19 posts tagged “art”

Joshua Bell is supposedly one of the best violin players in the world, if not the best. One day, he decides to stand in a subway station in normal clothes and a baseball hat in Washington D.C. He pulls out a 3.5 million dollar Stradivarius violin and begins to give a 45 minute concert. The day before, he was playing for a full house in Boston in front of people paying $100 a seat and up to hear him play. Interview magazine once said his playing "does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live." The Washington Post recorded the subway concert and made observations about those few people who took a moment to stop and listen or to put some money in his violin case.

Bell decided to begin his "concert with a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach, a piece written specifically for solo violin. Of the work, composer Johannes Brahms,said

"On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."

And yet hundreds of people walked by. It was six minutes into the performance before someone stopped to listen. Over the 45 minute performance, 1070 people hurried by. Seven people stopped to listen for more than a minute. Twenty-Seven gave him money for a total of $32. "If a great musician plays great music and no one hears, is he really any good?" the Washington Post asks. "It was a strange feeling," Bell said later, "that people were actually, ah . . ."

The word doesn't come easily - ". . . ignoring me." The Washington Post reports:

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

"When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence . . ."

He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened -- or, more precisely, what didn't happen -- on January 12.

MARK LEITHAUSER HAS HELD IN HIS HANDS MORE GREAT WORKS OF ART THAN ANY KING OR POPE OR MEDICI EVER DID. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that Metro station.

"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

Leithauser's point is that we shouldn't be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.

What fascinates me is that the Washinton Post reporters noted that almost without exception, children walking by with parents wanted to stop and listen and equally without exception, parents dragged them along and did not let them.

"There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away."

There are many days when, though I am no virtuoso, like Joshua Bell, I feel much like him. For example, two years ago, I was being paid X amount of dollars to teach history. A year ago, I was somewhat unceremoniously run out on a rail. I have used my last year to get better at what I do, reading and learning and filling in gaps in my knowledge for each and every one of the courses that I taught. Without a shadow of a doubt, I am better at everything that I was being paid to do a year ago, and yet I feel so much less worthy now that I am not being paid to do it. The Washington Post captures the paradox well.

"Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one thing only. He understands why he's not drawing a crowd, in the rush of a morning workday. But: "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!"

. . . If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?

Over a thousand people got to hear Joshua Bell play that day. One recognized him. "It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington," she said.

"Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?"

She put in $20. The rest of the $12.17 came from everyone else. Soon after, he received the Avery Fisher Prize for being the BEST Classical Musician in America.

Question for Comment: How would you live your life differently today if your OBJECTIVE was to experience as much beauty as a day could offer you?

Watching Inspirations was an attempt on my part to compare my own sense of creativity with other people's. Seven different artists; a painter, a dancer, an architect, a choreographer, a musician, a potter, and a glassblower all discuss the creative process that they go through in making art in this movie. I cannot say that I entirely understand why they are as successful as they are but clearly the success of these artists says something about their ability to give the public something that it wants. And this may well be the irony because each of the artists talks about the importance of NOT producing art that other people want. Art, for each of them, is about satisfying something WITHIN, not WITHOUT. Each of the creative minds in this film seem to have arrived at a place where they have become willing to be wrong, to be mistaken, to fall short of something and in public. It is the price that they have simply learned to pay for the enjoyment of their success.

I will say this: If you produce ENOUGH art from within yourself, some of it is bound to be interesting to someone. Dale Chihuly may be a case in point.

Often I don't explain the method to my movie choosing madness ... often I don't know the method until after I have seen them. Today, for example, I chose to watch two movies about public space and private space and how those concepts compete with each other. Part of the method to this madness involves a class I am teaching at the moment involving the Greek play Antigone. In some sense, the play is about a battle between Antigone and Creon over the right to determine the fate of Antigone's brother's body. Does the corpse of a city's enemy belong to the corpse's family? Or to the corpse's city and therefore government? One could ask many questions like this. Does the water that feeds a public pool bel;ong to the property owner where the water falls or to the public? Does an unborn fetus belong to the mother or the father or the community?

In the documentary, Bomb It, taggers, grafitti "artists," vandals, anarchists, city dwellers, property owners, neighborhood vigilantes, gang members, grafitti "trackers" and law enforcement officers debate the same question really: "Who owns the public's visual space?" "Who asked to see your walls?" one of the artists asks the owners of high rise buildings? As with any social issue this contentious, there are multiple points of view. Many of the grafitti artists wonder why only rich people should get to see art, why they should be deprived of the right to have their names known, their art seen, their fame immortalized ... just because they haven't the money or power to go to art school or buy a gallery. Some argue that their work is as meaningful and as important for society to see as anything in the galleries. As if to say that grafitti maybe superficial, but it is deeply superficial.

We're not asking for the space, one of the movie's "vandals" says. "We're taking the space." And though it sounds like stealing, it may be important to realize that they see the real estate tycoons who steal their public space, air, and sunlight as stealing THEIR space. To layers of perspective lie right on top of each other throughout the movie.

