Since Alain Resnais died I have been re-watching the films and will post about them some time. Harvard Film Archives - which Charles Olson once introduced for - is projecting them these days in a Le Corbusier-designed theater.. if you're nearby tonight at 7pm is the masterpiece La guerre est finie, next Saturday the 28th at 7 is Muriel, or the Time of Return (my favorite of his, which I will attempt to catch), and Monday the 30th at 7 Providence. The ones I named are the ones I recommend, which doesn't include Last Year in Marienbad, which I consider a valiant attempt to make Robbe-Grillet cinematic as I may elaborate on in said post. I don't know what was available to the nice folks at the archive but the films I consider better than Marienbad (and the others they feature like Wild Grass) of those within reach here, in order of preference: 1. Muriel, 2. Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 3. Le Guerre Est Finie, 4. Providence, 5. La vie est un roman, 6. Night and Fog (short; his short films on Van Gogh, Picasso and Gauguin would also roughly place here), 7. Mélo, 8. Love Unto Death, 9. You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet.

What's up

A bunch of shows now will likely elicit comment here in the next couple of days but if you can get to Princeton today before 5pm it's the last day to see MoMA's collection of Edvard Munch works on paper (which MoMA hung up, I think fewer in all, when The Scream - that work the artist asked the Genie to banalize and the Genie granteth - was loaned to them) which constitute some of the best prints ever made by a human, I think the best but you can check the samplings from Picasso's Vollard Suite in Philly if they're not getting it done for you. In Vollard and the Frieze of Life, there is a relation between universal archetypes and contingent experience which haggles over the formal qualities, color, line, symbolism, the concept, meta- and phenomenology, but this haggling comes from the unification of the two, like the woodcut of The Kiss (left) that has been reworked from drawings from fresh emotional content. The print version of Moonlight (below) is perhaps for me the most powerful of the show. If the face is that of mistress Milly Thaulow leaving her house at night in 1885, and the house in this print is believed to resemble the shore house his father rented, they share the common color brown, while the window pane and the tree share green, both featuring a combinations of right angles and natural curves as moonlight on the face is itself a reflection with its symbolic history, as with the shadow. The large format painting on the subject highlights the bright glow of the face suggesting the influence of Redon's Marsh Flower (Hommage à Goya), Germination 2 and Triste Montée of Dans le Rêve, and Obsession, of which the latter may have provided the compositional structure for works like Jealousy.

The curators' promo "from his first prints in 1894 to those completed in 1902, the year of the triumphant exhibition of the complete Frieze of Light painting cycle at the Berlin Secession" omits from the history of institutional reception the fact that in 1892 the Berlin Artists Association took his works down from their show after one week, leading the the formation of the Secession (and publicity and attention for Munch) which itself wouldn't show Munch's works until after the intention of certain personalities was overcome. Whether they are dealing in paternalistic euphemisms about official taste hasn't broken my relative détente with the Princeton curators as they feature a huge Riopelle in their new abstraction show.

What's up

This closing crept up on me after I happened by a month ago, but Piri' Miri Muli' readers within proximity of the St. Lawrence River who haven't seen the Peter Doig show are here advised that it ends upon closing today, in the area where he spent his adolescence after the show opened in Edinburgh, the nation of his birth, headed to Fondation Beyeler in the half-canton of Basel-Stadt where readers have it for all of next winter. Seeing it in Montreal sets it against the backdrop of the landscape paintings of the "Group of Seven" which Doig internalized while at the same time seeking escape to the Royal Academy of London for punk culture and the easel masters. The German Daniel Richter, about whom the phrase "the Return of Painting" has often been used, wrote an essay about Doig in 1990, around the time that Richter, who shares Doig's passion for music and album art, was moving from abstraction to figurative composition. Richter's depiction of the figure, at times deploying an illumination suggestive of autonomous human energy, as well as landscape brush work, use of color influenced by psychadelia, and abstracted planes with a representitive function can be traced to the influence of Doig, even as Richter has taken it in compositional directions influenced differently by literature, philosophy, activism, and European master archetypes. The influence of the Group of Seven, who by choice worked oblivious to the avant-garde trends of New York and Europe, and Doig's earnest emulation of both the painterly techniques and embrace of the pre-modern of Gauguin, an influence derided by Ashley Bickerton, a graduate of CalArts conceptualism and 90's New York, in lesser practitioners as "stupid Gauguin fantasies of island life.. dollops of local color spooned on, nauseatingly obvious images of kitsch slices of exoticism," caricatured in wallpaper by Sigmar Polke, is updated in a manner that makes it central to the practice of painting in the face of photography (which Doig works from) and concept. So mounting this show of Doig's in Montreal reflects not only a civic pride in a local boy, but lets the works share the building with Tom Thomson, Emily Carr, David Milne, and others, revealing how that tradition's formal, painterly focus on nature helped revitalize figurative painting. Doig's film posters for his own repertory cinema in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad suggest that genre's influence on his work, as the various versions of Pelican (two of many below), in which a man dragging away a pelican is shown at the precise moment he sees his witnesses, employ cinematic methods of focus by highlighting, in turn, the man and the pelican, from one painting to another in a way that can only be found in painting.

