selfdivider

Browsing through the “Notable Children’s Books of 2007″ on the NY Times site, I was floored by this image taken from a book called The Arrival by Shaun Tan. Perhaps I’m late in discovering his work; the reviewer called the book more of a graphic novel than a children’s picture book. Curious, I went to the book store to see for myself. Found it in the graphic novel section, completely dissed: a single slim copy buried between gargantuan Marvel and DC compendiums on the top shelf. Took the book and read it in about twenty minutes, mesmerized. Probably the best twenty minutes of my past week. I was too cheap to buy it at full price, so it’s on my Amazon wish list. But all told, it’s one of my favorite books this year.

The Arrival is completely wordless. It tells the story of a nameless immigrant, who looks Asian one moment, European the next. He leaves his family back in the old country to settle in the new country. One might presume the new country is America, as the port that the immigrant comes through is vaguely reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century Ellis Island. But if the new country is America, it is in its opaque, allegorical disguise (let’s call it Amerika.) As a matter of fact, aside from the people themselves, who are rendered in precise physical and emotional realism by Tan, everything else is allegorical, as if taken from a dream or a myth. Even the hieroglyphic script - which is beautiful but illegible, printed everywhere - is invented by Tan, forever indecipherable.

The strongest part of the book, for me, was the first half of it. Estranged from his old country and way of life, the immigrant struggles to find work, and pines for his wife and daughter in the new land. It’s possible that I found a more personal kind of emotional resonance here, as my father came to the states a year before us; reading The Arrival, I could easily imagine my father’s hardship and loneliness. But in the images above, see how subtly the images in the montage panes on the left transmogrify into their alien counterparts on the right. Throughout the book, the narrative moves through arresting and elliptical sequences of images; many of you will be reminded of Chris Ware’s poetic way of distilling ephemeral moments into images, memorializing the present fleeting into the past in the process.

There are many moments in The Arrival that will convince you that what Tan has accomplished is just great art. It’s a free and inventive work, immaculately designed and composed. Strange creatures and enigmatic symbology, along with Tan’s consummate but peculiar logic in arranging the book’s images into a compelling narrative called into my mind both Hieronymus Bosch and Kafka. The surreal design of the new country and its architecture, though, made me think of Brodsky and Utkin the most.

Brodsky and Utkin are Russian architects who were called “paper architects” during the Soviet years because they were avant-garde architects whose style remained radical, even after the Socialist Realist style was denounced as “over-decorated” by Khruschev in the ’50s and abandoned. Brodsky and Utkin, though, continued to produce a series of whimsical architectural etchings. They were influenced by the cosmopolitan architecture of the past (i.e. Byzantine, Egyptian) as well as the post-modern concept of the city. As a result, their work seems both utopian and dystopic at once. (I don’t think they work together any more as artists; each of them is a practicing architect.) Anyway, their etchings are usually accompanied by equally whimsical texts written by the artists. (My favorite is “Villa Claustrophobia,” clearly influenced by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which I have no reason to insert into this post; please check their small but fascinating body of work in a book published by Princeton Architectural Press.) The work above is called “The Crystal Palace,” and its accompanying texts - a haiku by Basho and the artists’ description - could very well describe the strange land which the immigrant in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival must adopt and call home:

Seaweed swarms with
Transparent [minnows] Catch them -
They shall thaw without a trace.

Basho

Crystal Palace is a beautiful but unrealizable
dream[,] a Mirage which calls you always[,] seen
a the edge of [the] visible. But as each dream [is seen] in
close examination[,] it will prove the other thing
than it seemed [from] afar. [It stands on the edge of the city.] A person who wants to
visit it will make a long way through the town
borderland, blocks of slums and dumps but co
ming at last to the Palace find neither roof nor
walls - only the huge glass plates, stuck into the
huge box of sand. A Mirage remains simply
a Mirage, though it can be touched. Passing
from one glass chink to another, a visitor will
walk [through] the Palace… and find himself at
the border of a small square, where the Landscape
commences… Did he learn the very essence of the Crys-
tal Palace[ W]ill he have a desire to visit it once more
Nobody knows…

I briefly mentioned the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Army Faction yesterday, the gloriously idiotic group of young, sexy terrorists who traveled to-and-from their murderous missions in stolen BMW 2002’s and Alfa Romeos. They took their codenames, while imprisoned, from Melville’s Moby Dick - the leader Andreas Baader was Ahab, Jan Carl Raspe was the Carpenter, Holger Meins was Starbuck, and Gudrun Ensslin - Baader’s attractive girlfriend and a leftist university intellectual who came up with the Melvillean monikers - was Smutje.