   

I have to confess, this is the time of year when I have the hardest time finding something to take a picture of. Everything just seems so shaven of color and that whole "stained glass" effect of the sun in Fall leaves disappears into a rather gray brown clutter. This is a great time for Vermont artists to give us all they got. grin.

Usually I like to finish a book before I write about it in the blog but this one is particularly fascinating and who knows, once school starts in a week, what time I will have for reading and writing.

The other day, I was “cracked open” by a song. I can only assume that you can relate. It was sort of like someone slipping a key into my brain and unlocking a thought or an emotion or both that had been trapped in there. One second I was fine. Two lines into the song, I was crying. I don’t know about you but when things like that happen to me, I get curious. So yesterday, I started reading Daniel Levitin’s book This is Your Brain on Music. I will just say that it is fascinating. I want to just come over and read the whole thing to you. Grin.

But here are some excerpts.

“This direct mapping of pitches so important, it bears are repeating.  If I put electrodes in your visual cortex (the part of the brain at the back of the head, concerned with seeing), and I then showed you a red tomato, there is no group of neurons that will cause my electrodes to turn red.  But if I put electrodes in your auditory cortex and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at precicely that frequency, causing the electrode emit electrical activity at 440 Hz- for pitch, what goes into the ear and comes out of the brain!” p. 29

“When the sound is generated on a piano, flute, or any other instrument -- including percussion instruments like drums and cowbells -- it produces many modes of vibration occurring simultaneously.  When you listen to a single note played on an instrument, you're actually hearing many, many pitches at once, not a single pitch.  Most of us are not aware of this consciously, although some people can train themselves to hear that.  The one with the slowest vibration rate -- the one lowest in pitch -- is referred to as the fundamental frequency, and the others are collectively called overtones. 

To recap, it is a property of objects in the world that they generally vibrate at several different frequencies at once.  Surprisingly these other frequencies are often mathematically related to each other in a very simple way: as integer multiples of one another.  So if you pluck a string and its slowest vibration frequency is 100 times per second, the other vibration frequencies will be two times 100 (or 200 Hz), 3X times 100 Hz (300 hertz), etc..  If you blow into a flute or recorder and cause vibrations at 310 Hz, additional vibration will be occurring at twice, three times, four times, etc. this rate …

The brain is so attuned to the overtone series that if we encounter a sound that has all of the components except the fundamental, the brain fills it in for us in a phenomenon called restoration of the missing fundamental. A sound composed of energy at 100 Hz, 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, and 500 Hz is perceived as having a pitch of 100 Hz, its fundamental frequency.  But if we artificially create a sound with an energy at 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, and 500 Hz leaving off the fundamental, we still perceive it as having a pitch of 100 Hz.  We don't perceive it as having a pitch of 200 Hz, because our brain “knows” that a normal, harmonic sound with a pitch of 200 Hz would have an overtones series of 200 Hz, 400 Hz, 600 Hz, 800 Hz, etc. we can also fool the brain by playing sequences that deviate from the overtones series . . . in cases like this, the perceived pitch shift is away from 100 Hz in a compromise between what is presented and what a normal harmonic series would imply.” P. 42-43

“The introduction of energy to an instrument – the attack phase- usually creates energy at many different frequencies that are not related to one another by simple integer multiples.  In other words, for the brief period after we strike, blow into, pluck, or otherwise cause an instrument to start making sound, the impact itself has a rather noisy quality that is not especially musical -- more like the sound of a hammer hitting a piece of wood, say, than like a hammer hitting a bell or piano string, or like the sound of wind rushing through a tube.  Following the attack is a more stable phase in which the musical tone takes on the orderly pattern of overtone frequencies as the metal or wood or other material at the instrument is made up arts to resonate.  This little part of musical tone is referred to as the steady state -- in both instances the overtone is notably stable while the sound emanates from the instrument during this time.

“… After Shafer edited out the attack of orchestral instrument recordings, he played back the tape and found that it was nearly impossible for most people to identify the instrument that was playing.  Without the attack, pianos and bells sounded remarkably unlike pianos and bells, and remarkably similar to one another.  If you splice the attack of one instrument into the steady state, or body, from another, you get varied results: in some cases, you hear an ambiguous hybrid instrument that sounds more like the instruments that the attack came from than the one the steady state came from.  Michael Castellengo and others have discovered that you can create entirely new instruments in this way; for example, splicing a violin bow sound onto a flute tone creates a sound that strongly resembles a hurdy-gurdy street organ.  The experiment showed the importance of the attack” p. 54-53.   