That place and the Contemporain have a sampling of Riopelles up, the latter in a show on local abstraction (which actually just ended), though Riopelle found abstraction unattainable, and where the Adrien Paci show has also closed but the Albanian funeral dirge that he contracted for himself can be uploaded for today's Shavasana..

In Toronto the AGO has a capriciously rotated show of Beuys drawings, sculptural assemblages by David Altmejd that seem to get more critical attention North of the border than in these parts, and for those of you that wondered why they should go to the effort of creating a real work of art when a fake one would suffice Wifredo Prieto has placed one real diamond amidst a pile of fake ones for you to spot.

NYC: It's good to see the Werner show of small Polke drawings before and after the MoMA show as it allows contemplation of his commentary on commodities with fewer crowds, but it gets crowded too. It is bizarre at times to see all those people looking at Polke paintings (which includes youthful parodies expressing his distate for pure conceptualism) in the big show which includes his masterpiece Paganini, which I've likened to Richter's later masterpiece The Owner's History Lesson. The Gauguin show there is essential; including his original prints for the Noa Noa pamphlet and his sole casted sculpture, from someone who beheld a lot of them 'prominent' in urban settings. Also near Werner is Raymond Pettibon's surfer works on paper over the years, in which Polke-like cartoon renderings glide upon (I will not attempt surfer slang) Courbet's and Turner's dear coasts with the bo's'n's 'surfing trumps art' spieling.  The Met's SE Asian Hindu/ Buddhist show includes early Ganeshes from Vietnam, one where he is a much unadorned pachyderm, one in which he holds a horseradish and one on a sort of pedastal unusual to Indian carvings... similarly themed Himalayan works from the period in Brooklyn's holdings are still at the Rubin. Free chocolate at Zwirner.

Eagleton describes St. Patrick in The Truth About the Irish as "the first individual in recorded history to write against slavery. He is also said to have driven the snakes out of Ireland. Some people suggest that they ended up in Chicago's city hall." Meanin' to upload some tunes for the occasion, like this footage of Packie Russell, a year before Topic Records recorded the Russell family in 1974, a stone mason who would hold fort on his concertina at Gus O'Conner's pub in Doolin, where Dylan Thomas, G.B. Shaw, and Synge also sought refreshment in their day, the latter making famous the boat ride from that port to the neighboring islands at Yeats' insistence. While his brother Micho toured internationally, Packie chose to stay there: 'I am only an ignorant countryman living on the edge of the Cliffs of Moher, in the county of Clare, on the western coast of Ireland,' where Wallace Stevens imagined 'the head of the past.'



Paddy Keenan, the "Jimi Hendrix of the uillean pipe" was one of the founding members of the Bothy Band..



The saying 'all Keenans are related' has been passed down from I don't know where, but in Iniskeen, where Patrick Kavanagh grew up and my family came from, the gene pool is small, the lower edge of its county lines bordering County Meath, where Paddy was the son of the piper John Keenan, an Irish Traveller, of which Eagleton says "in 16th and 17thC Ireland, professional travellers were often skilled craftsmen, as well as poets, doctors, seers and druids.."

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Also raised in County Meath was the Bothy Band's Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, here in 1976.. ..(embed disabled)..

The Clancys stir Ed Sullivan's Hibernian blood with their "Johnson's Motor Car" at 1:40.. Edward Said wrote "the problem of Irish liberation not only has continued longer than other comparable struggles, but it is so often not regarded as being an imperial or nationalist issue; instead it is comprehended as an aberration within the British dominion."



Two tactics from that history that noticeably carry over into current imperial governance is the use of catastrophes like the potato famine to impose economic monopolies, recently evident after the Haiti earthquake, and the complicity of the native financial elites in that reorganization and everything else..



