trigger 4

[Herlu]

cosmic trigger 4
http://www.rawilson.com/trigger3.html
PAINTER JAILED FOR COMMITTING MASTERPIECES
"Logic!' cried the frog. "There is no logic in this!"
-- Mr. Arkadin
I can live without God. I can't live without painting.
-- Vincent and Theo
In August 1968 the Spanish government imprisoned a man on the island of
Ibiza for creating a long series of sketches and paintings -- beautiful,
intensely lyrical works that Art Experts had universally proclaimed as
masterpieces. The imprisonment of this Maker of Masterpieces did not
represent censorship in the ordinary erotic or religious sense. Nobody
even accused the artist of Political Incorrectness. He got jugged for a
technical matter -- namely, that he had signed the wrong name to his
works... or several wrong names, in fact. Names like Picasso and Van Gogh
and Modigliani and Matisse, for instance. Not that anybody knew then, or
knows now, what name the man should have signed. Generally, when the case
gets recalled at all, people refer to the prisoner of Ibiza as El Myr or
Elmyr de Hory, but neither of those titles have any claim to special
eminence among his many aliases. In his long career, the painter had used
both of those names, but he had also used Baron Elmyr von Houry, Elmyr
Herzog, Louis Cassou, Baron Elmyr Hoffman, Joseph Dory, E. Raynal, Joseph
Dory-Boutin and quite a few others -- perhaps
as many as a hundred pseudonyms, according to Francois Reichenbach, an
alleged Expert on this case. One trouble with Reichenbach as an Expert: he
admits to buying and selling some of "Elmyr's" forged paintings. Another
problem: he later collaborated (with Orson Welles, no less) on a film -- F
For Fake -- that either exposed "Elmyr" totally or created a whole new set
of myths about "Elmyr," depending on which other Experts you choose to
believe. (Welles himself has said -- in the documentary "Orson Welles: A
Life in Film," BBC-TV -- that "Everything in that movie was a fake." But
to post-modernism, all art constitutes fake, or mask, in the Aristotelian
sense of an imitation, or counterfeit of something else, and in a new
non-Aristotelian sense we will explore as we advance deeper into the murk.
We need to think slowly before deciding whether Welles spoke literally or
metaphorically in describing F For Fake as itself a fake.) Whatever the
facts -- if we still dare to speak of "facts" in this age of situationism
and deconstructionism -- we will, as a matter of typographical
convenience, hereafter refer to the prisoner of Ibiza as
Elmyr without dubious quotes and without any guessing about his last name
-- if he had a last name, like ordinary humans, and didn't arrive here by
spaceship...."Elmyr" he preferred in his last years, and Elmyr we shall
call him. And, for those who don't like to repeatedly see words they can't
sound out in their heads, the Hungarian "Myr" rhymes with "deer," and
"Elmyr" has the same beat approximately as "cold beer" or "my ear." Just
say "cold beer, my ear, shake spear, Elmyr" and you'll have no further
sounding problems as you read. Elmyr served only two months in jail and
then the Spanish further expressed displeasure with his chosen profession
by expelling him from their country for one year, because he also had a
reputation as an flamboyant homosexual, or in pop argot, an aging fairy
godmother. But meanwhile, he had told his story to a young American
writer, Cliff, who became his official biographer. According to Fake!, the
deliberately outrageous biography concocted together by Cliff and Elmyr,
this man of variable names, wobbly gender and multiple styles had
committed many more masterpieces
than those for which he had gotten jailed. In fact, Fake! says Elmyr had
painted over a thousand of the classics of modern art. Every time you walk
through a museum and see a Picasso or a Matisse that you particularly
like, you should stop and ask, "Now did Picasso or Matisse do that, or did
Elmyr do it?" Sort of changes your whole view of what critics call "the
canon," doesn't it?
