Philadelphia Experiment (Alien Sedation); Vija Celmins

          Yesterday I visited a well-known office building in Philadelphia (the newest skyscraper in a city whose formerly modest, but old and attractive skyline, has been ruined by the incredibly mediocre architecture of its newest buildings; if it mattered more, you could call it a tragedy) and saw something unexpected and dreadful.

 

          In the building’s lobby, across from the shockingly awful Permanent Display Of Important Art (in the form of  several groupings of brightly colored, life-sized sculpted human figures, modeled to resemble Crackerjacks toys, posed in ways meant to suggest a cross-section of daily activities  in contemporary urban Philadelphia), is what has been described as “the largest four-millimeter LED screen in the world………spanning 83.3 feet wide by 25.4 feet high, the 2,100 square foot video wall bring[ing] spectacular original programming to visitors 18 hours a day”.

      Depressing as the sculpture tableau is, the video wall and its “spectacular original programming” are simply beyond belief in their vapidity, stupidity and vulgarity.  Projected in apparently random, quietly assaultive, but non-hypnotic, succession are computer-animated  clips depicting continuously and variously: (a) ugly, badly dressed human “worker-figures” dancing among enlarged Styrofoam coffee cups or on and around “worker-pod” desks and chairs; (b) these same figures riding toy rocket ships while wearing hideous mime-like ooh-and-ah facial expressions; (c) enlarged variations on spirit crushing cog-and-wheel and interlocking gear designs; (d) nature scenes (presumably from Planet Earth but unrecognizable in terms of their geography) denatured and made to look airless, lifeless and synthetic;  (e) the most banal Philadelphia cityscape scenes imaginable expressing the lie that our local highways are actually slick, rational and navigable.  There are also occasional, purposeless, bilaterally symmetrical scenes of 1920s "flapper" girls dancing on and straddling bi-planes.

        I have unsuccessfully attempted to locate interviews with the creators of these horrors to learn more about their artistic intentions.  To me, it seems as though they decided that the easiest way to undermine the human spirit was to distill the grotesque late-20^th century sensibility of MTV (most artfully, in many  people’s minds, exemplified in Peter Gabriel’s dreadful “Sledgehammer” video) by removing all obvious elements of violence and cheap, clichéd social criticism, and substituting instead a Prozac haze patina.  I assume their purpose is to pacify and brainwash the building’s workers, invited guests, and pedestrians seeking the succor of the new, high profile “public art” display they’ve heard so much about in the local media.  The ultimate visual and emotional gestalt of this "wall of dearth" is pure Big Brother (George Orwell's, not the reality TV show).

Andy Warhol, Green Car Crash, 1963 

 

Jasper Johns, Target With Plaster Casts, 1955

 

          When I was much younger and was first thinking seriously about the function of art, I wrote an essay for an American history class about some figures I called “public artists”.  I focused on various 1960s American Pop artists and their precursors (Warhol, Rosenquist, Johns, Rauschenberg), as well as some other artists (Smithson, Serra) who seemed relevant.  It was an uncertain, highly imperfect student effort that contained a lot of inconsistencies, inapposite examples and theories shoehorned in to try to match whatever my main thesis was.   For all its faults, I think I did come to grips with the fact that the underlying function of art should be to communicate important things, not to deceive the viewer or waste his time.

 

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1959 

         Art can be anything -- seditious, disturbing, happy, sad, angry, organized, chaotic, male, female -- but it cannot be sedative.   It should wake and stir the spirit, not lull or, worse, smother it.

James Rosenquist, I Love You With My Ford, 1961 

  

 

Jackson Pollock, No. 1, 1948

 

          It can be decorative (I’m thinking of rock concert light shows in the 1960s) in ways that are not clearly momentous (I'm thinking about Iranian mosques of the Safavid period), but it cannot be utterly trivial.

Fillmore East, Joshua Light Show (Big Brother and the Holding Company), 1968

 

Interior of Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque, Isfahan 1615-18

          Remembering Egyptian and Mexican pyramids, Greek vases and temples, Islamic mortars and pestles, Chinese vases and Lascaux cave paintings (among thousands of other works and objects), I think this holds true throughout history.

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Big Sea # 2), 1969, Graphite on Acrylic 

       The concept of “public art”, whether we're speaking of monuments, other objects for the town square, the work of a poet laureate or any other writer, pop musician, etc., seeking immediate communication with a broad audience, is an interesting subject.  However, so too are the works of less public artists working on a smaller, more intimate scale like the Latvian-born American artist Vija Celmins.  I have admired Celmins’ work since I first saw it in the early 1970s because she seemed quietly and naturally to key into the mantra I have previously cited that “the function of art is to imitate nature in her manner of operation”.

Vija Celmins, Explosion at Sea, 1966, Oil on canvas 

       Working in the finest, most dexterous manual detail, creating her depictions of natural objects and phenomena and reclaiming the sublime medium of grisaille, I have read (and I am not a Celmins scholar or any sort of scholar these days), that Celmins intends in her work to “dispel notions of the sublime” about nature.

Vija Celmins, Comet, 1992, Linocut 

 

       For me, however, Celmins’ art reinforces my belief in the possibilities of achieving quality and possibly transcendence through art, i.e., in the sublime.  

       As art critic Joe Scanlon wrote in a review of a 1996 Vija Celmins New York City gallery exhibition:  "these are pictures made for reasons beyond the express purpose of being looked at".

Vija Celmins, Ocean Surface, 1983, Drypoint

End of the season: Zucchine Fritte (Elizabeth David)

 

From Italian Food (1954) by Elizabeth David

"Zucchine are usually cooked unpeeled, cut into thin rounds, fried in butter or oil.  They can be stuffed, stewed, used in a sauce for pasta, fried in batter, added to vegetable soups, and cooked with tomatoes and cheese in the same way as aubergines.  Very thin strips of zucchine fried crisp in hot oil, piled up on the dish like potato straws, are sold in every Roman rosticceria in the summer."