What is so interesting to me is how it reminds me that none of us “hear” the same thing when we hear. Even if our eardrums vibrate in the same way, our brains are rascals to us. It is entirely possible for us to “hear” things that were NEVER played! (Men have known this for centuries. Grin). The facts are clear. Something can be taken OUT of a message and if the piece removed is expected, it will still be “heard”. Designed to help, our brains can deceive. Whatever the FIRST thing heard is, may control how everything AFTER is heard. As he says, if you splice the attack sound of a bell onto the steady state of a Tuba, you may just find that the whole sound, is heard as a bell. Sometimes, your brain doesn't wait to hear what the attack leads it to expect. How IMPORTANT is THAT analogy for resolving conflicts, I ask you?

One of the experiments the author talks about involves actual sound recordings of owl brains (some people get paid to do the weirdest things!) Because sound frequencies get translated into electrical frequencies in the brain, a person with the right equipment can record the electrical frequencies and play back the sound as transmitted through brain signals. That way, you can literally take frequencies OUT of the input and listen to them after the brain has re-inserted them.

No one who has ever had a marital argument should be without this piece of scientific evidence. Heaven only knows how many times I may find myself using it from here on out. ;-)  

What I am looking forward to exploring in the book, to get back to my original question, is just whether or not music literally performs a "chiropractic adjustment" in our neural wiring. Is it possible that music is as important to our brains as say, sleep, or food? Did the "combination" of words, timbre, melody, pitch, rhythm, tempo, volume, key, or reverberation just put the tumblers in place? Or is there a higher power at work here?

I find it interesting that I am not one who is typically "moved" by music though I listen to it all day long. Something Levitin said about a friend of his struck a cord (no pun intended):

“Our culture, and indeed our very language, makes a distinction between a class of expert performers -- the Arthur Rubinstein's, Ella Fitzgeralds, Paul McCartneys -- and the rest of us.  The rest of us pay money to hear the experts entertain us.  Jim knew that he wasn't much of a singer or a dancer and to him, a public display of singing and dancing implied he thought himself an expert.  The villagers just stared at Jim and said, ‘what do you mean you don't sing?!  You talk!’  Jim told me later, ‘it was as odd to them as if I told them that I couldn't walk or dance, even though I have both my legs.’  Singing and dancing were a natural activity in everybody's lives, seamlessly integrated and involving everyone.  The Sesotho verb for singing (ho bina), as in many of the world's languages, also means to dance; there is no distinction, since it is assumed that singing involves bodily movement.” P. 7

It makes me wonder, what did we lose when we started turning on TV's (I don't have one) and stopped playing music together and dancing?

One last quote that I absolutely hope to never forget:

“The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one musical part playing at a time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God.” P. 13

Banning polyphony. That is just going to have to go on my list of the 10 dumbest things the church ever did. I mean ... How many beings are there in a TRINITY people? Sigh. What if God cannot be heard WITHOUT the polyphony?

It is not hard to see how this connects to things I have written about Toni Morrison's writings or various artists like Cezanne.

Question for Comment: When was the last time you got "torn open" by a song? Do you prefer to look at what is happening in your brain when that happens? Or does that take the essential mystery of it all out of the experience for you? Can a person believe in both the brain physics of the experience without discounting that there might be some ONE behind it as well?

One of the things that Ansel Adams does so well is to balance shades, textures, natural forces, and moods in his photographs. If you look at an Ansel Adams photograph, you see gradations of light and dark and often an equal amount of both. You will see elements of wildness balanced against elements of calm. You will see vertical lines balanced by horizontal. You will see jagged rocks balanced by soft clouds, etc. You will also see the lines of the photograph drawing you towards that thing that Adams thinks is the most interesting thing in the scene.

Here is a photograph I took of Sutherland Falls up the road from my house.

If you look, I think you can see similar things going on. The rigidity of the rock is balanced by the fluidity of the water. Dark and light dance with each other. And the line takes you right into that spot in the picture where the force of the water is pounding with the most ferocity ... the source of a sound I was hearing as I was standing there. In many ways, that SPOT is the most interesting point in the entire scene. If you look closely, you will see in the rock next to the waterfall a face with a sad expression. The waterfall is pounding on the spot where his heart would be if he were some living being instead of just a rock. There is something going on in my life right now that that spot represents to me.

In short, there is more going on than even I knew when I went looking for this angle and took the picture. I just knew that "this was the right picture for that moment". And maybe that is why art is important to us. Maybe it is one of the few chances our inner unconscious selves get to express themselves so that we can know who we are?

"How can we talk face to face till we have faces?" C.S. Lewis once asked.

Question for Comment: Do you ever let yourself just create something so that afterwards you can just look at it and get to know yourself?

It is hard to know where to begin a book review of The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable Edited by Marc C. Connor particularly without knowing what you, the reader, might be interested in. The following are simply some of my gleanings from the book.

1.       Morrison’s work has drawn from Western literary roots but it is primarily to be seen as an African American challenge to many of the principle ideas revered in Western Euro-American aesthetics.

