All in the Timing

It’s very ironic that it took a comedian—the manic Michael Palin of Monty Python fame—to resurrect the reputation of an artist known for the deathly quiet and stillness of his art—Vilhelm Hammershoi. Of course, Palin’s mind is much more versatile than that of a simple madcap, as his thoughts on Hammershoi prove, just as Hammershoi is much more than a kind of grand claustrophobic of art. Born May 15, 1864, Hammershøi studied painting as a young man and exhibited a portrait of his young sister Anna, titled Portrait of a Young Girl (above, from 1885), as his first public attempt at success. Although many, including reportedly Renoir admired Portrait of a Young Girl, Hammershoi failed to win the prize, just the first of many slights that would drive Hammershoi further and further into himself. Today, Hammershoi has become a “name” in the lexicon of Danish art thanks to several touring exhibitions of his work in the United States and Europe. Although portraits such as that of Anna and even nude studies by Hammershoi exist, the “branding” of Hammershoi as a reclusive, obsessive painter of interiors, almost exclusively the famous apartments he shared with his wife, has taken hold, possibly forever. Like Edvard Munch and Vincent Van Gogh, Hammershoi suffers from an overabundance of psychobiography when critics try to grasp his work and understand the artist himself.



Part of the reason why Hammershoi seems to perpetually recline on the art historian’s psychobabble “couch” is the lack of source materials. Hammershoi’s silent works seem even more silent thanks to the lack of words left behind by the artist. Whereas someone such as the recently departed Thomas Chimes surrounded his works with volumes of verbage, Hammershoi deafens us with his quietness. Hammershoi himself seems to have been extremely shy, once famously traveling to England to meet his hero Whistler and then never mustering the courage to knock him up. Regardless, Hammershoi’s paintings, such as Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30 (above, from 1901), stand for more than agoraphobia. Painting his wife Ida in their home, Hammershoi captures the coziness of his domestic setting while also creating a fascinating composition of shapes. The frames on the wall echo the larger frame of the wall itself. The plates lined up on the table draw us into the picture, as if inviting us to sit down and eat as we listen to the music. The colors are somber, but the mood is not funereal. Hammershoi feels at home here, and wants us to, too.


I have no idea if artists such as Andrew Wyeth or Edward Hopper were ever aware of the work of Hammershoi. The plates in Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30 remind me of the plates in Wyeth’s Groundhog Day. Hammershoi’s Sunbeams, or Sunshine: Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams (above, from 1900) reminds me of Hopper’s quote that all he wanted to do was paint the play of light on a wall. Just like Wyeth made an entire universe out of his Chadds Ford surroundings, Hammershoi created whole galaxies out of a simple set of connecting rooms. Light coming through the window of his parlor served as the doorway to infinite. If William Blake could see infinity in a single grain of sand, Hammershoi could find it in a dust mote dancing in sunlight. If artists’ reputations can be likened to stocks, Hammershoi stock is rising slowly and, characteristically, quietly.

Woven Together

William Kentridge and Marguerite Stephens annotate a copy of a source drawing. Photo by John Hodgkiss, courtesy of the William Kentridge Studio.

While in high school, I had the privilege of playing with a small ensemble supplying the music for an event held at the PMA for John Cardinal Krol, then Cardinal of Philadelphia. We set up well before anyone else arrived on the balcony level surrounding the Great Stair Hall of the museum and waited for our cue. For the better part of an hour, my friends and I were confined to the area on which the museum’s History of Constantine Tapestries designed by Peter Paul Rubens and Pietro da Cortona. That memory flooded back to me as I read the catalogue to the PMA’s current exhibition William Kentridge: Tapestries. South African artist William Kentridge (shown above) follows in the footsteps of those Old Masters in creating his own tapestries that unite not only old methods with modern ideas but also Western art with South African indigenous culture.

