Stop Making Sense

If Salvador Dali is the king of Surrealism, Max Ernst is the court jester. Born April 2, 1891, Ernst took the absurdity of Surrealism and Dada and emphasized the humor of the joke of reality over the existential angst accompanying the loss of rationality. In Aquis Submersus (above, from 1919), a doll-like figure with a handlebar mustache stands at the edge of a swimming pool surrounded by buildings. The buildings, however, seem more like two-dimensional stage backdrops. Their shadows appear behind as if projected onto a wall. The moon reflected in the water turns out to be a clock hung high above the scene. It is as if one of Giorgio de Chirico’s ominously unpopulated towns had been recreated by a grade school class for the school play. Ernst certainly knew of de Chirico’s art and is playing off of him here. de Chirico actually resisted the label of Surrealist, so Ernst may be trying to help him out here by showing how a little absurdity could be injected into de Chirico’s surreal seriousness.

For Ernst and other Surrealists and Dadaists, every scrap of the world around them was fodder for foolishness. In The Hat Makes the Man (above, from 1920), Ernst cut out pictures of hats from catalogues, pasted them to a page, and linked them with lines of color to “make” living creatures roaming across the page. Always the clown, Ernst puns visually on the idea of “the hat makes the man” and literally constructs a “man” out of hats. Ernst claimed that the pictures of the hats and other bourgeois items for sale “provoked” him to action. Freud, in many ways the Surrealist’s best friend, saw hats as symbolizing repressed desire, literally keeping a lid on the id. Ernst runs with that idea and creates phallic columns of writhing hats struggling to keep things tidy. Just as Rene Magritte would later use bowler hats to stand in for the erasure of the modern man’s sense of self, Ernst uses hats to signify the fruitless struggle to cover up human urges.

Ernst’s Ubu Imperator (above, from 1923) pays homage to the father of Dadaism, Alfred Jarry. Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi inspired generations of European artists to “stop making sense” and thus deny the conditions of society presented by authority. Jarry founded the fake science of 'Pataphysics, or "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments," as Jarry unhelpfully described it. Like The Hat Makes the Man, Ubu Imperator is an individual made up entirely of accoutrements. Whatever animates the clothing might be human, but we’re not sure. All we know is that the clothing, which represents the commercialism and standards of a society, however vain and cruel, is coming our way. The great paradox of Ernst’s work is that while it almost never depicts a recognizable human, it contains a great deal of humanism. I look at some of Dali’s paintings and feel only sadness and horror at how they tear open the inhumanity of the world. When I look at Ernst and his covered-up characters, I laugh and feel hopeful that there’s something still worthwhile deep inside.

Funeral for a Friend

Painters are often called poets with colors and poets are often called painters with words, but few painters and poets ever shared as close a bond as Pablo Picasso and Guilaume Apollinaire. “United in mutual respect, intellectual agreement, and a shared sense of humor,” Peter Read writes in Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory, Picasso and Apollinaire helped shape each other’s art from their first meeting in 1905 to Apollinaire’s death in 1918. Like a phantom limb, Apollinaire remained a presence in Picasso’s life for the next half century and continued to shape Picasso’s never-ending evolution. Read masterfully examines the depth of their relationship from its warm humor in caricatures such as Picasso’s drawing of Apollinaire as a tea pot (above, from 1905) to the inventive use of typography in Apollinaire’s Calligrammes to the haunting seriousness of Picasso’s forty-year quest to create a fitting memorial to his friend’s memory. Against the backdrop of avant-garde Paris before the Great War up until the 1970s, Read shows how these two men and their undying friendship placed them at the forefront of modern art.

Whereas most painters socialize with other painters, Picasso found himself most often in the company of poets—Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and others. But none match the influence of Apollinaire, whom Picasso met through Jacob. The two immediately became fast friends—soul mates from the start. Alfred Jarry served as the patron saint over all the artists of this period. “Jarry’s Rabelaisian vulgarity,” Read writes, “which inverted the hierarchy of human faculties, paved the way for Picasso’s 1907 revolution against established canons of beauty and retinal perspective in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.” When Picasso and Apollinaire meet, they both still cling to classicism in their art—Apollinaire in his Alcools poems and Picasso in his Blue and Rose Periods. Apollinaire’s choice of a Cubist portrait of himself as the frontispiece to Alcools, however, announces a new direction in his art and links that direction to Picasso’s development. Apollinaire’s next collection, Calligrammes, features shaped poems in which the typography builds visuals such as the Eiffel Tower (above). At the same time, Apollinaire writes as an art critic for several publications, using his media outlet to promote Picasso’s art as well as all modern art looking to sweep away the conventions of the past. Like Vasari praising Michelangelo in his Lives, Apollinaire uses “Promethean and Pentecostal imagery” to posit Picasso as the culmination of all that came before. Unlike Vasari, however, Apollinaire refuses to cast other artists as villains and provide the anti-modernists with ammunition, which allows him to promote Matisse—a pseudo-third leg to the Apollinaire-Picasso love triangle—and others. Picasso even appears in Apollinaire’s fiction, playing out the same artistic struggles as in real life. In all these writings on Picasso, Read asserts, “Apollinaire is fully engaged as a creative writer, blurring the frontiers between journalism and literature, poetry and prose,” while simultaneously spurring Picasso to follow suit in blurring all lines of movements and “isms” in finding his own unique vision.

