Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Bon Appétit, Millie Brown!

Or, Millie Brown Vomits Art

Millie Brown is one strange, strange artist.  She gulps down tall glasses of milk dyed with food coloring and then vomits all over a canvas she has placed on the floor.  Then she gulps down another color of milk and does it again (and again) until she is satisfied the work is complete, all the while accompanied by two singers dressed as turtlenecked milk bottles singing Delibes' "Flower Duet."  It should come as no surprise that the response to her work has been overwhelmingly negative for exactly this reason.  Because she has Lady Gaga's support, many people are accusing both of them of glorifying bulimia.  Many more people are saying her work is not art.

I think there is absolutely no question it is art.

I find it fitting that the YouTube video says "No description available."

Here is why I think it is art.  Millie Brown's work has a tremendous line of art historical precedent -- art made with far grosser effluvia that was easier to create and sells for more money.  Heck, she is only making $20,000 a canvas and look at all the work she has to do!

Andy Warhol's Oxidation Paintings (better known as "Piss Paintings" -- take a guess how he made them) sell at Christie's for $1,900,000.



If only I could get paid for peeing on things.  I'm just lucky if I don't get a ticket.

Piero Manzoni canned his own shit (a lot of it).


Each can sells for $50,000-$60,000 at auction.  But then again, look at Manzoni's face: who could resist that shit-selling smile?

You'll be glad to know that it turns out it wasn't actually shit, he was just relabeling cans of pasta sauce.  Again, a way better (read as: more practical) plan than vomiting on a canvas.

And let's not forget Cy Twombly's smeary pink and brown fecal efforts to mock Jackson Pollock's drip paintings.


Which brings us to Jackson Pollock himself: the first man to paint with his canvas on the floor of his studio; the first man to make a work of art simply by dribbling paint all over a canvas and allowing the alluvial action to produce an image; a man known for his "dance" around the canvas, expressing his inner Jungian subconscious for the benefit of mankind.  Millie Brown has taken several pages from Jackson Pollock's book by painting with her canvas on the ground and allowing the paint to simply dribble (or heave, or gurgitate) onto the canvas.  She takes Pollock's idea of expressing her inner self even further by imbibing her paint and upchucking it directly -- literally -- from inside her... her stomach.  She claims she suffers from serious migraines, and I don't doubt she does; that's the inevitable result of literalizing Pollock's efforts to externalize one's interior genius.



Note also: Jackson Pollock did his works with style and glamor.  He was a celebrity as much as any artist ever was.  Having Lady Gaga on your team is nothing compared to Pollock.  Since I've tabled the issue of bulimia, I'll also table the issue of alcoholism and Pollock's mental health.

And that's just getting to the 1950s.

In 1946, Marcel Duchamp ejaculated a painting (Paysage Fautif) and gave it to his girlfriend, Maria Martins.


 What a charmer!


And Duchamp started his work decades before that.  It took him years to get to ejaculating paintings.  As everything in the twentieth century inevitably comes from Duchamp, so too can Millie Brown's vomitorium paintings can be traced back to Duchamp's watershed piece, The Fountain (1917).





In short, bravo Millie Brown!  There's no question that what you are doing is art.  The question is whether it's original, or any good, and whether or not the paycheck is worth the migraines.






Edit -- 11/1/2014 -- you'd think this sort of stuff would reach a level of one-upsmanship where no one would want to go, and yet, here we are again.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Edgar Lee Masters and Carroll Cloar


The best thing I've read this week is Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology.  Coincidentally, the most interesting art I've happened across this week is Carroll Cloar, a southern surrealist. 

Fiddler Jones
~~~
THE EARTH keeps some vibration going   
There in your heart, and that is you.   
And if the people find you can fiddle,   
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.   
What do you see, a harvest of clover?            
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?   
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands   
For beeves hereafter ready for market;   
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts   
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.     
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust   
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;   
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy   
Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”   
How could I till my forty acres     
Not to speak of getting more,   
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos   
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins   
And the creak of a wind-mill—only these?   
And I never started to plow in my life     
That some one did not stop in the road   
And take me away to a dance or picnic.   
I ended up with forty acres;   
I ended up with a broken fiddle—   
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,     
And not a single regret.   


Edmund Pollard
~~~
I WOULD I had thrust my hands of flesh   
Into the disk-flowers bee-infested,   
Into the mirror-like core of fire   
Of the light of life, the sun of delight.   
For what are anthers worth or petals            
Or halo-rays? Mockeries, shadows   
Of the heart of the flower, the central flame!   
All is yours, young passer-by;   
Enter the banquet room with the thought;   
Don’t sidle in as if you were doubtful     
Whether you’re welcome—the feast is yours!   
Nor take but a little, refusing more   
With a bashful “Thank you,” when you’re hungry.   
Is your soul alive? Then let it feed!   
Leave no balconies where you can climb;     
Nor milk-white bosoms where you can rest;   
Nor golden heads with pillows to share;   
Nor wine cups while the wine is sweet;   
Nor ecstasies of body or soul,   
You will die, no doubt, but die while living     
In depths of azure, rapt and mated,   
Kissing the queen-bee, Life!   




Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Walter Horatio Pater in a Nutshell



 All of this is from The Renaissance (1877); final edition (1894).
Hugely influential book on Oscar Wilde
Outlines the concept of aesthetic a priori
Hugely influential on Clement Greenberg / Abstract Expressionism (see: "Modern Painting" and "Towards a New Laocoon")
Hugely influential on Susan Sontag, whose "Against Interpretation" is essentially a ersatz twentieth century transcription of the below -- she rails against hermeneutic analysis and calls for "in place of a hermeneutic we need an erotics of art."



“Preface to the Renaissance”
To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that [vii/viii] special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? 

And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or [viii/ix] experience--metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. 

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal.

those who prosecute either of them are generally little [xiii/xiv] curious of the thoughts of others.



“The School of Giorgione”
It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting — all the various products of art — as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry.

Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own [130/131] special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations; to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to its special material; to note in a picture that true pictorial charm,

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation — that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape — should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.


Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples of poetry and painting being those in which the constituent elements of the composition are so welded together, that the material or subject no longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in their union or identity, present one single effect to the "imaginative reason," that complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogue or symbol.
It is the art of music which most completely [138/139] realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire. 




“Conclusion to the Renaissance”
[I’ve essentially copied the whole thing.]

What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names?

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when [235] reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions–colour, odour, texture–in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.

It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off–that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, [238] or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.

Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.