Ultimately, Ulrike Meinhof hung herself in Stammheim prison in 1976. And in October of 1977, the morning after the anti-terrorist unit of the West German police stormed the Lufthansa plane and killed the Palestinian hijackers who had demanded the release of RAF members from prison, Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were found dead in their prison cells. Baader had somehow smuggled in a pistol into his cell. He fired two shots into the wall and his bed to make it look like murder, then shot himself with a shot in the back of his neck while squatting on the floor. Raspe also had smuggled in a gun, and shot himself in the temple, sitting on the edge of his bed. Ensslin used a piece of loudspeaker cable in the cell to hang herself.

As hopelessly futile the attempts of the RAF had been in bringing forth any progressive change in the world, they nonetheless elicited a big cultural and artistic response. There was a film, called Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), which was directed by, among others, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, and Heinrich Böll. As far as I know, the film is only available on videotape (anyone know anyone at Criterion) Gerhard Richter’s monumental October 18, 1977 series of paintings on the Baader-Meinhof’s deaths is a part of MoMA’s collection. Don Delillo wrote a strangely sterile but creepy story called “Baader-Meinhof,” which was published in The New Yorker some years ago (you can read it here.) The story begins with a man and a woman looking at Richter’s paintings at a museum, discussing the paintings, and the dead bodies of the RAF members. In William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, the protagonist becomes entangled with the Baader-Meinhof Gang, even going as far as to receive dynamite sticks to be used in a terrorist act (which he buries in his garden; kind of silly.) Probably the funniest Baader-Meinhof reference occurs in Sam Lipsyte’s Subject Steve, in which a character named William, while talking about selling out to investment firms and money, is cutting up coke crystals on a Baader-Meinhof pop-up book (Irony!).

Why the resonance, even thirty years after the historical occurrence We can only speculate, but Gerhard Richter, in his interview with Jan Thorn Prikker in 1989 about October 18, 1977, says that he painted what seemed unpaintable, the dead. He talks about his subjects, the dead Baader-Meinhof members, in a way which resonates even more strongly in this present age of terror and war -

That is the most inexplicable thing; that we produce ideas, which are almost always not only utterly wrong and nonsensical but above all, dangerous. Wars of religion and the rest: it’s fundamentally all about nothing - and we take it utterly seriously, fanatically, even unto death.

Richter continues to say that despite the controversy which his October 18, 1977 ignited, his only motive in painting the suicides and deaths of the Baader-Meinhof members was purely human. That it was merely triggered by “dismay, pity, and grief.” It makes sense, doesn’t it What else are we supposed to feel about so many of us being led by ideas - the fundamental nothings - into fanaticism, war, and death?

A brief coda: while reading through the papers in 2002, I came across a short but beguiling article. It turns out that the brain of Ulrike Meinhof was kept by Magdeburg University, by a certain Bernhard Bogerts. Meinhof’s daughter - who was 13 when her mother killed herself - filed a lawsuit demanding the return of her mother’s brain. It turns out that Dr. Bernhard Bogers, along with one Dr. Peiffer, a neuropathologist at the University of Tübingen, have been studying Meinhof’s brain. Peiffer was present at Meinhof’s autopsy after her suicide, and decided to study it. He had kept her brain in the basement of the university, preserved in formalin, for two decades. (I swear this isn’t a subplot from a Thomas Pynchon novel?) Bogerts and Peiffer published their findings in January of 2003, claiming that they found damage near the amygdala in Meinhof’s brain, which might have incited her violent behavior.

Anyway, Meinhof’s daughter got her mother’s brain back, and Meinhof’s brain was buried with the remains of the body in Berlin in December of 2002. It also turns out that the brains of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were also being kept in the basement of Tübingen, but they had mysteriously vanished from the archive.

(Paintings of Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, respectively, by Gerhard Richter)

Do you have friends who admit to you that they’ve always wanted to read Moby Dick, but they haven’t Some make that admission with a certain spirit of defiance (”I don’t give a shit about the canon!”) and others still with a coy sheepishness. My shameful deficiency as a reader lies in my stubborn refusal to read Jane Austen. I’ve read some passages from her novels as assignments, but I’ve not yet read any of her novels. I have no idea why not, as I find her writing remarkable from what little I’ve read. One of these summers, though, I’m going to make it a Jane Austen season, start a book club, and write about my experience about how Austen’s novels actually mirror my life. What a totally unique idea! Perhaps they’ll make a movie of it.

