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]

stro
phe

no
men on

nou
men on

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.

What's up

Not that enthused about Chelsea right now..



I'm bitter that Ramis Barquet went belly up because that was one of my three or four favorites... art from those countries in the South where they don't fit into the local theory (except at MoMA, where the Latin American collection consists of works that agree with Gringo Theory rather than taking the artists for what the are).. like Luis Felipe Noé and FranciscoToledo aren't repped in NY, um.. that's crazy, which is not to say they aren't making a living but it's our loss.. Last I was at R.B. I found the Tomás Esson show wonderful but didn't write it up as it was ending. Apparently I didn't upload enough Julio Galán web photos, or maybe other factors came into play. In the other galleries now there's a lot of "This one's ripping off early Pollack, that one's ripping off Stephen Shore, this one's ripping off Ellsworth Kelly, that one Joan Mitchell, this one Brice Marden, that one etc etc" because many artists and collectors stay close to the art history department narrative. If you want me to name the names of the imitators, my Paypal email is different than my listed email so ask first. Pace follows up the Matta show with Dubuffet's play-ontology of his last two years of being, you should be able to tell by that phrase whether you'd be into that.

I have, however, composed my thoughts of where best to fill your High Line park pic-a-nic basket before/during a Chelsea stroll in my under-utilized NYC travel blog, like this is the first post since I registered the address a while back. I've decided it's bad luck to not mention certain eating places because my places of choice have been closing.

In Soho, Jon Kessler's Blue Man Groo... I mean.. Blue Period - his art-historical referentiality has been kicked up a notch as he's running the Columbia program and it may have been more interesting to try to figure out how Giacometti's Palace at 4am (right, Man Ray photo) related to the Iraq War than it would seem his current theme is tho I have yet to go... Picasso's Blue Period could almost be a new Vegas casino at this point. He manned a control console at the Palace at 4am when I was there and I got a laugh by asking "Were you afraid the war would end before the show opened?"



The Brooklyn Museum has a long wall of Djuna Barnes' newspaper art and writings, which I most enjoyed and is an indispensable spectacle for Barnes enthusiasts. Right around the corner Rachel Kneebone has a thought-provoking riff off the Museum's Rodin holdings. In between, the permanent Judy Chicago installation with the murderer's row of the place settings of Emily Dickinson, Georgia O'Keefe, Virginia Woolf seems to grow on me as it would have never occurred to me to get a grant for a ceramic memorial to Woolf's genitalia. The Brooklyn Museum needs dough, has spiffed up its Syrian and Egyptian reliefs and is too run down and out of the way to attract a zillion annoying tourists like the Met and MoMA. They hang some of their best paintings high up, though, like one of Rothko's 1930s works.

What's up for two more days, v.3, I mean three more days

I should type a bit about the Roberto Matta Echaurren show while it's still hanging out with us; if you are in the NY metro area, have a pulse, and sometimes like it when people draw pictures, every Matta show is a major event and and every phase of his work is of singular significance. Here are works from 1988 on, with the notable exception of 1975's large scale "L'homme descend du signe," from the most figurative phase of his career:


It may be hard to see on the web repro (one more reason to see the 13' 5-3/4" x 27' 4" masterpiece) but there are white lines found around the painting, set apart from perspective, of figures, demotic and unintelligible writing, which aren't found in his earlier phases and but are in the later works in the show, perhaps picked up from Polke and/or Twombly in a way that heightens the effect of "seeing through," inspired by Duchamp who credited Matta for "the discovery of regions of space until then unknown in the field of art." Matta painted numerous alternate versions of Duchamp's Large Glass. On the lower right hand corner Matta appears to reference the capillary tubes of the Large Glass' lower left hand corner, of which Duchamp had derived the tubes' shape through chance operations, which here instead of dangling malic molds connect to empty boxes, which have the three dimensional aspect of the "parasols - drainage slopes - sieves" in the lower half of the Large Glass and the shape of the "halo of the bride - draft pistons" of the upper half. An ascension to the vertical dimension is suggested on the left in a step ladder of spinal bones leading upwards to a being enclosed by a rib cage, which combined with the other elements of the work speak inversions within a previously codified though never explained language and extend out into new dimensions.

Matta was possibly the most theoretically driven painter in art history, and his works from the Eighties show how the act of applying paint to the canvas repeatedly allowed him to realize the scope of what he originally envisioned. When Artaud saw the Balinese theater, he sought to replace the psychological with the metaphysical, citing the conventions of psychological drama, but for Matta (as Artaud eventually agreed) these are not contradictions. Matta originally went to Paris to study architecture with Le Corbusier and viewed that which is built as an extension of human psychology, imagining architectural structure that derived from the range of human emotions - 1991's "Cosmos Mental":



