn't part of a photo shoot, and just happened to see Murphy in the street. High fashion meets street sense, spontaneously.

I wonder why he's taking a shot of her head? It must be the pale pink handkerchief she's tied around her head - à la Jackie Onassis?



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I recently did a review of the film Bill Cunningham New York, about the fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. He doesn't figure in Wikipedia's list of Fashion Photographers, and if any of them would know him, it would be through his tiny sections in the New York Times Styles section Sunday edition: "On the Street" and "Evening Hours."

He parallels his work of taking photographs in the streets (and the high society) of New York with Don Quixote fighting windmills.

I would say that is how the artist is these days. Bill is given a certain palette, often of unattractively dressed women who have been told by contemporary style experts that ugliness is the way to go. But he refuses to accept this, although he is somewhat immersed in that culture. His way out perhaps is to photograph all kinds of details to avoid the "whole ugly look." He often does find a pretty handbag, or a colorful shoe in that midst to offset the running style. He is a Don Quixote fighting the windmills.

Here is an article he wrote on his street fashion photography method.

Bill on Bill
By Bill Cunninghham
October 27, 2002

I started photographing people on the street during World War II. I used a little box Brownie. Nothing too expensive. The problem is I'm not a good photographer. To be perfectly honest, I'm too shy. Not aggressive enough. Well, I'm not aggressive at all. I just loved to see wonderfully dressed women, and I still do. That's all there is to it.

As a kid, I photographed people at ski resorts -- you know, when you got on the snow train and went up to New Hampshire. And I did parties. I worked as a stock boy at Bonwit Teller in Boston, where my family lived, and there was a very interesting woman, an executive, at Bonwit's. She was sensitive and aware, and she said, ''I see you outside at lunchtime watching people.'' And I said, ''Oh, yeah, that's my hobby.'' She said, ''If you think what they're wearing is wrong, why don't you redo them in your mind's eye.'' That was really the first professional direction I received.

I came to New York in 1948 at 19, after one term at Harvard. Well, Harvard wasn't for me at all. I lived first with my aunt and uncle. I was working at Bonwit's in the advertising department. Advertising was also my uncle's profession. That's why my family allowed me to come here and encouraged me to go into the business. I think they were worried I was becoming too interested in women's dresses. But it's been my hobby all my life. I could never concentrate on Sunday church services because I'd be concentrating on women's hats.

While working at Bonwit's, I met the women who ran Chez Ninon, the custom dress shop. Their names were Nona Parks and Sophie Shonnard. Alisa Mellon Bruce was the silent partner. Those two women didn't want me to get mixed up in fashion either. ''Oh, God, don't let him go near it.'' You have to understand how suspect fashion people were then.

But finally, when my family put a little pressure on me about my profession, I moved out of my uncle's apartment. This was probably in 1949.

I walked the streets in the East 50's, looking for empty windows. I couldn't afford an apartment. I saw a place on 52nd Street between Madison and Park. There was a young woman at the door, and I said: ''I see empty windows. Do you have a room to rent?'' She said, ''What for?'' And I said, ''Well, I'm going to make hats.'' She told me to tell the men who owned the house that I would clean for them in exchange for the room on the top floor.

So that's where I lived, and that's where my hat shop was. Elizabeth Shoumatoff, the artist who was painting President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he died, brought in Rebekah Harkness, Mrs. William Hale Harkness. She and the ladies from Chez Ninon sent clients over. They had to climb all those stairs, and the stairs were narrow. The place had been a speakeasy in the 1920's. There was a garden in the back with a lovely old Spanish fountain, all derelict. That's where I had my first fashion show. The only member of the press who came was Virginia Pope of The Times. I got to know her very well years later -- saw her almost every Friday for tea. But anyway, her rule was to go herself to see any new designer. So there was this lovely, gracious lady at my first show, and the next day in The Times there was a little paragraph: ''William J.''

See, I didn't use my last name. My family would have been too embarrassed. They were very shy people. This was maybe 1950.