“An understanding of Morrison's work requires immersion in ‘ways of knowing,’ to borrow Nellie McKay's phrase, that are not necessarily a part of the Western tradition: African and African American myth and language, African American musical traditions of the spirituals, blues, and jazz, alternative approaches to history, religion, ancestry, culture specific concepts and philosophical ideas of time and cosmology that are often opposed to traditional Western concepts, and many more.” P. xi

The editor insists that one must take both African American and European-American traditions into consideration though Morrison herself prefers to lean more heavily on the later:

“The double voicedness of the African-American text consequently requires that African-American writing be approached in a similarly double manner, one that is cognizant both of the specifically African features of the writing, but also the Western, or Anglo European, features of that writing.  Only such a double vision is capable of perceiving and interpreting, the manner in which the text moves between the two traditions.” P. xix

Some of the key elements of the way she sees things can be highlighted in the quote below:

“Though Morrison resists clarifying what precisely [her] principles are, her increasingly voluminous critical writings reveal four main elements that seem to constitute the essence of black writing for her: the presence of displacement or alienation; a close relationship between author and reader; an oral quality to the voice of the text; and at the formal level, a quality of music in the writing that is distinctively black.  When these elements come together in the work of art, they produce Morrison's own aesthetic ideal.” P. xxii

2.       Toni Morrison, from what I gather wants her novels to sound like Black people talking … better yet, singing … or maybe even better yet, worshiping. She tries to capture the ways that people formed and solidified communities with words. On this topic, I quote the book extensively:

“Toni Morrison claims that ‘writing is a craft that appears solitary but needs another for its completion”. This reader response element that pervades Morrison's writing responds to its omnipresent alienation. “One of the major characteristics of black literature,” she asserts, “is the participation of the other, that is the audience, the reader.”  To Morrison, this is not only the hallmark of her writing, but the very function of literature: “My writing expects, demands participatory reading, and that I think that is what literature is supposed to do.  It's not just about retelling the story; it's about involving the reader” P. xxiii

 “For Morrison, this means restoring the oral quality of the language, and making it imitate as closely as possible “the one other art form in which black people have always excelled, that is music.” P. xxiv

“Reaffirmation of community is one of the hallmarks of Black English.  Systems of language within the Black English oral tradition are systems that call for the participants to reaffirm their cultural roots, community, and themselves.  One of those systems is call/response, defined by Smitherman as “stating and counter stating; acting and reacting.” It is “spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the speaker statements (calls) are punctuated by expressions (responses) from the listener.” . . . “response allows the caller to know that the audience approves of what she is saying and how she is saying it; it is immediate validation.” P. 22

“Morrison allows the reader to become part of the circle of storytelling and thereby witnesses.  In African-American culture witness/testify, like Signifin and call/response, uses the act of communication as a metaphor for the unity expressed in the traditional African worldview.  The act of witness/testify is the tangible proof that symbolizes or serves as evidence to validate one's existence as part of the group.  In the oral tradition of Black English, witness and testify go hand-in-hand: one who witnesses has an obligation to testify.  To witness is to affirm, attest, certify, validate, and observed.  Thus Smitherman defines testifying as a ‘concept referring to a ritualized form of black communication in which the speaker gives verbal witness to the efficacy, truth, and power of some experience in which all Blacks have shared.’” P.23

Thus, in many ways, her work takes us back both to the West Coast of Africa and to the Socratic dialogs of Attica.

3.       One of the central themes of Morrison’s work is community:

“The great truism of Morrison scholarship is that her primary theme is community.  Certainly each novel rigorously engages such issues as what constitutes a community, what functions communities serve, what threatens the community, what help skits survive.  As Morrison herself has said, if anything she does, in the way of writing novels, isn't about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything.” P. 49

There is a particularly engaging segment on page 54 about how Pecola keeps getting thrown out of her homes. Like Jesus in a way, there is no room in the inn. One home after another rejects her because one home after another judges her by standards of beauty that they have been given rather than standards that they have chosen. When Claudia concludes that the soil had decided to reject marigolds that year, she is not criticizing marigolds but criticizing society. Though marigolds may blame themselves for dieing, the fault lies in the culture that fails to nourish them.

“Pecola is destroyed within her very community, and that community not only fails to aid her, they have helped cause her isolation.” P. 55

“The Bluest Eye concludes with Claudia's final meditation on Pocola’s state, in which she views the shattering of Pocola as part of an entire economy of sterility and death, which embraces as well the community and even the land itself: “It was the fault of the earth -- the land -- our town.  I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year.  The soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers.  Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruits it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.” P56

4.       My favorite chapter in the book is about the aesthetic that Toni Morrison wishes to see replace the one that destroys Pecola Breedlove. It is an aesthetic that says that any human being will become beautiful while we pay loving attention to it and use our imaginations to understand why it is worthy of the tangible love we bestow on it.