“Each combined coherent development with constant renewal,” Read writes of his title pair. Not even the onset of World War I could sever their ties. Sadly, just as the war ended, the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic claimed the life of Apollinaire, who had been weakened by exposure to gas warfare in the trenches. The entire circle centered upon Apollinaire grieved over his loss and gathered at his grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery each year on the November 9th anniversary. When a committee formed to erect a memorial at the poet’s grave, Picasso seemed the natural choice, but the artist struggled with the commission. Read recreates wonderfully the debate over the memory of Apollinaire—split between those who admired his classical side and those, like Picasso, who admired more the poet’s experimental side. Mimicking Apollinaire’s cut-and-paste poet technique, Picasso developed a cut-and-paste metal sculptural technique with the help of Julio Gonzalez. In 1930, Picasso offers Woman in a Garden (above) as a memorial for Apollinaire’s tomb. “Built to guard a poet’s tomb,” Read writes, “the sculpture fuses human, animal, vegetable, and mechanical forms in a structure whose main lines of force emphasize vertical energy.” Unfortunately, the modernism of Picasso’s memorial overwhelms the committee, including the widow, Jacqueline. “The committee wanted an ornament,” Read concludes, “but Picasso designed an idol.” In 1935, the committee allowed another artist to design the graveside memorial, but Picasso remained the true keeper of the Apollinaire flame.

Each year on the November 9th anniversary of Apollinaire’s death, Picasso would make some great gesture or create some noteworthy work of art. For the thirtieth anniversary, in 1948, Picasso painted The Kitchen (above). Since Apollinaire’s death, Picasso had witnessed much more death, visiting the extermination camps in Warsaw, Auschwitz, and Birkenau to witness first-hand the horror of the Holocaust whispered about in occupied France during World War II. The title of The Kitchen creates a false sense of domesticity, but the skull-like face in the center, with plates for eyes, disrupts the reassuring atmosphere. “The Kitchen,” Read believes, “uses a language of abstract black calligraphy, spread over empty space, to express the inexpressible.” As Apollinaire once patterned his poetry into shapes decades before, Picasso here reaches for poetry through his own use of line when words themselves fail. Read never fails to link the living Picasso to the deceased Apollinaire. Among all the ghosts of the entire haunted twentieth century, Apollinaire speaks loudest to Picasso from the beyond, constantly reminding him of the need to move on and create in even the darkest times.

Read ends this love story with a happy ending. Apollinaire’s widow Jacqueline never stopped asking Picasso to create some memorial to her husband, his friend. Other artists, including Matisse, flirted with the idea of public memorial to the poet. Finally, in 1959, Picasso donated the sculpture titled Head of Dora Maar (above) as a memorial to Apollinaire to be placed on Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Read includes a slew of photos taken on the day of the unveiling in 1959, but Picasso himself seems conspicuous by his absence. The sculpture itself stands for his monumental presence in the honoring of his friend. Both classically scaled yet modernly abstracted, Picasso’s sculpture acknowledges both sides of the poet as well as both sides of his own art, bringing the relationship that began almost half a century before back full circle. Read neatly ties up all the loose strings and brings down the curtain gently on this long friendship, presenting a casebook example of how a common artistic spirit can transcend all media. Anyone who wishes to understand the head and heart of Picasso needs to know the works of Apollinaire. Anyone who wishes to understand exactly how the works of each of those two artists, so individual yet so united, fit together in life and in death, needs to know Peter Read’s Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory.

[Many thanks to the University of California Press for providing me with a review copy of Peter Read’s Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory.]

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.]

Man Bites Dog

“I hate people who own dogs,” the playwright and painter August Strindberg once said. “They should have the courage to bite people themselves.” Born January 22, 1849, Strindberg created groundbreaking plays such as Miss Julie that called into question all authority, both of God and man. Politically, Strindberg verged on the edge of anarchy with a foothold in the world of socialism. A powerful, charismatic personality, Strindberg attracted friends in all the arts, including the unconventional painters Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin. Munch painted Strindberg in oils and later created a woodblock portrait (above, from 1896). Strindberg’s relationship with Munch was often strained, as the younger artist always seemed too needy of Strindberg’s approval. As Munch began painting his personal, expressive works that would haunt generations, Strindberg already had been painting works born of his own personal anguish.