In this fourth exhibition of the PMA’s Notations series and the first to feature a catalogue, the PMA’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Carlos Basualdo, assembles not only a wide array of Kentridge’s work but also edits an excellent catalogue that examines this multi-faceted artist from multiple directions. Gabriele Guercio connects Kentridge with the legacy of the tapestry in his essay, “Becoming Aware in a World of People on the Move.” Guercio sees the Renaissance concept of the disegno at work in Kentridge’s tapestries. “Vasari, blending Plato and Aristotle, equated disegno with idea,” Guercio writes, “meaning that drawing produces not so much representation of a preexisting reality but events of consciousness that are lived and reified as in the signs jotted down on a sheet.” This seamless transitioning from one medium to another, from drawing to tapestry to painting, all stemming from the idea or disegno, ends around the eighteenth century, when the division between art and craft develops, splitting the artist and the artisan even today. Kentridge’s works bridge this divide, taking similar ideas and creating drawings, paintings, sculptures, films, and even tapestries. “Kentridge’s tapestries demonstrate a capacity not only for blurring the gap between craft and art,” Guercio writes, “but also for subverting the pretense of placing artistic phenomenon within fixed categories.” The wall erected between life and art collapses in the wake of Kentridge’s tapestries.

Porter Series: Géographie des Hebreux ou Tableau de la dispersion des Enfants de Noë, 2005, William Kentridge. Tapestry weave with embroidery: mohair, acrylic, and polyester. 100 1/2 x 137 7/8 inches (255.3 x 350.2 cm). Collection of Anne and William Palmer, New York.

At the heart of Kentridge’s tapestries is the theme of labor, the work of human hands. In the Porter Series (one example above), Kentridge memorializes the South African porters who carry the luggage and other possessions of others. These figures are shown as silhouettes, merging physically in many cases with the objects they carry, as they process against a backdrop of old atlas pages. The porters indicate not only labor but also exploited labor, specifically the exploited workers of South Africa laboring for their colonizers. The maps bring to mind the issue of nations and colonies as well as the idea of travel between nations in the connection with the porters. Kentridge throws into doubt the idea of progress, of brining “civilization” to “uncivilized” nations, inherent in the colonization of Africa by Western nations. By making the figures blackened shadows, Kentridge denies the certainty of representation and, by extension, all forms of certainty. “All calls to certainty, whether of political jingoism or of objective knowledge, have an authoritarian origin relying on blindness and coercion—which are fundamentally inimical to what it is to be alive in the world with one’s eyes open,” Kentridge says. It is interesting to contrast Kentridge’s use of shadow figures with that of Kara Walker. Where the white South African uses shadows to illustrate the wrongs of colonialism against maps that outline the long human history of jingoism and coercion, the black African-American uses shadows to illustrate the wrongs of slavery and its ever-echoing effects through American culture against a plain white background, throwing the racial dichotomy into even starker contrast. Both, however, deny any answers in the end. Certainty, any certainty is wrong in of itself in its ability to morph into authoritarianism and repeat the same old sins but with new names.

The mohair for Kentridge's tapestries is dyed in wood-fire vats in Swaziland. Photo by John Hodgkiss, courtesy of the William Kentridge Studio.

What makes Kentridge’s tapestries even more striking is their physicality, which literally merges the idea of South Africa with South Africa itself. The mohair used in the tapestries comes from farm goats in Swaziland that is dyed (above) by hand by local artisan women. More local artisans in the Stephens Tapestry Studio in Swaziland and Johannesburg hand-weave the tapestries from enlarged photographs of Kentridge’s original drawings. These workers do not slavishly copy Kentridge’s designs but rather add their own unique touches, creating a wholly new work that is both Kentridge’s and theirs. “The process is less a translation from one medium to another than a precisely calculated blurring of the possibility of conceiving of photography, drawing, and projection as separate and independent mediums,” Basualdo writes. Looking at the proud faces of these South African women weavers in the catalogue, in both action shots taken during the process and in a group photo at the end of the book, you finally recognize the continuum of artistry between the acknowledged artist Kentridge and these unheralded artists. Through the physicality of the tapestry, Kentridge impresses on the viewer the immense, yet too often unrecognized talents of the black population of South Africa and, by extension, reaffirms their essential humanity so long denied by apartheid.

Porter Series: Espagne ancienne (Porter with Dividers), 2005, William Kentridge. Tapestry weave with embroidery: mohair, acrylic, and polyester. 98 3/4 x 130 1/2 inches (250.8 x 331.5 cm). Courtesy of Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan.