To make money, I worked at a corner drugstore. At lunchtime, I'd stop making hats and run out and deliver lunches to people. At night, I worked as a counterman at Howard Johnson's. Both jobs provided my meals, and the dimes and nickels of my tips paid for millinery supplies.

Society women were coming to get hats. It was a good education, but I didn't know it. I didn't know who these people were. It didn't mean anything to me. And then, of course, you get to realize that everybody's the same.

I made hats until I went into the Army. I was drafted during the Korean War. When I came out in 1953, I was still looking for empty windows. I found one on West 54th.

John Fairchild had just come back from Paris to run Women's Wear Daily in New York, and he knew the ladies of Chez Ninon. John said to me, ''Why don't you come and write a column for us.'' Of course, the ladies at Chez Ninon were thrilled: ''Oh, good, get him away from fashion. Make him a writer.'' They didn't realize what John was really up to. He thought, Now, I've got the inside track on the clients at Chez Ninon, which was every Vanderbilt and Astor that there was. Plus Jackie Kennedy.

What John didn't realize was that the people at Chez Ninon never discussed the clients. Private was private.

I had never written anything, but John was like that. He wanted to turn everything upside down. He just said, ''Write whatever you see.'' He was open to all kinds of ideas -- until I wrote a column about Courrèges. When I saw his first show, I thought, Well, this is it.

But John killed my story. He said, ''No, no, Saint Laurent is the one.'' And that was it for me. When they wouldn't publish the Courrèges article the way I saw it, I left. They wanted all the attention on Saint Laurent, who made good clothes. But I thought the revolution was Courrèges. Of course, in the end, Saint Laurent was the longer running show. So Fairchild was right in that sense.

After that, I went to work for The Chicago Tribune, for Eleanor Nangle. She had been there since the 1920's. A wonderful woman. The best of the best. The Tribune had an office in New York, in the Times building. One night, in about 1966, the illustrator Antonio Lopez took me to dinner in London with a photographer named David Montgomery. I told him I wanted to take some pictures. When David came to New York a few months later, he brought a little camera, an Olympus Pen-D half-frame. It cost about $35. He said, ''Here, use it like a notebook.'' And that was the real beginning.

I HAD just the most marvelous time with that camera. Everybody I saw I was able to record, and that's what it's all about. I realized that you didn't know anything unless you photographed the shows and the street, to see how people interpreted what designers hoped they would buy. I realized that the street was the missing ingredient.

There's nothing new about this idea. People had been photographing the street since the camera was invented. At the turn of the 20th century, the horse races were the big thing. Lartigue was just a boy then. But the Seeberger brothers in France were taking pictures. They, and others, were commissioned by lace and fabric houses to go to the grand prix days at the Longchamp, Chantilly, Auteuil and Deauville racetracks and photograph fashionable women. The resulting albums were used as sample books by dressmakers.

Vogue and Harper's Bazaar were doing a similar thing, but they photographed only name people at society events. And Women's Wear has been photographing socialites and celebrities for years. But the difference for me is I don't see the people I photograph. All I see are clothes. I'm only interested in people who look good. I'm looking for the stunners.

I started taking pictures for The Times in the early 70's, though my first street fashion appeared in The Daily News. Bernadine Morris, whom I had known since the 50's, said to Abe Rosenthal: ''Take a look at his work. You have all these sections to fill.'' Then I got to know Arthur Gelb, and one day I told him about this woman I had been photographing on the street. She wore a nutria coat, and I thought: ''Look at the cut of that shoulder. It's so beautiful.'' And it was a plain coat, too. You'd look at it and think: ''Oh, are you crazy? It's nothing.''

Anyway, I was taking her picture, and I saw people turn around, looking at her. She crossed the street, and I thought, Is that? Sure enough, it was Greta Garbo. All I had noticed was the coat, and the shoulder.

Arthur was marvelous. I came in that morning in late December 1978, and no one was in the department except Mimi Sheraton, the restaurant critic. I showed her the Garbo picture. She stopped typing, got up, and away she went with the picture. Minutes later, the phone rang, and Mimi said: ''Come down here, Bill. Arthur's desk.''