Toni Morrison's Beauty Formula Katherine Stern

“The concept of physical beauty as a virtue,” Morrison wrote in 1974 “is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructiveideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.”  Morrison was responding to the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’ - what she took to be ‘a white idea turned inside-out’ that still reduced the worth of people to their bodily appearance.  Concentrating on whether we are beautiful,” she wrote, “is a way of measuring worth that is wholly trivial and wholly white and preoccupation with it is an irrevocable slavery of the senses.  “However much beauty matters to white people” she added, “it never stopped them from annihilating anybody.”

Morrison's impatience with the very idea of physical beauty will be familiar to readers of The Bluest Eye, where the narrator calls beauty “one of the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought” and tells how Pauline Breedlove was never able, after her education in the movies, “to look at a face and not assign it's a category in the scale of absolute beauty.”  In a piece for the New York Times Magazine in 1971, Morrison wrote that it must be just as well for black women to “remain useful” rather than to strive for a more decorative status.  The romanticism of beauty worship seemed to her “a needless cul-de-sac, an opiate that eventually must separate us from reality.” P. 77

“Critics have been fascinated by Morrison's treatment of the destructive, devaluing power of white standards of beauty but few have tried to describe the alternative approach to beauty that she offers. . . .
“In this essay, I show how Morrison draws our attention away from the visual, the static, the remote, or idealized object, towards an experience of physical beauty that is tangible and improvisational, relational and contextual, involving mutual efforts to feel as well as see.  Morrison does not merely circumvent Western aesthetic standards, but invents entirely original ways to approach the beautiful as work or process.  In her narratives, beauty depends on the beholder's craft or intention and results from labor upon the body either by the hands or the imagination.” P. 78

“Morrison's emphasis on the tactile over the visual conveys an implicit challenge to the Western aesthetic fascination with sight and corresponding degradation of touch.  Aristotle considered touch the most lowly, animalistic sensation and Renaissance theorists echoed him. To Vincenzio Borghini touch seemed ‘bestial’ compared to sight, the most crude and most material of the senses.  Leon Battista Alberti chose as his emblem a winged eye, explaining that ‘the eye was an obvious symbol of super mystique, more powerful than anything, swifter, more worthy... it is such as to be the first, chief, king, like the God of human parts.” Leonardo da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting, declares that ‘the eye counsels and corrects all the human arts and its sciences are most certain.’”

“In general, the discourse on aesthetics has endowed the visual faculty with objectivity, autonomy, and hence, dominion.  Because visual sensation covers remote distances, its reach is considered lordly and authoritative, whereas tactile sensation, limited to the local in specific, seems lowly by comparison.” P. 83

“Beauty takes place in Morrison's novels when some active imagination makes the body’s unforeseen beauty suddenly apparent.  Thus for Morrison, the experience of beauty is much more subjective and dynamic than its visual, static dimension would suggest.  Beauty is ultimately provides a subtle, and unaccountable, unpredictable response.  And beauty is narrational, for Morrison is uninterested in any notion of beauty unmediated by fantasy, storyline, the contingencies of context. . . . For Kant, the beauty of an object must be distinct from the fictions that it inspires, whereas for Morrison, the aesthetic object cannot be disassociated from the montage of perceptions whereby it comes to be both felt and imagined.”

“By reminding us of the contributions of imagination to the appreciation of the body, Morrison suggests that responsiveness creates the experience of beauty, rather than the usual notion that physical beauty preexist it elicits a response.” P. 88

“With an awareness of how Morrison tends to devise interactions between physical touch and imagination, and how she stages beauty as a surprise effect of mental imagery brought to bear on handiwork, we can reread the narrator's strange self disclosure at the end of Jazz and understand exactly how and why the book takes a body, conveying its experience of the hands cupped around it: ‘I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you.  I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now and missed your eyes when you went away from me... look where your hands are.  Now” … Surpassingly gorgeous, the ending of Jazz is a perfect example of the beauty of imagined touch, Morrison's aesthetic trademark.” P. 91

I confess that I am often amazed at how much scholars have to say to say anything but by the same token, I am impressed by how much I learn from them when I take the time.

Question for Conversation: What do you think about this notion that beauty "occurs" to the person willing to love others with touch and imagination? How does one go about changing people's ideas about beauty in a world so permeated with visual tools for contact?

I am presently conducting an online mini-course with students in America and Jordan about the subject of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. OR more specifically about conceptions of beauty and the relationship between youth, looks, and power. I hope to learn a lot. It certainly has me asking questions.

“You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don't frown. You have."

And beauty is a form of genius-- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile."    Picture of Dorian Gray

It is hard to know exactly what the marketing strategy behind Department store chain, JCPenny is but nevertheless the following advertisement caricatures an assertion that Lord Henry makes about the power of beauty.

I think we can pretty much agree that a beautiful woman or handsome man can walk right into a JC Penny store and out again anywhere in America and this will NOT happen to them. But most Americans at least  will laugh at the commercial (and remember it) because there is, perhaps, a kernel of truth to the caricature; people with good looks are given certain “power” that people without them have to acquire, if they can, in other ways (i.e. money, talent, fame, or association with those that have them, etc.)