Let’s move on to another category of writers: there are still other authors whom we’ve actually read, but we just don’t understand why they’re so honored and venerated. Some of my friends actively dislike Proust and Tolstoy. As much as I love Sebald, a few of my friends can’t stand his writing. For me, a writer who belongs to that category is Balzac. You can come at me with an arsenal of explanations - historical, theoretical, aesthetic, etc. - and I’m sure I will fall asleep on you; I’ve heard them before. I mean, I loved the depiction of the literary market and the commodification of the print culture in Lost Illusions, thought it was brilliant. But in the end, I just don’t like his stories. The characters. Lucien’s capitulation to cheap journalism in Lost Illusions, sacrificing his artistic ambition. Frenhofer’s misunderstood painting in The Unknown Masterpiece.

I guess what chafes at me is Balzac’s constant idealization of the creative Genius. I find it almost revolting, and one-dimensional in its concept, especially in The Unknown Masterpiece. In The Unknown Masterpiece, the painter Frenhofer, the sole disciple of Mabuse, paints what is probably the first proto-Modernist canvas in Paris of early 1600’s. A. C. Danto has a wonderful introduction in the NYRB edition, discussing real painters, like Picasso and Cezanne, who were influenced by Balzac’s depiction of the fictional Frenhofer. So I was very disappointed to find out that most of the novella’s pages were devoted to insipid ideas about art - “it’s like nature itself, composed of an infinity of elements” - and the geniuses who create such an art. (When Frenhofer is talking madly about the process of his painting, the elder painter Porbus tells Poussin to be quiet because the master is literally talking to his own genius. Really.) It was like reading a part of Kant’s Critique of Judgement as interpreted and severely diluted by an enthusiastic schoolboy.

Perhaps my failure as a reader of Balzac is that somehow, I cannot historicize, rotate on the same axis with him. My empathy does not reach out to him. Perhaps I’m just a brat of today’s age, too jaded to condone the romantic notion of genius; with Balzac, I just cannot see the forest for the trees. (Won’t.)

In The Unknown Masterpiece, Frenhofer paints quickly, like a demon, in frenetic movements (you know, because he’s a mad genius.) The subject of his proto-modernist canvas is a nude portrait of his dead beloved, Catherine Lescault, and so, how could I not think of Lucian Freud in comparison, probably the foremost painter of nude figures in our era There was an engaging article last month in the Telegraph UK, about Freud’s process of painting Ria, Naked Portrait 2007, which is showing at the Tate right now and will eventually make its way to the States so it could be bought by some hedge-funder.

Apparently, Freud spotted Ria Kirby, who was an art handler at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and felt that he could paint her. Kirby was obviously flattered that Freud wanted her to sit for him, and agreed. Freud started to paint her in April of 2006. The process would go on for sixteen months, every day for five hours, seven days a week, except for the four evenings they took off in respite. That’s more than 2400 hours. The article mentions that Freud’s criterion for determining the end of a project is based on his intuition: that he feels as though he’s working on someone else’s painting. That there is no more room for his input. As methodical and bureaucratic as Freud seems to be, his way of understanding when the picture is finished seems to be in line with Frenhofer’s similar intuition - that a true painter perseveres until “nature is forced to show herself stark naked.” But unlike Frenhofer, who kept the nude portrait of his beloved Catherine Lescault veiled because he would not distinguish between art and life, Freud could paint his subject, Ria, primarily because - according to the article - she was congenial and punctual, a nice person. In Freud’s Ria, the woman’s body is not merely eroticized by the artist’s gaze, whereas in Frenhofer’s, she is trapped by it, always and forever sexualized.

(Photographs by David Dawson)

You know that dumb question that we ask each other sometimes The one that goes something like: if you can bring back any deceased person for a lunch, to converse with, who would it be One of my choices would be the photographer William Gedney. When he died in 1989 at the age of 56, he left behind a lifetime of work. Although he wasn’t a Henry Darger or anything, he was intensely private and most of his work was not known to people outside his immediate friends, his colleagues and some curators. Thanks to Duke University’s phenomenal William Gedney site, a lot of his photographs and journals are available on the web.

I don’t know exactly why, but Gedney’s images always stay with me long after view in my memory, each scene somehow growing and moving within me in ways I don’t care to understand. Maybe it’s just Gedney’s calm but intense empathy of vision. On the left is from one of Gedney’s sketchbooks. It’s a small drawing of a Vuillard painting, drawn from memory, years after he’d seen the actual work at a Vuillard exhibit in 1983, at the Wildenstein’s gallery in NYC.