Okwui Enwezor and Ivan Vladislavic examine Kentridge’s imaginative journey through the landscape of South African apartheid in their essays. Enwezor demonstrates how Kentridge proves that no landscape is truly “innocent.” All landscapes bear the mark of their history, the “(un)civil engineering” of the powerful trying to remake the “savage” powerless as part of the larger colonialist ideology. Vladislavic remarks on the literal remapping of South Africa post-apartheid as old colonial town and street names disappear as new names pop up, thus erasing all the history behind those colonial labels and generating a collective cultural amnesia. Vladislavic then surveys South African literature’s lamenting of the lost pastoral tradition and how that lost land plays into Kentridge’s larger cultural reclamation project. “While landscape can hide its memories,” Enwezor asks, “is it not the work of the artist to undermine such easy amnesia?” Kentridge’s tapestries, with their backdrops of old atlas maps (above), force us to examine the ideology and implications of maps and boundaries and face the victims of such concepts, perhaps for the first time.



Bridge, 2001, William Kentridge. Bronze with books. 23 5/8 x 36 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches (60 x 93.2 x 19 cm). Collection of the artist.

In uniting both aesthetic and political concerns in his art, William Kentridge provides a stellar example for the modern artist. Kentridge fully engages the viewer on different levels, raising the genre of craft back to its rightful place alongside that of fine art but also taking his personal history of South Africa and apartheid and making it a universal issue of authoritarianism versus freedom, a bridge (like the one above), hopefully, to a better future. When Kentridge spoke at the PMA in early 2007 as part of the Thomas Chimes exhibition in regards to his use of Alfred Jarry’s Ubi Roi in his art (my review of that podcast here), it was clear that here was an artist unafraid of getting his hands dirty with the issues of the day. Whereas the Constantine Tapestries that dazzled me so many years ago documented ancient imperialism, Kentridge’s tapestries document imperialism from the other side—the side of the oppressed. In these tapestries, Kentridge gives voice to the voiceless and gives the poor a treatment once reserved for kings.

[Many thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue and the images from the exhibition William Kentridge: Tapestries.]

To Tell the Truth

The PMA recently released a new podcast of the April 12, 2007, conversation between South African artist William Kentridge and Michael Taylor, the museum's Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, titled “Alfred Jarry/Ubu and the Truth Commission.” (Kentridge’s unrelated Untitled [Man With Megaphone] is above.)

Taylor, who in an earlier podcast spoke on “Painting and ‘Pataphysics from Max Ernst to Thomas Chimes” from March 9, 2007, sees a direct line from Alfred Jarry’s use of his Ubu figure to comment on late 19th/early 20th century France bourgeois culture, to Max Ernst's use of Jarry’s Ubu to comment on 20th century fascism, to Kentridge’s use of Ubu to comment on the Truth Commission, the South African investigation into atrocities committed under apartheid.

Kentridge sees a fundamental paradox in the operation of the Truth Commission, in which those who had committed the atrocities would receive amnesty if they confessed everything. Only those who did not confess would be tried, thus creating a system encouraging truth at the expense of justice. Kentridge uses Jarry’s Ubu figure in etchings, plays, and short animated films to show how the “rapaciousness, greed, violence, [and] self pity” of Ubu was reproduced in real life in the endgame of the South African tragedy.

Just as Jarry felt that the most absurd images could be the most naturalistic, Kentridge finds the most grotesque images exposed by the Truth Commission to be the most emblematic, such as the before and after photos of a pig wearing booby-trapped exploding headphones (a test run for an assassination device successfully used on a political dissenter). Kentridge recreates the Truth Commission-generated race between the “photocopier” (those who wanted to confess and save themselves) and the “paper shredder” (those who wanted to destroy evidence) in one of his plays through the absurd figure of Niles the Crocodile, a living shredder of the evidence Ubu feeds him.

Jarry’s sense of the “complete seriousness of the activity of playing,” Kentridge says, and his belief that “you are played by the game, not you playing the game,” inspired Kentridge to modernize Ubu and his “absurd, fragmented” world to illuminate the world of his native South Africa.

With this great podcast, the PMA continues their excellent presentation of the Thomas Chimes Adventures in ‘Pataphysics exhibit. The depth and variety of the presentation of the works of Chimes and Alfred Jarry, and their continued relevance today, testifies to the excellent scholarship of Michael Taylor and the museum’s commitment to art education.