By the end of the commercial, chaos erupts everywhere. One of the arguments that has been used against the use of American women serving in combat in the U.S. army is this suggestion that they would have a similarly disruptive influence on “order”. Perhaps, it is feared, the power of “beauty” would disrupt the power of discipline and chain of command and even fear that the military structures itself with. Is beauty powerful enough to make a whole civilization come unglued? One thinks of the story of Helen of Troy, unleashing war on Hellenistic Civilization with her good looks. It makes for an interesting question. If there is actually power in beauty, as Lord Henry suggests there is, can we assume that those in power without it, will seek either to repress it or control it?

Again, we might look to history for examples. During the high Renaissance in Europe, the Catholic popes used their immense wealth to acquire the greatest artists of the day and to gain control over the forces of art and beauty. Similarly, Louis XIV of France attempted to accumulate all the “aesthetic wealth” of France and install it in his new palace at Versailles, thus regulating access to all the most beautiful people and things he could. Augustus Caesar had Ovid bannished from Rome because of his poetic licenses.

One might also reflect on how the Byzantine emperors sought to monopolize all the icons of their empire, forbidding people to even own them in their private homes. We certainly would want to ask, in studying The Picture of Dorian Gray how Victorian society was attempting to either repress or control beauty. It is interesting to speculate, if one could monopolize all beauty that existed in their country or all wealth, which would sooner acquire one the other?

Question for Comment: If we assume that the possession of beauty entails a certain possession of power, are dress codes really about power? Are they about the balance between order and chaos in society? Is the JC Penny commercial on to something? Must beauty be regulated if social order is to be preserved by those who’s power depends on reason, rules, and regulated human behavior? Is beauty simply too powerful to be allowed the freedom to roam around?

Just asking my own questions out loud.

I finished the Power of Art series today. Picasso and Rothko. I confess. I need help. Even the explanation of abstract art seems abstract to me.

I have tried to read the backstory on these artists but ... their work still mystifies me. I cannot figure out just why they are paid so much. I cannot figure out in what way they are serving me or others though their art.

Do a Google search on ROTHKO. What are others seeing that I am not seeing?

"The artist also now resisted explaining the meaning of his work. "Silence is so accurate," he said, fearing that words would only paralyze the viewer's mind and imagination."
http://www.nga.gov/feature/rothko/classic1.shtm

Well ... OK but ... who of can get away with that in our work as communicators? Can I send a paragraph of letters to my online students like this

jghk;d ;doow ododn djdjdndjsknsnsiiffjf   fhfh sdid uheuwgbd duhd dopf f pf fpf disjs  s ps sjsijpsjsjs spps s spjsisjsihgcnbjc,ccc/mzoz  z  zjzbj foinjfjzbyaf  shsugsnn so s[' jghk;d ;doow ododn djdjdndjsknsnsiiffjf   fhfh sdid uheuwgbd duhd dopf f pf fpf disjs  s ps sjsijpsjsjs spps s spjsisjsihgcnbjc,ccc/mzoz  z  zjzbj foinjfjzbyaf  shsugsnn so s['jghk;d ;doow ododn djdjdndjsknsnsiiffjf   fhfh sdid uheuwgbd duhd dopf f pf fpf disjs  s ps sjsijpsjsjs spps s spjsisjsihgcnbjc,ccc/mzoz  z  zjzbj foinjfjzbyaf  shsugsnn so s['

... and then, when they ask me what they are paying for say "silence is so accurate"? Rothko speaks of people weeping before his paintings. Simon Schama himself cannot speak in more hagiographic terms about them. But they just seem like blocks of color to me. I think I need help. So, I took a few hours of my day to finish my book The Story of Art and some things began to make a little more sense.

It all started with Whistler's Mother. (Well, nothing ever starts with one particular painting in art but humor me). John Whistler entitled the painting of his mother "a Study in Gray and Black". Why? Because his point was that the SUBJECT of the piece was NOT his mother. (The public, refusing to accept that anyone should be able to look at their mother as a prop in solving geometry and color balance problems has refused to accept his title and still calls it "Whistler's Mother") He was basically using his mother as an incidental subject to solve certain artistic "problems" he was working. Imagine a man working on a Rubics cube that has segments of a love letter written to him on it and him not being as interested in getting to read the letter as he is in solving the puzzle. The task he thinks of is "must solve puzzle" not "must read letter". Modern artists  from Ceazanne to Whistler had been playing with the notion that a pice of art was an ideal place for an artist to solve ARTISTIC problems that he found interesting (color, balance, perspective, light, effects, mood, etc.). Paul Klee came along and said that he just preferred to start out with abstract objects in his work and if objects coresponding to reality presented themselves to his mind in the process, well then, he would let those objects take form, but only if they did not interfere with his "puzzle solving" (my interpretation).