John Cage: "I don't see the difference between a gallery and a church. And I don't know the difference between a church and anything else, hmm? That's what's meant, I think in Finnegan's Wake by the word "roaratorio," which I used for my music. The oratorio is in the church but the roaratorio is everything outside the church, hmm? And there's no difference between oratorio and roaratorio. Or another example is Tibetan Buddhism - not meditating is the same as meditating.. in the spiritual sense. If that attitude is taken, then it is." "You don't roar in a church but you roar in life, or roars take place in life, and among animals and nature. That's what this is. It's out in the world. It's not in the church. Or you can say, the world has become a church, hmm? ..in which you don't sing, you roar."

Paco obviously could have had any set up for Saura's Flamenco and he chose a circle in which he sits before what appears to be the sunset in an imagined pre-industrial Spanish coast, accompanying his brother Pepe's singing as when he was growing up..



Here in 1972, around the table with his brother for Bulerias "Cepa Andaluza"..



The "Mediterranean Sundance" perf in  Friday Night in San Francisco is I think one of the hardest songs to get sick of, and before you do.. this version has the video of Paco's fingering..



A rumba from the early 70s.. with Camarón..

What's up for two more days and a few months out west

Craft Morphology Flow Chart

The first posthumous retrospective of Mike Kelley has another two days at MoMA PS1 in Queens before opening in his home turf on March 31, having begun in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum where it was organized.. there was no doubt talk of subjecting the herd at MoMA Midtown to this expansive display of what Kelly termed his "Dysfunctional Bauhaus for the new religion of victimization" but aside from space considerations, mounting Kelley at a former school was irresistible as noted by curators and reviewers alike as he draws from the rituals, posters, vandalisms, and culture of schools as in his 1995 architectural work "Educational Complex" "his model of all the schools he attended omitted the rooms he forgot, which he attributes to repressed memory of trauma.."* in which, as with pop culture, he didn't believe in or attempt a psychic separation but one of critique that, by his account, led to works that were interpreted as the very nostalgia he despised for pop culture and school, developing at a moment between the Pop High Renaissance ("I'm from another generation. I have a more critical relationship to mass culture") and the arrival of the money and art stardom: "The art world is very different from what it was when I was young. When I was young, the art world was where you went to be a failure." In 1968 at age twelve in Detroit, his father a janitor his mother a cook, his aesthetic seemingly worked out, he placed a mock entry in a patriotic poster contest of ironic 'bad art' and won the contest. He got a dose of "Greenbergian formalism" at Michigan Ann Arbor where he roomed with Jim Shaw until he and Shaw went West, where Kelley soaked up and chafed against John Baldessari's "reductionist" Conceptualism at Cal Arts** in the mid-to-late 70s that has become fashionable in academic poetry over 30 years later. Kelley was emphatic that the artist does not arrive at meaning unwittingly "I don't believe in hiding intentionality," welcoming viewers though "to look at something and like it for the wrong reasons" as he says he does, not seeking what he termed Duchamp's non-retinal "reliance on hidden material that the viewer does not have access to for his meaning." Duchamp, of course, didn't hide The Green Box, and left it to the viewer to decode what he sought to express and represent -including the unwitting and unexplained - in so doing, evading the reduction of a Conceptualism for it's own sake as Kelley later did in his own way. "My early work - in part under the influence of the Conceptual Art generation of the 1960s and 1970s - refused to acknowledge that there was a historical 'I' in the work.. Meaning would flow in a kind of mythical third person, as if I.. were absent and the historically grounded reader were absent. Then I realized that this was a lie, a reiteration of the voice of dominant culture. So I tried to deal more with the specific aesthetics of my own lower-middle-class background."

Pay For Your Pleasure (above), created for the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, consists of a hall of blown up, institutional posters of authors and artists implying their practice is the sublimation of the criminal mind "I do not understand laws. I have no moral sense. I am a brute" (Rimbaud) "If you encounter charlatans, reason with them.. if they resist, be bold enough to drown them" (Giotto) "I erect myself at the exact point where knowledge touches madness, and I can erect no safety rail" (Balzac) "I call 'monster' all original, inexhaustible beauty" (Jarry) leading to the 'low art' of the work of an actual local criminal which is studied to decipher their psychology. I saw this installation in his previous retrospective and the criminal's work was an uninteresting portrait - this time the criminal's was good enough, a sort of cosmological abstraction, that I thought the previous concept had been forgone and a work of Kelley's had been inserted - as he is all over the map graphically, including attempted skill levels. A hallway is typically decorated to condition the visitor to the decorum sought in the rooms and this does the opposite, as when he proposed*** to decorate an office complex by blowing up cartoons on secretary's desks to a large scale, placing "If assholes could fly, this place would be an airport" in large letters next to the conference table. The exhibition includes From Our Institution to Yours (below) in which he blew up drawings made by his art school's security guards, warning the working class against 'false images,' as the personification of animals exists in church and state as well as folk art and cartoons.