Arthur looked at the picture and said, ''What else do you have like this?'' I had been hanging out at the corner of 57th and Fifth, and I said, ''A picture of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, the king and queen of Spain, a Kennedy in a fox coat.''

I also had a picture of a woman who turned out to be Farrah Fawcett. I didn't know. See, I never go to the movies, and I don't own a television set.

Arthur said, ''Let's run these.'' The next day, Dec. 30, there was a half page of pictures in the Metropolitan Report.

I never bothered with celebrities unless they were wearing something interesting. That's why my files wouldn't be of value to anyone. I remember one April in Paris Ball when Joe DiMaggio came with Marilyn Monroe. But I was mesmerized by Mrs. T. Charlton Henry of Philadelphia. So chic. She'd take the train up in the morning to Penn Station and walk to Bergdorf, to be there when it opened. And when she came in, she'd say, ''Good morning, Miss Ida,'' ''Good morning, Miss Elizabeth.'' She knew everyone's name.

Back in the 60's, I remember that Eleanor Nangle and I were sitting at one of Oscar de la Renta's first shows in New York when she heard antiwar protesters down in the street. She said: ''Come on, Bill, we're leaving. The action isn't here.'' We got up and skipped out of the show. I knew from photographing people on the streets that the news was not in the showrooms. It was on the streets.

At The Times, when Charlotte Curtis was covering society, she called me one Easter Sunday and said, ''Bill, take your little camera and go quickly to Central Park, to the Sheep Meadow.'' That morning I had been on Fifth Avenue photographing the Easter parade. So I got on my bike and went up to the Sheep Meadow, and there before me were all the kids -- the flower children. All these kids dressed in everything from their mother's and grandmother's trunks, lying on the grass. It was unbelievable. It was all about the fashion revolution. And it was because Charlotte Curtis had called me on the phone.

MOST of my pictures are never published. I just document things I think are important. For instance, I've documented the gay pride parade from its first days. It was something we had never seen before. I documented every exhibition that Diana Vreeland did at the Met, but every picture is of her hand on something. I do everything, really, for myself.

I suppose, in a funny way, I'm a record keeper. More than a collector. I'm very aware of things not of value but of historical knowledge. I remember when Chez Ninon was closing in the mid-70's. I went in one day, and the files were outside in the trash. I said to the secretary, ''Well, I hope you gave all the letters from Jackie Kennedy and Mrs. Rose Kennedy to the Kennedy Library.'' And she said, ''No, they kept a few, but they felt that the rest were too personal, so they threw them out.'' I rescued everything I could and still have it.

I go to different places all the time. And I try to be as discreet as I can. My whole thing is to be invisible. You get more natural pictures that way, too. The only place where I really hung out was the old Le Cirque on 65th Street. My friend Suzette, who did the flowers there, has been with Sirio Maccioni since he got off the boat from Europe, when he was a captain at the old Colony restaurant. Everyone said Suzette tipped me off, but she couldn't have cared less about who was there.

Most people wouldn't believe that anyone would be so dumb to come every day and stand for two hours without knowing whether somebody was coming out. But I like the surprise of finding someone. Most photographers couldn't do what I do because of deadlines. You spend days, weeks, years waiting for what I call a stunner.

I think fashion is as vital and as interesting today as ever. I know what people with a more formal attitude mean when they say they're horrified by what they see on the street. But fashion is doing its job. It's mirroring exactly our times.

The main thing I love about street photography is that you find the answers you don't see at the fashion shows. You find information for readers so they can visualize themselves. This was something I realized early on: If you just cover the designers in the shows, that's only one facet. You also need the street and the evening hours. If you cover the three things, you have the full picture of what people are wearing.

I go out every day. When I get depressed at the office, I go out, and as soon as I'm on the street and see people, I feel better. But I never go out with a preconceived idea. I let the street speak to me.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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