E.H. Gombrinch hints at the fact that modern art has become unintelligible to many of us because we do not understand the artistic problems that the artists are concerned with and because artist no longer seem to have a "task" or a social purpose that we have given them to do. He writes:

"It was a fateful moment in the story of art when people's attention became so riveted on the way in which artists have developed painting or sculpting into a fine art that they forgot to give artists more definite tasks. . . .

“If we do not ask them to do anything in particular, what right have we to blame them if their work appears to be obscure and aimless?

Anyway, last night, as part of my self-imposed curriculum on this subject, my son and I watched the documentary Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? An entertaining movie about the value of art in a world that has converted art to business and investment. This truck driver finds a painting that may be a Jackson Pollock original in a thrift store and buys it for five dollars. She doesn't think it is worth anything really but when she discovers that it may be worth 20-30 million to someone else, she refuses to sell it for any less. Because it is not signed, but only has a Jackson Pollock finger print on it, it may only be worth 2-9 million dollars to a buyer (She still thinks it is both worthless and worth way more). To those in the art industry, it is worth nothing because its pedigree cannot be proven with paper. By itself, it is not worth anything to them. With provenance (a legitimatizing paper history) it would be worth much.

So, here is a canvas that is worth a few bucks, nothing, two million dollars, five million dollars, or fifty million dollars all at the SAME TIME.  And maybe it will turn out to NOT be a Jackson Pollock original. Will it be worth thousands of dollars anyway because it was the "star" of a movie once?

What are things worth? What are WE worth? Would I be worth 20 million dollars if Jackson Pollock threw paint on me and signed me? What if he just left a fingerprint? How much would my value decrease per bath? Would I be worth more because I ONCE was an original Jackson Pollock? Would it be worth my not bathing? I read a story once that a family recognized Pablo Picasso at the beach one day and sent their son over to ask  Picasso for a small doodle and an autograph. Picasso drew something on the kid's back with a marker and signed him and sent him back.

What does a parent do. Forbid the kid to go swimming? Sell the kid?

Question for Comment: What are we worth folks? What are we worth? What increases our value? What decreases it?

IT is not an easy thing to write a book review of an encyclopedia. By definition, the work is an anthology of thoughts by different authors often overlapping. I picked this book up a few weeks ago and started working my way through it because I am scheduled to do a workshop on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in a month and I have been trying to gather my thoughts as best I can. Perhaps what is of most interest to me is how this book connects to others in the Aesthetics course to which it is attached and to the CORE curriculum that it is linked to.

In the introduction, Elizabeth Beaulieu writes:

“Through her novels, Morrison forces us to acknowledge that the lives we often overlook and rarely celebrate are perhaps the lives we can learn most from.” p. vii

One cannot help but connect this approach to the work of artists like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, or Van Gogh, all of whom would be willing to marry or paint a common tavern woman or housemaid and portray them as the Virgin Mary. VanGogh in particular could make a pair of old boots holy and all three felt deeply about blurring the line between saints and sinners, even as Morison does.

Another interesting connection between Morrison’s work and the work of artists is the mutual understanding that both this author and many artists share about the power of suggestion. What so many people find fascinating about the Mona Lisa is the way that Leonardo DaVinci leaves some of the most essential information (the corners of the eyes and mouth) shrouded in shadow. The Italian word for this is sfumata and it is one of the things that Morrison does in the way that she tells her stories through multiple narrators who do not always tell us everything. Jane Atteridge Rose puts it in the Encylcopedia Article, Approaches to Morrison’s Work: Pedagogical expresses it this way:

“In a discussion of The Bluest Eye, Morrison makes the following points, which could apply to any of her novels.  She explains that as she developed the pieces of that story, she discovered that she preferred them unconnected.  She feels that the resulting narrative, with events that relate, but do not flow coherently or directly, that communicates the story of the fractured perceptions resulting from a splintered life. . . . Students pondering these assertions realize that they must actively participate in the interpretive experience to fulfill the author's intent.” P. 25, 27

It would be impossible not to see the connections between this strategy and the work of artists like Manet, Monet, and even Rembrandt in his later work. By allowing the eye of the viewer to fill in details, the painter or author allows that viewer to be a participant in the painting/writing and thus the characters that emerge are more “real” to each reader than they would be if completely described the artist creating them.

What is particularly interesting about this optical and psychological phenomenon, as it is applied to Morrison’s work, is that she suggests that the dot-connecting must take place in the context of communal observation, not individual. As Lisa Cade Wieland writes in the article “Memory,” “Beloved’s plot is constructed to mirror the way that memories unfold.”

