What's up for one more day, v. XIX

If one is out and about this Saturday in Manhattan one of the all-time Chelsea-in-December lineups is mostly winding up, and in this case the Clemente and Rauch shows have left me puzzled enough to make for one of my last minute notices.  The Francesco Clemente shows especially have had a personal and formative effect on me and I will post on them again some time during the run of the Rubin show (til Feb 2), but for now know that the Rubin is free Friday nights, but as there are often lectures in the Clemente Temple then, paying admission on a weekday is often quieter.  It and Clemente's Two Tents at Mary Boone 24th St, ending Saturday, are revisitations of the period of Clemente's life when he lived in Chennai in India's Tamil Nadu, holed up in the Theophilosophical Society library, creating works on handmade paper of the ashram in Pondicherry while his lifelong strategies of representation were formed amid sacred art and secular posters. The tents are based on tourist tents located on the edge of the Thar desert outside Jaisalmer in Rajastan, mostly middle class camps where local and international package tourists are treated to camel rides and garish musical numbers, a genre intended to be seen in darkness or minimal light and at varied states of wakefulness.  The two tents are the Devil's Tent, where a figure resembling the Planter's Peanut guy or the New Yorker guy with a monocle acts out colonial repression amid some Moloch-like figures, and the Angel's Tent, where Clemente's sentiments towards the earth, body, are spirit are represented, along with works on paper inspired by Mughal miniatures.

I was a bit disappointed by the last Neo Rauch show at Zwirner while finding the previous one seminal; this one I liked the first time and more the second - it is truly one for the ages which one should see if possible. 'Hüter der Nacht' is perhaps the most thematically representative in the show, in that it portrays the recurring male in the sickbed being approached by the female assuming an aquatic figure, which, in other works, appears to suggest (though nothing is ever for certain in Rauchland) Melusine and/or the mermaid found in German folk tales and literature.  Ellis Dye writes of Goethe's references to Melusine "in all these cases the destination is an exotic elsewhere, and in each case transliminal communication takes place. Woman - she who lacks boundaries - is the agent of such border crossings.. a vessel of mixing, mingling and transformation."  'Skulpteurin' comes closest to Goethe's Melusine-as-dwarf theme, with gender inversions of the Pygmalian theme; 'Marina' (above) depicts the Melusine/ Mermaid figure as a crucifix, with a mermaid in the background spatially coming from its back shoulder. In the large 'Der Blaue Fisch' (below), the female in red emerges from the guts of a large fish found by a team of men in a canal, reminding me of Breton's 'Melusina no longer under the burden of the fate unleashed on her by men alone, Melusina rescued, Melusina before the scream that will announce her return, because that scream would not have been heard if it hadn't been reversible, like the stone of the Apocalypse and like all things' in Arcanum 17.

If on 24th St for Clemente at Boone this Saturday, Dionisio González' photos of architectural structures resembling the Jetsons' Googie house on stilts deteriorating in isolation in natural settings in Spain and Alabama is at Galerie Richard (514 w 24th) one more day; here the thumbnails are some consolation for not seeing the show but the color prints from the Inter-Acciones series are large scale.  Also up one more day are Nathan Lyons photos at 535 w 24th, Ahmed Alsoudani's paintings at 515 w 24th, and Sigmar Polke's manipulations of photocopies at Fergus McCaffrey, 514 w 26th St.

Ending later in Chelsea are Louise Bourgeois' suspended works at 547 w 25th (til Jan 10) and the two Picasso shows: John Richardson's Gagosian Picasso and the Camera at 522 w 21st (til Jan 3) and Pace's answer, focusing on the period with his last wife Jacqueline, including a room of variations on "Les Femmes d’Alger d’après Delacroix” that Picasso enthusiasts should try to get to (til Jan 10).

What's up for two more days, I mean no yes two days and an hour or so, v. XI and/or XII

“Café Deutschland VI – Caféprobe (Café Deutschland VI – Café-Rehearsal)”, 1980

This year's presentation of late 70s- early80s Café Deutschland paintings by Jörg Immendorff, long represented by Michael Werner (4 East 77th, through 1 November), closes less than a week before David Zwirner's new opening of Neo Rauch, who has stated his admiration for Immendorff's series which made waves in Germany when Rauch was in art school.  I don't know if those selecting the works intended this, but compositional strategies and characters in the canvases in the show reminded me of some in Rauch's, while flags emptied of meaning found in Rauch, who grew up in the GDR, were an early theme of Immendorff the West German.

Immendorf has said that the Café Deutschland series was born when he saw Renato Guttuso's Caffè Greco in reproduction (above) and then in person in Cologne.  Guttuso's early works were realist protests during the Fascist era of Italy, after which he placed mythological themes in contemporary settings, a technique de Chirico used to channel Böcklin.  Caffè Greco was painted in 1976, when de Chirico was living next door to the 18th Century café which has welcomed Goethe, Byron, and Stendhal, so Guttuso would see him, and, on one occasion, Buffalo Bill there, as well as I suppose Gide, seen in the central foreground, while Duchamp's arm holding a cigar may be a reference to what the owner of the arm called "the fourth dimension," and Picasso's neo-Classical Dora Maar across the room from the Torso of Belvedere would similarly relate to Guttuso's stylistic affinities.  The figure wearing sunglasses to the right of Gide is from de Chirico's portrait of Apollinaire (below), said to suggest the blindness of the seer.  Regardless of how one views de Chirico's late work, incorporating theatricality and open-ended time-images quoting the classical era, Guttuso's dual portrait reflects the inclination of many to separate the phases of de Chirico's work, of his youth "the nostalgia of the infinite" as he prophesized in one of his titles which is represented here visually.

