What's up

Piri' Miri Muli' can confirm that Robert Morris' labyrinth will be at Sonnebend throughout the summer, irrespective of what else is showing there, and that any bird feathers found in it have not been placed there by humans.

Not to be outdone, Galerie Lelong has for the remainder of the week Hélio Oiticica's labyrinthine 1972 installation Penetrável Filtro, which seems to have predated by a year Morris' first labyrinth tho both are likely influenced by Robert Smithson's 1970 Spiral Jetty. Oiticica was at the time staying in the US, exiled from Brazil's suspension of habeas corpus: for a while in New York, later a guest of Roman Jakobson's at Cambridge, while his friend Haroldo de Campos was teaching in Buffalo.  de Campos' poem Galaxias comes out of a speaker next to a speaker featuring Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, before Oiticica's posthumous instructions, displayed in the next gallery, stipulate that local TV and radio is on display further into the labyrinth along with a colorful complimentary punch. Lelong selected tasty orange juice after a careful review of the color scheme.  Tropicália, a  Penetrável shown in the Bronx Museum in 2006, was his first hit in Brazil, giving Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso the name for their music movement, but Oiticica didn't want his New York work to have quaint symbols of Brazil like Tropicália's live macaws.

The show includes one of his first Penetrável works from 1960, soon after he had abandoned two dimensional gouaches in the style of Mondrian. Rio's Neo-Concretists had broken from their dogmatic São Paulo counterparts, and while the geometry of Brazilian concretism reflects a faith in scientific progress, the Neo-Concretists took an interest in Merleau-Ponty's somatic theory, often incorporating the audience into the work. Terry Eagleton writes of this phase of somatics

The first body book of our era is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception; but this, with its humanist sense of the body as practice and project, is now distinctly passé. The shift from Merleau-Ponty to Foucault is one from the body as relation to the body as object. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is where something is being done; for the new somatics, the body is where something - gazing, imprinting, regimenting - is being done to you. It used to be called alienation, but that implies existence of an interiority to be alienated - a proposition of which somatic criticism is deeply skeptical

Morris quotes Smithson: "the first bad body art was the Crucifixion."

Oiticica's grandfather was the renowned Rio anarchist José Oiticica, his father an entomologist who dabbled in painting and photography and died in 1964, the year of Brazil's military coup.  That year, Oiticica moved into Rio's rough Morro de Mangueira (right, Candido Portinari's 1933 "O Morro") making carnival costumes there (his "Parangoles") after an initially difficult initiation phase. Neo-Concretist sculptor Lygia Pape said "Helio was a young Apollonian, even a little pedantic, who worked with his father in the documentation of the National Museum, where he learned a methodology: it was very organized and disciplined. In 1964, his father died.  A friend of ours took Helio to the Morro. It was there that he found a Dionysian space he had no knowledge or experience of... he began to incorporate the experience of the Morro.. the barriers of bourgeois culture broke there.. it's as if he were another Helio, Helio's a "Morro", which invaded everything: his home, his life and his work."

The aura of the Morro was evoked this Spring at DC's Hirshhorn with an room devoted to Oiticica's "Cosmococa," conceived in collaboration with veteran filmmaker Neville D'Almeida, projecting for an audience, visibly grateful to be lying on mattresses with nail files, white lines emanating from the eye of Bunuel on the cover of the New York Times and white lines emanating from a man wearing one of his Parangoles sacks, to the soundtrack of Hendrix and traditional Brazilian music, apparently referencing the allegory of sight at the beginning of Un Chien Andalou in the center of sensory dimensions of the installation. The Lelong show also features 1979's Penetrável PN28 "Nas Quebradas," (left) in which the visitor is invited to slide down a hill of crushed stone to evoke the pathways of the favela. The geometry of Concretism is always somewhere present, suggesting an unreal locale amid the places referenced and the anarchic function of the spectator.

For those who didn't lose interest in easel painting by masters after the geometric decrees of the 1950s São Paolo Concretists' "10 Year Plan," especially painting with an "existence of an interiority to be alienated," get thee to the Carlyle, enter on the Madison side (no. 981 tween 76th and 77th), and make thy way up the steps to the right for a wonderful André Masson retrospective drawn from private collections, one of the best gallery shows up this decade, holding its own against John Richardson's latest Picasso show across the street with canvases of and by Françoise Gilot as well as Picasso's ceramics from Vallauris and some improvised sculptures, which if you check out (til June 30) don't forget to get off at the 3rd floor for Venus Over Manhattan's spooky JK Huysmans tribute (also til Jun 30) which includes a Gustave Moreau, Henry Fuseli's "Fairy Mab," Redon charcoals and graphites.

Dana Schutz' "Building a Boat While Sailing" is up at her Petzel debut for the rest of the week (535 w 22nd).

On the W side of 24th, Clemente packs as many inspired canvases as possible in Boone's space (til June 30) while many, many Lucio Fontanas are accommodated next door. South to Zwirner, Yan Pei-Ming more than pulls off his art history referentiality.