Balinese drama, presenting what Artaud described as a "blend of explosions, escapes, passages, and detours in all the directions of external and internal perception (which) constitutes a supreme idea of theater.. this revelatory aspect of matter, which seems suddenly to scatter into signs in order to teach us the metaphysical identity of the concrete and the abstract.. carried to the nth power.." derives from pre-Hindu animist beliefs, that all matter possesses a soul, and that the above mirrors the below, like when Caravaggio's Baptist looks down (right) at the Nelson Atkins while Leonardo's points up. Breton wrote in 1944 "..in the person of Matta.. everything which is seen at first sight and no longer with second sight tends to be formulated on the principle of total animism. This animism, tracing its path through Lautreamont and Rimbaud, has continued to mature since romanticism, where it may be observed at its infantile stage... What endures is the conviction that nothing is in vain, that everything that can be contemplated speaks a meaningful language which can be understood when human emotion acts as interpreter. For anyone who has eyes to see, all these aspects are open, not just open to the light like Cezanne's apple but open to everything else as well, including the other opaque bodies; they are constantly ready to blend together, and only from this fusion can be forged the key which is the only master-key to life."

Animists on the island of Pulau Sumba believe that the sky and the sea are engaged in a cosmic battle, but right after this essay of Breton's, Matta replaced the horizon line in the 1940s with dimensions corresponding to what he called conscienture, the painting of consciousness. The time dimension is represented is works like this 1999 canvas "Architecture du temps (un point sait tout)"..



On the Pace website is his "Oëramen (La conscience est un arbre)" in which the animals radiate in a night scene mingling with disembodied organs as an illustration of conscienture. M'Onde - a large bird with unintelligible texts coming out of its mouth - I can't find pics any of his mosaics online but there are (not in this show) large scale mosaics - at the first of two Matta shows I've seen in Paris was a large scale "Creation of the Earth." The enthusiasm around Matta that shows like this provoke will hopefully lead to a touring retrospective, as to match up his early work with his 70's canvases and later works would revisit what he did to NYC in the 40s.

Ah the SUVs and industrial emissions that bring sunny new years like these. There was only one day a while back when before dawn I stood there thinking that the sun might not come up, because I was far from the clocks and had nothing else to obsess over but more importantly, I didn't need pity, the sun's. Kerouac and Petrarch both say that's why the sun comes up. You know it's coming when you need the pity.

I began to mention while writing about Turner's Sea Monster how the elements of the St. George and the Dragon story seem to have crossed north into the Adriatic Sea from the Ionian, combining the python slain by Apollo in Delphi (above, left) with the story line of Theseus slaying the Minotaur at Knossos (right), and how the 8th to 10th Centuriy barbarian attacks in Amasea, Turkey gave inspriration to the sea monsters slain by Venice's patron saint Theodore. In the late 17th Century, the epic figure Gjergj Elez Alia became the subject of Albanian songs which were influenced by the Bosnian equivalent Alija Djerzelez, believed to be inspired by a 15th Century Ottoman military commander of the Hungarian Succession Wars. Baloz, Gjergj Elez Alia's adversary, is alternately described as a Northern marauder and a sea monster: in Robert Elsie's translation of the ballad "Rumour was spreading and it became known that/ A swarthy baloz had emerged from the ocean" and as with the Minotaur, women are sacrificed to it until the protagonist slays it.

The Bosnian, Serbo-Croat language ballads of Alija Djerzelez, possibly influenced by the bugarštica tradition of ballads that have been traced to the 15th Cenutry, are no longer sung in their original form, but the Albanian Songs of the Frontier Warriors, incorporating the story of Gjergj Elez Alia, have been passed on by an oral tradition and retain their popularity. As Elsie says "While the Bosnian Slav epic seems to have died out as a living tradition, the Albanian epic is still very much alive. Even as the twenty-first century marches on, one can still find a good number of 'lahutars' in Kosova, in particular in the Rugova highlands west of Peja, and in northern Albania, as well as some rare souls in Montenegro, who are able to sing and recite the heroic deeds of Mujo and Halili and their thirty 'agas,' as part of an unbroken oral tradition. One can safely assume that these elderly men constitute the very last traditional native singers of epic verse in Europe."

For whatever reason I came upon what I believe are these ballads on Christmas night as they have just been uploaded onto Youtube in recent years. This one and this one mention Gjergj Elez Alia on their Youtube title, and incorporate the two-stringed çifteli which has in most cases replaced the one-stringed lahuta, the Albanian version of the Greek lyra that gave its name to lyric poetry. Both those videos are compelling traditional renditions of an orally transmitted vocal range, but the nationalistic significance of the Songs of the Frontier Warriors can be seen in two videos with more than 200,000 viewings, in which a pair I believe is called Beqa and Muja performs in military fatigues with what appears to be rooms filled with Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers, full of user comments celebrating the Kosovar Albanian cause.




..these songs seem to have the same melodic structure as the Gjergj Elez Alia songs..



Milman Parry's theory of oral-formulaic composition derives from trips Parry made with Albert Lord to the region in the 1930s, in which they recorded over ten thousand texts in both Serbo-Croatian and Albanian. The fact that only the Albanian songs remain suggest their cultural isolation since World War II may have played a part in preserving the oral traditions. Parry and Lord put forth the notion that repetitions of verses in Homer's epics meant that these songs could shed light on the oral tradition of Homeric poetry, which has been contested by others, but this is what remains of the orally transmitted epic in Europe.