Zucchine Fritte (Fried Small Marrows)

Cut 1/2 lb. of small unpeeled marrows into little strips, like very small chips.  Salt them and leave them to drain for an hour.  

Shake them in a cloth with flour and fry them in deep oil.  They will only take about 3 minutes to cook.  Lift them out of the pan with a perforated spoon and drain them on kitchen paper.

Rosticceria in Rome

September 26, 1949 -- End of the season, Tower Beach, London

Tower Beach, the Foreshore, 1905

Savile Row, London

Elizabeth David

Now you are gone, end of the season

Winter will come any day
Back in the scrum on a wet afternoon
Down in the mud, dreaming of flowers in June

October 20 -- Happy birthday Arthur Rimbaud, Margaret Dumont, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Wren

Arthur Rimbaud (b. October 20, 1854)

Margaret Dumont (b. October 20, 1882)

Bela Lugosi (b. October 20, 1882)

Christopher Wren (b. October 20, 1632)

2011 Update -- Please click here!

Happy Birthday, Suzanne Duchamp (October 20, 1889 -- September 11, 1963)

Suzanne Duchamp

Suzanne Duchamp, Multiplication Brisee et Retablie (Broken and Re-Established Multiplication), 1918-19, Art Institute of Chicago

Suzanne Duchamp, Le Ready Made Malheureux de Marcel (Marcel's Unhappy Ready Made), 1919

Issue of Tabu: Printer: H. Chachoin Imp., Paris. 1921. Lithograph, 47 1/2 x 31 1/2" (125.6 x 80 cm). Purchase, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Jean Crotti, Germaine Everling, Francis Picabia, Suzanne Duchamp on La Croisette, Cannes, 1921

Hope Springs Eternal : New fish species found deep below ocean surface; Proof Reproof (A. Pope)

Dateline, 10/15/10  11:54 am ET

The ghostly white snailfish was found September 10 in the South Pacific.

Scientists have discovered a new species of fish living almost 4 1/2 miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

The ghostly white snailfish was found September 10 in the Peru-Chile trench in the South Pacific by an international team of marine biologists led by Alan Jamieson of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. The scientists also found cusk-eels and crustaceans living in the trench off the west coast of South America. Those creatures had never before been observed at such depths, where sunlight never penetrates and water pressure is almost 10,000 pounds per square inch.

“Our findings, which revealed diverse and abundant species at depths previously thought to be void of fish, will prompt a rethink into marine populations at extreme depths,” said Jamieson, who led researchers from Japan and New Zealand in the project.

The researchers discovered the creatures during a three-week expedition during which they took more than 6,000 images at depths between 4,500 and 8,000 meters (15,000 to 26,000 feet).

The most recent mission – August 31 to September 20 - was the seventh in three years by a collaborative research project among the University of Aberdeen’s Oceanlab, the University of Tokyo’s Ocean Research Institute and New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research.

Previous expeditions had identified another species of snailfish in deep-sea trenches off Japan and New Zealand.

Scientists found large shrimp-like crustacean scavengers in abundance.

“To test whether these species would be found in all trenches, we repeated our experiments on the other side of the Pacific Ocean off Peru and Chile, some 6,000 miles from our last observations,” Jamieson said. “What we found was that indeed there was another unique species of snailfish living at 7,000 meters — entirely new to science, which had never been caught or seen before.”

Jamieson said scientists also observed cusk-eels in a “feeding frenzy that last 22 hours” and large shrimp-like crustacean scavengers in abundance in the trench.

“It begs the question of why and how they can live so deep in this trench but not in any other,” said Niamh Kilgallen, an expert on the creatures at the New Zealand institute.

“These findings prompt a re-evaluation of the diversity and abundance of life at extreme depths," Jamieson said.

"Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old time, and regulate the sun;
Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,
And quitting sense call imitating God;
As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,
And turn their heads to imitate the sun.
Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—
Then drop into thyself, and be a fool! "

Alexander Pope, Excerpt from An Essay on Man,  1734

The Great Larry Wallis (Pink Fairies, Police Car, Other)

Songwriter, guitarist and producer Larry Wallis is one of the most appealing, largely unsung, figures in modern rock music.  His 1977 single on the Stiff label, "Police Car", has EVERYTHING going for it -- cool, eternally relevant subject matter, sharp lyrics, a great tune and marvelous, driving musicianship.   

His work with the Pink Fairies, although appreciated by cognoscenti, deserves greater attention and praise.  He produced Wreckless Eric's first lp, including the immortal Reconnez Cherie.

An informative, funny and predictably slightly profane interview with the great man is found here.

Apparently, back problems (sciatica) have sidelined him lately.  I hope he returns to action soon.   

(Roy Wood too.) 

The world needs  (more) Larry Wallis.

From "The Dancing Floor" by John Buchan

1. I think it was chiefly the sight of the multitude moving toward the Dancing Floor, all silent, so that the only sound was the tread of feet.  He was in doubt before as to where exactly the place was, but the roads blazed for him like the roads to Epsom on Derby Day.

 

 2. It was now nearly dark, and suddenly like the marks delimiting a course, torches broke into flame.  These points of angry light in the crowded silence seemed to complete the spell.

 

3. As they approached the breach in the wall Vernon managed to whisper to him to cheer up, for no ill will would befall him.  'I am your friend', he said; 'together we will make an end of this folly,' and the man's face lightened.

4.  It was this look on Maris's face which I saw from my hiding place and which made me forbid Janni's pistol shot.