(One last little note for the great folks at the PMA who make these podcasts available and who have already heard me whine for more of them. During this conversation, two short films were shown in addition to a slide show. Is there any chance of ever doing video podcasts of these presentations as well? Aside from the obvious permission problem videos of art presents, I don’t see much of a difference between what you’re doing now and a video equivalent, especially for art not easily accessible or familiar to most people. I don’t personally have a video iPod, but it’s clearly the wave of the future. The PMA would really score points with the technorati if they were on the forefront of this wave.)

Waxing ‘Pataphysical

Taking to heart Alfred Jarry’s admonition to experience art in person more than in thought, I ventured out this week to the Bridgette Mayer Gallery to experience the current exhibit of works by young artist Ivan Stojakovic, “Global Nature.” (Stojakovic’s Neural Blossom diptych appears above [left half] and below [right half].)

Perhaps I have too much Jarry and Thomas Chimes in my head right now, but I couldn’t help but connect them with Stojakovic as I walked through the gallery and took in all the color and textures of Stojakovic’s work (reproductions really don’t do justice to the impasto technique or the colors). Jarry would have appreciated the catholic approach to imagery and technique Stojakovic employs. Pieces of technology, such as computer boards and fractal images, as well as biological forms, such as magnifications of cell structures, appear throughout. Thick ropes of acrylic paint comprising Net I and Net II (featured on the exhibit catalogue cover) mimic electrical wires.

At the same time, Stojakovic quotes elements of art history, such as Japanese woodcuts, as seen in the sprawling orange tree limbs covered in pink flowers networking across the two halves of Neural Blossom (shown above). Japonisme has intrigued Western artists since Edouard Manet, but Stojakovic modernizes it with acidic color, translating it into his personal, technicolor idiom (an image of furiously firing, "blossoming" neurons) while retaining the art history allusion. Jarry must be smiling down on this joyful celebration of imagery and color.

Chimes came into my mind because of this shared use of technological markings to create a private language. The contrast between Chimes almost purely white works at The Locks Gallery and Stojakovic’s color leaping from the walls of the Bridgette Mayer Gallery, only a few blocks away from one another in the historic area of Philadelphia, disguises their similar aims. Chimes consciously uses Jarry’s idea of ‘Pataphysics, i.e., an imaginary “science” playfully using the trappings of technology, but Stojakovic may be a subconscious ‘pataphysician. Of course, the true message of Stojakovic’s work may be that we are all ‘pataphysicians, willingly or unwillingly imbibing the technological flow surrounding us while hoping to retain the color and texture of imagination that gives life meaning.

Living Over Thinking

Anyone who came away from the Thomas Chimes exhibit at the PMA wanting to learn more about Alfred Jarry should read Jill Fell’s book, Alfred Jarry: An Imagination in Revolt. Fell gives a complete picture of Jarry’s influence as an author and artist, but also as an unconventional art critic.

The poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire judged Jarry’s woodcuts (his Veritable Portrait of M. Ubu is above and his Saint Gertrude is below) to be the finest examples of the full range of Jarry's artistic talent. Jarry credited Goya’s Disasters of War, Gustave Dore’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, Odilon Redon’s monstrous imagery, and William Hogarth’s satires as influences on his work. In turn, the “psychological primitivism” (Fell, p. 84) of Jarry’s woodcuts would influence the German Expressionists, Der Blaue Rieter group, and Die Brucke group.

Such influences gave Jarry little anxiety in his use of them. “A really original brain works exactly like an ostrich’s stomach,” Jarry wrote. “Everything suits it, it pulverizes pebbles and mangles pieces of iron… A great personality does not assimilate anything at all, he de-forms it; better still, he transmutes it, in the upward direction of the hierarchy of metals. Finding himself in the presence of the unsurpassable—of the masterpiece—he does not produce an imitation, but a transposition.” (Quoted in Fell, p. 76) Jarry performed an act of alchemy in his work, taking all the elements of art, especially images of cruelty, such as those found in Goya and Dore, and creating something new and his own.