Guttuso's portrait of de Chirico in a known place is not in accord with de Chirico's representation of the Stimmung of imagined places drawn from his readings of Nietzsche, Otto Weininger, and the Schopenhauer who wrote "this pure and objective Stimmung of the soul is encouraged and determined by encounters with external objects" and, though a respite from the political content of Guttuso's early work, paved the way for Immendorff to set an eternal present of political imagery in such a place.  As Husserl, whom I'm not aware of de Chirico reading, described the primary emotional experience of objects and of time, de Chirico's canvases would seem to be set more in emotional recesses than his successors though he included clocks in his locales, perhaps referencing the Stimmung of afternoons, in canvases like The Melancholy of Departure, The Philosopher's Conquest (below) and The Soothsayer's Recompense.  Rauch's work thereafter would vary the locales in accord with emotional imperatives as well as adding personae from sociological observation.  Political content is more universally recognizable than emotional content, as humans can be estranged from even their own emotional memories, as I've indicated may be increasingly the case with Rauch as it was with de Chirico.

Un sirventes novel vueill comensar,
que retrairai al jor del jujamen
a sel que.m fes e.m formet de nien.
S'el me cuja de ren arazonar
e s'el me vol metre en la diablia
ieu li dirai: "Seinher, merce, non sia!
Qu'el mal segle tormentiei totz mos ans.
E guardas mi, si.us plas, dels tormentans."

I want to start a new poem
which I will recite on the day of judgement
to him who created me and formed me from nothingness.
If he wants to ask me to give account of anything
and if he wants to put me among the devils
I will say to him: 'Lord have mercy, don't do such a thing!
For in this evil world I spent my life tormenting myself.
If it please you, then, keep me from tormentors..'  

(Pèire Cardenal, c. 1180 – c. 1278, 'Un sirventese novel vueill comensar..')

What's up for five more days

FIRST CYPRESS 1964

Many of Chelsea's doors are locked not because it's summer, but since Cheim & Read has Joan Mitchell's Trees what's the point? I have been reading about Riopelle: her earlier paintings here, with him in Vétheuil in the Île-de-France, frame the trees more closely, while the paintings from the early 90s, well after her split with Riopelle and deteriorating health are of orchards from a distance. Riopelle railed against symbolic content, Mitchell was against the Exressionists, calling Willem de Kooning an Expressionist, saying she has more kinship with the Impressionists. Riopelle thought the Impressionists were "cheats" but that Van Gogh was the "extension" of the history of Dutch painting. The Île-de-France inspires a war with Van Gogh, whom Artaud called "bodily the battlefield of.. the problem of the predominance of flesh over spirit, or of body over flesh, or of spirit over both.." with Monet near by. Provence gets you Van Gogh and Cezanne: Picasso holed himself up there to do battle with Manet and Velazquez; Kiefer ties the landscape in to controversial aspects of German history. Mitchell admired Van Gogh a great deal, and would, like him and not Riopelle, call herself spiritual. The show revolves around two paintings of cypresses, the first from '64 can't be reproduced (hence this note). Riopelle said "I don't take anything from Nature, I move into Nature." (which Mitchell doesn't like capitalized, saying "Larry Rubin [William Rubin’s brother] kicked me out because Greenberg 'dropped me.' Because Greenberg said, 'Get rid of that gestural horror.'")

CYPRESSES 1975

Joseph Cornell, Lauren Bacall box, 1946

A few weeks ago I became aware of the pronouncement in The Boston Review, which I don't read, that "To confront, reinvigorate, and complicate the conversation about class in contemporary poetics, we are launching a poetry forum with this capacious essay by Daniel Tiffany." They could start by checking the attributions on the quotations and paraphrasing.  I just checked to see if I had forgotten some point that Margaret Cohen made and I hadn't..  I will leave this up here briefly...

"Tiffany cites Margaret Cohen's writings on Gothic Marxism and then moves on to the unattributed conclusion "..not only must the working class destroy itself, but it cannot become fully conscious of itself until it does so."  This is made to sound like a paraphrasing of Cohen's writings on the topic, but nowhere does she make that statement directly or indirectly.  The quotation cited to explain Cohen's concept of Gothic Marxism in the previous paragraph is not Cohen's, but an unattributed passage from David Arnold's Poetry and Language Writing.  Whether this conclusion bears some relation to Tiffany's reading of Gáspár Miklós Tamás or his own wish-fulfillment is unclear, but it is essential that Cohen's sentiments not be so misrepresented by someone cutting, pasting, and stringing together logical constructions about a class culture and tradition apparently alien to him."

Your commentary is lowercase and not italicized

Susan Sontag: "Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer; they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget."

Sontag also may have helped prompt Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz' fresh attack on Ginsberg and the Beats in 1988 by, as president of PEN American Center, signing Ginsberg's letter in support of Palestinian press freedoms, or maybe, since Norm doesn't confide these things to me, it was Ginsberg going to a Tel Aviv protest to read "Jawah and Allah Battle" that year including the line "Commentary and Palestine Review sent me here!", or maybe it was only a matter of literary taste, as before.  Ginsberg's response was classic:

Good old Norman Podhoretz. If he weren't there like a wall I can butt my head against, I wouldn't have anyone to hate. And why hate him? He's part of my world, and he's sort of like the character the Blue Meanie.. did I ever really hate him or was I just sort of fascinated by him? I saw him as a sort of sacred personage in my life, in a way; someone whose vision is so opposite from mine that it's provocative and interesting - just as my vision is provocative and interesting enough for him to write columns against in the newspaper. In fact, maybe he's more honest than I am because he attacks me openly. So I should really respect him as one of the sacred personae in the drama of my own transitory experience.

Norm's son, a marital relative of Elliott Abrams, took over Commentary in 2009...

"Sam, I thought I told you never to.."