"Philly narrative".. Paone, Goodman, Kamihira at the Woodmere

When I was 15 or 16 I took a class called Intro to Lyrical Poetry, which was to mean sung lyrics (rock/folk), in which we had to pick one song to bring in for the class and I picked this one. The lyrics were not on the album sleeve so I had to guess them and no one could decipher the last line: I substituted "a billion grains of sand with its hand in the ground fifty million years ago" for what this Youtuber decided was "and there were pendulums and sand and Coors cans in the ground fifty million years ago." The lyrics have to my knowledge never been officially published on the page.

Happy Memorial Day from Piri' Miri Muli'!

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Death is the resource of transfiguration. It is, of course, the way out of life as well as into life, and life, says the popular Mexican song, is worth nothing, no vale nada. But it is also the entry into life, since life is as valuable as our conscience decides it is.

-Carlos Fuentes Macías 1928 – 2012

My impulse to cite Kafka in a discussion of political poetry may have come from a conference speech by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1963, when he said "Kafka wrote slim books which are only concerned with specific, petit bourgeois problems. But if one reads them in depth and discovers that totality which a modern, new novel must always aspire to attain. The totality is what the writers and readers have in common. Society produces both of us, so we must be able to recognize and understand each other through this common context, which makes it possible for us at every instant to speak to each other. So it does not matter very much if literature is called committed or not..."

In a similar vein, César Vallejo wrote in 1930 in his reflections on Mayakovsky that Bach, Beethoven, the Pyramids, Chaplin are "socialist" because "they answer to a universal concept of the masses and to feelings, ideas and interest common to.. all human beings without exception."  Vallejo decried the emotional manipulation of Maxime Gorky's novels: "The socialist poet does not reduce his socialism to the themes or technique of the poem. He does not reduce it to the inserting of fashionable words on economy, dialectics or Marxist law, to mobilizing ideas and political requisitions from invoices or communist sources, nor to characterizing the actions of nature and the spirit with epithets taken from the proletarian revolution." It is at times a confused essay, especially as he was concurrently writing the socialist realist novel Tungsten, with clear demarcations of good and evil, which was the primary influence on José Maria Arguedas' first prose work Agua, which Arguedas said was "written with hatred, with the fury of a pure hatred, the kind that springs from universal loves up there in the regions of the world where two factions confront each other with inplacable cruelty - one group that bleeds and another that squeezes out the last drop of blood," the stark economic divisions of provincial South American towns affecting literary form, contrasted in Vallejo's mind with Mayakovsky's demise and European modernism.

Speaking of Arguedas, there is some footage of the Yawar (bloody) Fiestas from Cotabambas province, Peru: the tradition of tying a condor to the back of a bull on Independence Day to celebrate the joining of the Spanish and the Incan. The winged animal suggests a dragon figure joining earth and sky like the Mayan Q'uq'umatz, but for the Incans the sky was an empty space to be filled by Viracocha, whose top attendants assumed the forms of the cougar, condor, falcon and snake. This well edited 95 seconds is embed-disabled, but this has more footage of the type of bullfighting Arguedas depicted:



Here the condor rituals lead to it taking flight while a woman reads a poem:

The best dance moves are from 5:54 to 6:28 and a few after that.

What's up for two more days, v.5, I mean one day

Ending today is the New York debut of Punjabi artist Visha Gahotra (513 w 20th St), which welcomes guests with her 2008 installation "Neo-camouflage" (above): six soldier mannequins matching the color pattern of an Indian megalopolis' urban labyrinth, which resonates with the imagery of another show ending today: Robert Morris' "Labyrinths" at Sonnabend (536 w 22nd St). Morris got his start as an artist at age eight, taking the bus to the Nelson Atkins in Kansas City and laying out with his crayons in front of the Egyptian reliefs, later pastiching their Cezanne and, as in this show, Goya's "Caprices," among his many art history references to come. He is heavily influenced by some linguistic theorists: Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Davidson.

Morris' show presents his labyrinth drawings throughout his career and a wire fence labyrinth in the back courtyard. My experience of walking through the labyrinth was moving and personal, not tied to one image or specific issue. I didn't think for a second about prison camps, though Morris had used the wire fence two years ago for a labyrinth in Łódź, Poland, 30 miles from the Chelmno concentration camp where the Nazis enclosed a wire fence inside another, and indeed the Łódź ghetto had a labyrinthine grid. Wire fences also form a labyrinth at the Guantanamo detention camp. Morris' labyrinths are very straightforward as mazes, not usually giving you much opportunity to get lost. He uses many variations of scale, altering the participant's type of reflection, which he doesn't discuss much though he notes in an essay the monumental size of Nazi architecture. I found the wire fence very utilitarian - in a good, practical way - "here's your labyrinth" - and the transparency of the fence affected my experience, allowing me to know that I was there in a labyrinth and gaze out at the world beyond it.