In both his artwork and his art criticism, Jarry placed a priority on living over thinking. In his art, Jarry strips away social, academic, and historical conditioning, bringing in high and low, beautiful and ugly, rudely (to most eyes) juxtaposing elements the same way that the Surrealists, who count Jarry as a predecessor, later would. I’ll never forget the scene with the razor and the eyeball in Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s short Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. Jarry assaulted the eye and the imagination in the same unforgettable way. “Beauty, for Jarry, lay in the shock of the unexpected,” Fell writes. “Beauty had to be allowed to escape moral categorization and to encompass the cruel, the evil, and the monstrous.” (Fell, p. 137)

In his art criticism, Jarry always stressed actually seeing art for yourself over just reading or thinking about it. Jarry championed obscure, solitary, outsider artists over mainstream, established artists in his criticism, forever striving for new innovations. Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, Ferdinand Hodler, Emile Bernard, and the members of Les Nabis group are only some of the artists Jarry knew and promoted in his work. An anti-theoretical critic, Jarry used a “paranoic-critical method” (according to Andre Breton) to guide the viewer past the superficial lines of an image and through to the underlying shapes within. Jarry’s criticism also took the form of poems (specifically about Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings) and a novel (in which Gauguin, Bernard, and Aubrey Beardsley each preside over a country reflecting the principles behind their art) in an attempt to escape conventional criticism and achieve something closer to art itself.

Jarry’s ideas serve today as a reminder that, although both are important, living should always take priority over thinking. Experiencing life, in all its beauty and ugliness, should always be more important than thinking about it (or reading blogs about it).

Chimes Exhibit Lecture Podcast

I just listened this morning to a podcast of the PMA's Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, Michael Taylor, discussing the influence of French Symbolist writer Alfred Jarry on twentieth-century artists such as Thomas Chimes (currently exhibited at the PMA), Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, George Rouault, Ellsworth Kelly, and others. (Taylor claims to have linked 300 artists to Jarry.) One of Thomas Chimes portraits of Jarry is above.

Taylor sees Jarry's tyrannical character Ubu as a landmark figure in modernist art and a precursor of the totalitarianism and dehumanizing mechanization of the 20th century. When Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin rose to power, Taylor claims that artists used the Ubu character as a symbol of the brutish wrongs of the age. Taylor's ability to link both art history and social history makes for a fascinating exploration of the implications of art on society and vice versa.

Taylor's lecture was delivered live at the PMA on March 9, 2007. The podcast is available free from the PMA site. (A lecture on Diego Rivera and the Mexican Mural and Print Revolution is also available.) With the ubiquity of iPods today, I just wish that more and more museums would make content like this available free online. Hearing this lecture has made me want to read Jarry's work (I confess that I've read none) and examine these artists he's influenced more closely. Museums should realize that a little taste like this can bring hungry patrons to their door very easily.

Adventures in Entropy

In tandem with the Thomas Chimes' exhibit at the PMA, "Adventures in 'Pataphysics," the Locks Gallery (on 6th Street in Old City Philadelphia, Between Walnut and Locust Streets) is currently showing more recent work called "The Entropy Paintings." (The photo above of Chimes and one of his portraits of Alfred Jarry is from a Philadelphia Inquirer review of the PMA show.)

I haven't seen the larger exhibit at the PMA, but the smaller exhibit at the Locks Gallery has whetted my appetite. The paintings at the Locks are almost all 3 by 3 inch works, some grouped together in sets of two, three, and four. The works are almost entirely white, with only enough grey or off white to provide enough contrast to provide an image, however ghostly.

Looking at Chimes' entropy paintings is like trying to decipher a language you've seen before but never fully understand. He dots his works with mathematical symbols and similar-looking marks that make you want to break the code. Even the written words on several works are readable, but with great difficulty. Chimes clearly wants to pull you in and make you look closer, but at the same time doesn't want to make it easy to read him. In fact, just as you begin to read him, you realize even more that it's impossible. The recurring images in the works, such as the profile of Alfred Jarry, French absurdist author who "created" 'pataphysics and Chimes' inspiration, almost mock you with their simplicity in the middle of chaos, or, rather, entropy.

Walking around the Locks Gallery at lunchtime, all alone, with the clicking of a keyboard in the office nearby the only other sound, I felt like a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel, surrounded by symbols at once familiar and foreign, compelled to understand until coming to the understanding that faith in such communication is futile. Once you come to that conclusion, you can allow yourself to enjoy the "pleasures of the text" as literary critics love to say, but here the pleasures of Thomas Chimes' world of meaning in meaninglessness.