Could the Vuillard on the left be the painting that Gedney saw If so, we’d recognize that the woman in Gedney’s painting is the one from the Vuillard, not from the empirical and figurative details, but from the same infinite care and compassion with which both men looked at the small, lovely busy-ness of the woman turned away; their sights are on the same point on the same axis, as if they share a common nexus of memory.

In every image of Gedney, it’s as if I am told that what we remember in reminiscence, though certainly different from how things must have been in quantifiable detail, only heightens the quantum essence of the thing/person remembered. That this must be the reason why the people and things that affect us in the most haunting of ways are the very beings that we have lost. In fact, the nerve in me that thrills at seeing Gedney is the same one that’s moved upon reading Proust.

See the photo on the left I think I may have found the Chinese counterpart to William Gaddis’s Wyatt Gwyon. Kidding. That’s an imitation of Gerhard Richter’s Ema (Nude on a Staircase) that the dude painted, sans Richter’s trademark photo-blur effect. From the distance, it looks pretty ‘Amateur Night at the Apollo’. Still, I am now convinced that China will surpass Europe and the U.S. in more ways than one can count, because even their kitsch goes for more, reaches deeper, than our kitsch. Remember what Kundera said of his protagonist Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that in the Kingdom of Kitsch, Tomas would be a monster Mm, maybe, but in China, he’d only be a rat.

Now that I called the guy’s painting kitsch, I feel like a complete asshole. Perhaps he just made a study of Richter’s Ema as a student of painting, and someone happened to capture him on photo. There is something plainly dignified about the whole picture, I’d have to say. This guy, on his staircase, laundry drying on the railings - the remotest place one would imagine that Richter is being obsessed over and loved. Yet there it is.

(Damn, I stupidly forgot to jot down the photographer’s name - really sorry, Photographer! - but I found the image at the Art Forum site a few months ago.)

In Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, generations of miniaturists pass their craft through centuries, master to disciple, so that the perfect form and technique of their art are committed to memory. “Just as he memorizes the Koran,” Master Osman says to Black, as they leaf through the archives of such masterpieces, “he’ll never forget [the details] indelibly painted in his memory.” In a statement that finds a contrapuntal echo in William Gaddis’s statement on artistic originality that I mentioned in my previous post about Joyce Hatto (via Wyatt Gwyon of The Recognitions), Master Osman says, quite plainly, that “To paint is to remember.”

Late last night, surfing the net randomly, I happened upon the site for The Wallpaper magazine (don’t ask.) They had a pretty interesting coverage of Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, and browsing through the slideshows, I found this Chinese photographer whose work caught my eyes. His name was spelled variously as Qiu or Quo by The Wallpaper crew in the slideshow, which added to the mystique, quite frankly. But I believe the name is Qiu.

I wonder if you all find these images as delightful as I did. One of my favorite is the image on the left, from Qiu’s The World That Looks Unreal series. It has all the narrative urgency and the dream logic of a scene from a good short story. The hands listless over the unseen railing. People mindlessly walking in the distance. The caged tiger. And why the hell is the viewer of the cage situated there, of all places, where the view of the tiger is impeded by the thick, bureaucratically cut hedge The bubbles. The caged jungle cat reminded me also of Kafka’s story “The Hunger Artist,” in which a professional fasting artist fasts himself to oblivion, behind a cage, disappearing beneath a bed of hay. Only to be replaced by a young panther upon his death. At the end of the story, people are mesmerized by the power of the animal, fixated, unable to move on to anything else. In this photo, you realize that even that mesmeric power has eroded with the passage of time.

This photograph on the left - I’m sure some of you also see the influence of Gerhard Richter (or maybe Hiroshi Sugimoto), perhaps one of Qiu’s many other artistic “masters.” Yet there are elements in Qiu’s photographs that are inimitably his own, and we realize that one of the functions of his art (or for that matter, any significant art) is to remind us that his work represents, simultaneously, a continuation of and the break from the masters. That art, like time, is never static, always in flux. In My Name Is Red, a miniaturist would add a flourish of his own, too, departing from the mimetic representation of what he remembered from his masters, creating an illustration, for example, in which Satan can be seen slyly boarding Noah’s Ark. Black and Master Osman look through hundreds of pictures from different eras spanning hundreds of years, from the time of Tamerlane to Sultan Suleyman. A picture of a man standing atop a pile of wood, so that he could defile a camel. Another one of a merchant clinging to the feet of a mythical bird, flying over the sea. “Then,” Black says -

looking at an illustration that brought to life the inner workings of a complicated clock made from bobbins and metal balls, birds and Arabic statuettes seated on the back of an elephant, we remembered time.

(Images by Qiu, from The Sleepswalker and The World That Looks Unreal series of photographs)

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