The labyrinth has been called an "incomplete" mandala: it would seem that the labyrinth locates, like the mosaic at Chartres, the pilgrim more at a moment in time and space but Japanese mandalas are situated in specific places. The axe (labrys) appears in both, in the labyrinth to slay the bull and in one of the many hands of Vajrabhairava in mandalas, who like the Minotaur often has a bull's head, and whose use of the axe eventually abolishes duality. The labyrinthine floor mosaics in ancient Greece were used for dances.


The "star shaped dodecagon behind trenches" which the architecture scholar Austerlitz in WG Sebald's novel of the same name says was the preferred design for fortified cities by the end of the 17th Century, which the narrarator says "strikes the layman as an emblem.. of absolute power" reminds me of a Carl Gustav Jung mandala (left). The early Sumerian towns seem to have consisted of a temple surrounded by labyrinthine streets, which, like the medinas of North Africa, gave locals an advantage over invaders. Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project was by his account inspired by Louis Aragon's sections in 1926's Le Paysan de Paris of the destruction of labyrinthine streets when (as with Gahotra's cityscape) they suddenly were considered an obstacle to social control. Morris sees in the labyrinth a mythology preceding its physical remains which evades logic and experience, quoting from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations 203: "Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about." Aragon started his novel out with an attack on philosophers, "incapable of tackling the smallest problem without first going through the routine of recapitulating and then refuting everything that predecessors have had to say" and then proposes that the labyrinthine passages around the Opera quarter "are not yet inhabited by a deity. It is forming there, a new godhead precipitating in these recreations of Ephesus like acid-gnawing metal in the bottom of a glass."

What's up for two more days, v.4, I mean 3 days and a few hours

For this week's edition I have an image from "Jean Dubuffet: The Last Two Years" (Pace, 510 W 25th St, pdf) for every stanza break in Wallace Stevens' "Metaphor As Degeneration":

If there is a man white as marble
Sits in a wood, in the greenest part,
Brooding sounds of the images of death,



So there is a man in black space
Sits on nothing we know,
Brooding sounds of river noises;



And these images, these reverberations,
And others, make certain how being
Includes death and the imagination.



The marble man remains himself in space.
The man in the dark wood descends unchanged.
It is certain that the river



Is not Swatara*. The swarthy water
That flows round the earth and through the skies,
Twisting among the universal spaces,



Is not Swatara. It is being.
That is the flock-flecked river, the water,
The blown sheen - or is it air?



How, then, is metaphor degeneration,
When Swatara becomes that undulant river
And the river becomes the landless, waterless ocean?



Here the black violets grow down to its banks
And the memorial mosses hang their green
Upon it, as it flows ahead.


Dubuffet: "These paintings were intended to challenge the objective nature of being (être). The notion of being is presented here as relative rather than irrefutable: it is merely a projection of our minds, a whim of our thinking. The mind has the right to establish being wherever it cares to and for as long as it likes. There is no intrinsic difference between being and fantasy (fantasme); being is an attribute that the mind assigns to fantasy. One could apply the term ‘nihilism’ to this challenge of being, but it is reverse nihilism, since it confers the power of being on any fantasy whatsoever, given that being is a secretion of our minds. These paintings are an exercise for training the mind to deal with a being that it creates for itself rather than one imposed upon it.

"The mind should get rid of the feeling that it alone must change while being cannot change; the mind will train itself to vary being rather than varying itself, the mind will train itself to move through a space in which being is variable and never anything but a hypothesis, the mind will practice using its ability to provide its own fulcrums wherever it wishes, it will learn to rely on illusion, to create the ground on which it walks. The mind will learn how to move through all the various degrees of being, and it will feel at ease when being is undependable, flicks on and off, remains potential, and sleeps or wakes at will. Being and thinking are one and the same."

* This river, located north of Harrisburg, PA, appears in both "The Countryman" and "Metaphor as Degeneration." In both cases, it is intended to represent the real, physical, actual world over and against abstractions of the mind that are expressed in metaphor. [Rhodes]

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Manuel De Falla wrote El Amor Brujo in 1914 in Madrid after he had lived in Paris from 1907 to the outbreak of war, where friends Debussy and Ravel were drawn to Iberia and he was learning from them how to orchestrate his traditions. He intended his reworkings of Andalusian folks songs to be sung offstage by the sort of mezzos that seem to have finished a shift rolling cigars with Carmen, and this singer I cannot identify fits the bill..



The dramatic tension of the song cycle is really the purgation of love, as the female protagonist is entranced by the spell of the ghost of the unfaithful ex, who before the opening credits of Saura's film version (Piri' Miri Muli' recommended) was bequeathed to her by their parents, and her new lover was wrongly accused and did time for his stabbing, so upon his release they contract the village spell caster to organize a fire ritual (which may have been descended from Hindu Homa rituals brought by Gypsies from Rajastan) after which they want the ghost to refocus his attentions on the girl he'd made away with in the first place..



The second song of both videos relates the nocturnal lights of the Will-o'-the-wisp, which has inspired myths the world over including references by Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Coleridge, and Brontë, to the appearance of the ghost, leading to Miles Davis' toots to the ghost in his tribute to De Falla and Joaquin Rodrigo.