I think Mike wants us to see Accatone soon

Kelley stressed in interviews that his trauma involved his encounter with the dominant culture and repeatedly denied experiencing familial abuse, a suggestion that the magazines continue to circulate to explain his suicide. He was politically passionate, describing himself as a Marxist and dialectical materialist: "Every state that's against (Bush) helps him get reelected because the population hates anything that's against the dream that he's proposing, so any time anyone says anything that counters that dream, people reject them (and) make him even stronger because people want to live in a fantasy world of American hegemonic dominance." As with Pop, his work often appears to be the full extension of Art Therapy rather than a critique of it: "Beuys had a notion of art as a curative process. I don't have that delusion. Art doesn't cure you, it makes you aware of the problems you have. Art used to be a personal sickness that showed you were better than other people. In actuality art is just saying 'let's just point this out and we can talk about it, I'm no different from you, I'm no better than you, I'm not special, I'm no genius that cut off my ear. I'm just another schmuck like you.' What I like about Beuys is that he had a very egalitarian idea of art. I don't believe that either. A lot of people don't have the talent, the strength to stand outside the culture and make a fool of themselves. He was a professional fool. What I dislike about a lot of contemporary artists is that they want to be hipsters. They're not willing to be fools, to put themselves on the line in some shared emotional way. They want to be better than other people, and that's to me worse than wanting to be the outsider and tragic and a suicide and all that crap.'"

The snowfalls have left Clyfford Still-like markings on the exterior of PS1, and Still would be an example of an artist for whom a single work has a resonance which, if somehow quantified, could score relatively favorably against the resonance of his entire oeuvre - Kelly, despite flashes of mastery of materials and inventive draftsmanship, inhabits the other side of that scale, as he was prolific and evocative with a minimum of repetition, so conducive to the Posthumous Retrospective space this is. Despite his many imitators, there will never, ever be another show like this one.

* His We Communicate Only through Our Shared Dismissal of the Pre-linguistic: Fourteen Analyses was a critique of the socialization of art
** ..after Art Institute of Chicago rejected him because he was 'too Chicago' as they were trying to copy Baldessari at Cal Arts
*** Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry

invadieron el muerte..

A bird lived in me.
A flower traveled in my blood.
My heart was a violin.

I loved and didn't love. But sometimes
I was loved. I also
was happy: about the spring,
the hands together, what is happy.

I say man has to be!

(Herein lies a bird.
                              A flower.
                                             A violin.)

-Juan Gelman, Epitaph, tr. Ilan Stavans
 



"You see, that's what I said with my poem. Everybody waits for the next death of the next late great jazz musician. That's what it concludes with, sayin' everybody is waitin'. Like all the record company pirates put out legendary performances of all types of stuff that wasn't around when you were alive. It's like everybody waits 'til you're dead, then you get all the recognition. But what good is it when you're dead, if you're alive right now and you're not gettin' recognition, you know what i mean.." (Roy Campbell, Jr.)

In a book of verses spattered
with love, with sadness, with the world,
my children drew yellow ladies,
elephants trudging across red parasols,
birds imprisoned in the margin of a page,
they invaded death,
the large blue camel rests above ash-gray words,
a cheek glides across the solitude of my bones,
candor defeats the disorder of the night.

-Juan Gelman, The Victory, tr. D.J. Flakoll & Claribel Alegría



"A heart stops, another starts, it beats and bleeds within the chest, it whispers, it speaks the truth – listen! The soul, sometime staggering under life’s challenge, is straining every unseen fiber, then desires and fears are seen no longer; the soul is but a stillness somewhere in space. The heart speaks to the soul. Listen to this internal dialogue. See with the eyes of the heart; Listen when it speaks, for the heart is born pure." (Yusef Lateef)

The main thing
to be against
    is Death!

 Everything Else
      is a
      Chump!

 -Amiri Baraka, Ancient Music