Strindberg approached painting as a release, a drug to ease his pain. Painting made Strindberg 'indescribably happy—as if he'd just taken hashish,' he wrote. Works such as Storm in the Skerries (aka, The Flying Dutchman) (above, from 1892) exhibit all the turmoil of Strindberg’s soul. Using palette knives, Strindberg slathered on the paint to create a thick, swirling mass of color and texture that recreates the turbulent seas of Richard Wagner’s operatic vision. Strindberg also painted more calmer scenes, as was seen in a 2005 Tate Britain exhibition, but it in is these wild, symbolic snapshots of his psyche that Strindberg holds the most interest for viewers today. Such technique and wild abandon remind me of the works of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Strindberg’s equally eccentric fellow visionary across the Atlantic in America. Ryder and Strindberg most certainly never met, but would have had a fascinating conversation if they had.


Strindberg once claimed that he painted the first truly symbolic landscapes, such as his The City (above, from 1903). Such a claim depends on how you define the symbolic landscape, but Strindberg certainly worked on the cutting edge of art. If he had devoted more time to painting, he might be known primarily as an artist than as a writer. Of course, Strindberg required such a heightened state of emotion to create his works that he most likely would have burned out if he’d worked exclusively as a painter. Strindberg later experimented with photography, exposing photographic plates to the clear night sky and believing that he’d captured impressions of the stars themselves. (Most experts today suspect that earthbound dust really created the pinpoint marks.) Like Alfred Jarry, Strindberg’s mind and spirit spilled forth into every medium available, including the visual arts, offering an enticing morsel of what could have been so much more.

Getting to the Point

Along with Georges Seurat, Paul Signac helped develop the painting style known as pointillism. Born November 11, 1863, Signac often takes second place to Seurat when people connect the dots between pointillism and its practitioners, but Signac deserves a place of prominence as well. In works such as The Port of Saint-Tropez (above, from 1901), we see Signac combining his love of sailing with his love of art. Thanks in some part to Signac’s “discovery” of the beauty of the French Riviera, Saint-Tropez and other beach towns soon became the destination of artists ranging from Renoir to Matisse, all drawn there by the dazzling blue water and stunning sunlight. Signac served as a missionary of sorts for artists seeking sensory overload, helping usher in the more colorful movements of early modern art.



Like Seurat, Signac belonged to the radical circles of the French art world. His Portrait of Felix Feneon (above, from 1890) shows his friend, the prominent anarchist, art critic, and art dealer, against a bold, carnivalesque backdrop almost mesmerizing in color and design. Signac and his friends, which included Alfred Jarry, hoped to turn not only the art world but all of society upside down, rocking the boat that had grown too steady, too comfortable for too many years. Just as the pointillist style sought to break down color into its most basic components before rebuilding it anew, these radical anarchists looked to tear down the establishment to build French society anew.


Signac’s greatest legacy may be in his influence on the Fauves, who followed him down to Saint-Tropez and took off in their own direction after following his lead. It is impossible to look at works today like Signac’s The Papal Palace, Avignon (above, from 1900) and not immediately think of Matisse or Derain, both of whom knew and worked with Signac on the Riviera. Although they didn’t share in his radical politics, they did share in his radical ideas about painting, especially the use of unreal color to express emotion and mood. The royal purple Papal Palace seems electrically charged here, as if it were made of neon. The pointillist technique used makes it almost jewel-like in its iridescence. Matisse flirted with pointillism early on before finding his own style, but he never gave up the lessons in color that Signac and the South of France taught him.

Bashing Poor Richard

Once a member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, Philip Guston later developed a more post-modern style that used cartoonish figures to comment on American society. The Three (above) from 1970 shows a trio of hooded Klansmen, taking the very real issues of racism and hate crimes and putting the clown nose of absurdity on them.

Guston met Jackson Pollock in high school and their career paths paralleled for a while. Like Pollock, Guston painted in a more representational style before the 1950s, although his work showed more Renaissance influences than that of Pollock, who had discovered Jung by that point. Guston painted in the same Abstract Expressionist style as Pollock and De Kooning up until the 1960s, until he found abstraction to be unsatisfying. What Guston ultimately found satisfying was taking the drama of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency and revealing it for the absurdity is was in his Poor Richard series. Nixon, Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew, and the then Attorney General John N. Mitchell receive the Guston treatment in one of the Poor Richard drawings above.

You can see the influence of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu character in Guston’s depictions of Nixon and his henchment. Clearly, Guston uses the figure of Ubu to point out the beastly and power-drunk aspects of the Nixon administration as well as its absurd descent into paranoia. Another technique Guston used to render the powerful powerless before art was the diminishing of a figure to a single characteristic, as seen in the drawing above where Nixon’s Secretary of State (and advisor to the current Bush Administration), Henry Kissinger, perhaps the most perfidious of Nixon’s sidemen, becomes a hapless pair of eyeglasses. Gary Trudeau in his Doonesbury strip uses this same technique to represent all politicians, such as his current usage of a battered Roman war helmet over an asterisk to represent George W. Bush. In retrospect, Philip Guston’s post-abstract, post-modern work seems the perfect style for the bizarre age of Nixon and perhaps for our own age as well.

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.