“The plot emerges in nonlinear fragments as different characters remember their experiences and share them with the reader and/or each other.  Since many of these memories have been repressed for a long time, the process of uncovering them is slow and painful.  The recognition of the past involved in rememory requires the effort of the entire community, and cannot be accomplished by one individual.  Like the central character, Sethe Suggs, readers of the novel must engage in the act of creative reconstruction.  They have to piece together the fragments and different accounts in order to find coherent meaning for themselves.  However the narrative always foregrounds the subjectivity of any memory created.  Morrison's narrative approach to memory in Beloved and in her other fiction allows the novel to go back and forth between the past and the present, and blurs the distinction between them. . . . Morrison uses the term re-memory instead of memory in Beloved.  This term underscores that to remember is to put together, or creatively reconstruct, the pieces of something.  However, re-memory does not depend on just one individual subjective reconstruction.  Morrison establishes a community of rememberers whose consciousnesses overlap at times, and at other times remain independent. ” Encyclopedia, p. 207-208

Another fascinating connection between Morrison and the work of artists can be found in the way that she uses her gifts to “smuggle messages of dissent” into the wider culture that “pays her bills”. According to authors Benjamin Blech and Roy Dolinor in their book The Sistine Secrets, Michelangelo, in his work on the Sistine chapel, embedded all sorts of subliminal and not so subliminal messages that directly challenged the world view, theology, and policy of the pope that hired him. In a similar way, Morrison undermines some of the sacred authority of the culture that later awards her a Pulitzer.  Again, a quote from Lisa Cade Wieland’s Encyclopedia article on “Memory:

“Morrison has stated that using multiple narrators in her fiction enables her to give credibility to various and significantly different voices, which replicates the complexity and polyvocality of African-American culture itself.  Morrison's incorporation of multiple narrative voices also challenges Western (patriarchal, white linear) plot driven narrative, and replaces it with circular, nonauthoritarian narrative.” Encyclopedia, p. 244

A subsequent Encyclopedia article by Fiona Mills on Song of Solomon suggests that Morrison’s work in that novel retells the epic of Odysseus - only in this retelling, the hero does not overcome his challenges as an individual but only as a person who regains his ties to the community to which he belongs. In Song of Solomon the protagonist, Milkman Dead has to reconnect with the African American community rather than abandon it in order to achieve hero status. Mills writes:  

“[Morrison] offers an alternative to western individualistic ideologies by rewriting the typical hero quest myth.  As such, she insists that those ideologies do not work for African-Americans.” Encyclopedia, p. 321

As if that were not enough, the article discussing Morrison as “Trickster” – written by Cynthia Whitney Hallet – makes it clear that Morrison has, Michelangelo-like, used her verbal judo on several well known folk-tales of the white European and American literary tradition.

“The works of Toni Morrison reflect more than her mastery of folkloric figures, most especially that of the trickster; her stories also exhibit her ultimate skill of author as trickster.  In an important critical study, Fiction and Folklore: the Novels of Toni Morrison, Trudier Harris discusses Morrison's novels as a series of reversals, inversions and subversions of well-known folktales in the rhetorical strategies of the folk narrative.  According to Harris, in The Bluest Eye Morrison inverts the lesson of the ugly duckling; and in Sulla, she subverts the traditional fairy tale structure, and Song of Solomon she reverses the Odyssean journey; in Tar Baby she subverts details of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty; and in Beloved she reverses and undermines the traditional ghost story. . . .

However, perhaps more important is the fact that Morrison does not simply blur the common designs of certain story patterns; instead, she continues to confound and confuse -- in true trickster fashion-- the familiar narrative models by replacing the European American archetypes with African and African-American folkloric paradigms.  In doing so, Morrison completes a perfect act of duplicity and becomes the ultimate author as trickster figure.” Encyclopedia, p. 355

Like Michelangelo, who used the Talmud rather than Catholic church tradition for reference in creating his visual stories – who used the church’s sacred text in the construction of masterpiece of dissent from the social institution that they had been used to create, Morrison has taken the well known story of the Ugly Duckling and turned it on its head in The Bluest Eye. Pecola Breedlove does not turn into a white swan in the end but a victim of the folktale’s point (that all ugly ducklings want to become white beauties).   

Finally, it may be worth mentioning one passage that has particular relevance to another assigned work in the CORE curriculum, Plato’s Republic:

“There is no figure in the Bluest Eye who ascends from darkness and emerges into the light, who finds enlightenment and chooses it over the shadows, as one of Plato's prisoners ultimately does.  What we do fine in Pauline Breedlove and the sugar-brown Mobile girls is the same unwillingness to step outside of the cave that Plato's prisoners display when they are given the opportunity, an unwillingness driven by fear and the need to exist within the false, albeit familiar, construct because it is easier to do so -- because it is comfortable and safe -- rather than emerge from the cave and faced the painful light of the sun.” Encyclopedia, p. 272

Students who have been exposed to Morrison’s insight now must decide if they wish to descend again into the cave of ignorance or start acting like the media show they have been watching on the flat screen walls of the cave serves them well enough.

Needless to say, there is much more to be said but that’s what I have to say today.