The canon -- a term borrowed from the theologians (which should make us
suspicious at once: can we borrow anything of value from a corporation
widely suspected for about 200 years now of intellectually bankruptcy?) --
designates those works of art and literature which have achieved the rank
of Masterpieces. When does a work achieve this canonicity? When the
Experts say it does, of course. But the Elmyr case, far more than
Deconstructionist philosophy, indicates that the Experts do not always
know shit from shinola. Of course, not everybody believes that Elmyr
committed quite as much great art as he gleefully confesses in the
biography. Many Experts claim Fake! (a title to ponder, and ponder again)
engaged in shameless bragging and exaggeration, to make Elmyr seem
cleverer than the facts warrant. Unfortunately, these Experts had -- many
of them -- authenticated some of the fakes that Elmyr undoubtedly did
paint. As Elmyr's co-author, Cliff, says, these Experts do not want their
cover blown -- they don't want us to know how often, and how easily, they
have gotten duped by Elmyr and other skilled forgers. according to Cliff,
all Experts operate largely on bluff. Some of the Experts, however, have
counter-attacked by suggesting that this alleged "co-author," Cliff, may
himself have functioned even more as a co-conspirator. And, in fact, the
same co-author, Clifford Irving to give him his full name, subsequently
became even more famous, and much more infamous, for persuading a New York
publisher to give him a $750,000 advance for an authorized biography of
Howard Hughes, i.e. a biography in which Hughes himself would talk, for
the record, about all the financial, political, conspiratorial* and sexual
scandals in his Faustian career. $750,000 had a value, in 1969, of about
$5 million now, but the publishers shelled out happily. Irving had shown
them a contract and various notes in Hughes's own handwriting. .... You
see, even though Cliff Irving had already written Fake!, a textbook on
forgery, including charming details on forged signatures as well as
counterfeit paintings, he had a boyishly sincere manner and a wickedly
scintillating personality. Like all good con-men. He and Hughes had met on
a pyramid in Mexico, Irving said with a straight face.* In the dead of
night, of course....(It would make a wonderful surrealist painting, if
Elmyr ever did a Dali: The ambitious
young Irving and the rich old lunatic with matted hair and fingernails --
or claws -- like Bigfoot .... signing a contract on a pyramid .... under,
I presume, a full moon...) Handwriting Experts later testified in court,
after Irving's own veracity came under suspicion. They said absolutely
that Howard Hughes himself, and nobody else, had written the signature and
notes produced by Irving. At this point, alas, many people began to share
Irving's (and Elmyr's) low opinion of Experts, and soon the biography of
Hughes got cancelled. Hughes himself speaking over a phone (he never did
come out of seclusion...) denounced Irving as a fraud; but, of course,
some say that the voice emanated from a Virtual Hughes -- a double who had
impersonated Hughes for years. The Mafia had bumped off the real Hughes,
these conspiracy nuts claim, many years earlier. Had Irving faked a
meeting with a man already dead and gotten "exposed" by another faker
impersonating the dead man? As Swift proved to Partridge, we cannot decide
matters of life and death on mere allegation. But we will deal with that
kind of conspiracy later. Right now we only confront the problem of "the
canon" itself as a kind of conspiracy.
We simply do not know the extent to which Elmyr has entered the canon.
Maybe 2 per cent of the masterpieces in modern museums emanated from his
wizard's brush, as virtually everybody now admits. Maybe the figure (at
least for post-impressionism, fauvism and early cubism, Elmyr's
specialities ) runs as high as 25 per cent, or 50 per cent.... An ouvre of
"more than a thousand" paintings might make up something in that
percentage range of canonical 20th Century Classics. These implications
appear heavily suggested in Irving's Fake! and even more stressed in the
Welles-Reichenbach film .... Well, then, we must re-examine the canonicity
of art as skeptically as the 18th and 19th Centuries re-examined religion.
Religious canonicity survived (in the Occident) only as long as the Pope
qualified as the world's leading Expert. When other Experts arose, with
their own cults, religious canonicity became ambiguous and controversial.
What happens when the Art Experts face a similar challenge? Some Radical
Feminist critics have already begun such a "Protestant heresy" , and have
dumped such Dead White European Males
(DWEMs, in fashionable jargon) as Dante, Beethoven, Shakespeare,
Michelangelo, etc. and replaced them with a new canon featuring a lot of
long-forgotten ladies whose work, frankly, seems dreadfully inferior to
me, and to most art critics. For instance, Susan McClary has found
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony a musical hymn to rape, which will no doubt
surprise all those with less androphobic ears, who hear something quite
different in it, something of cosmic grandeur.. Says McClary, "The point
of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most
horrifying moments in music....which finally explodes in the throttling,
murderous rage of a rapist..." Sounds almost as bad as The Texas Chain Saw
Massacre, doesn't it? . Although I write a lot of satire, I didn't make
this up. You can find McClary's analysis in Minnesota Composers' Forum
Newsletter, January 1987. She also doesn't like Western classic music in
general, because of its "phallic violence" and "pelvic pounding." I insist
I did not invent McClary or any of her ravings. Honest to God. Some
Femigogues just happen to sound like satire when you quote them
verbatim. As for the female masterpieces set against old Ludwig, they only
appear inferior, the Feminist revisionists say, because all of us have had
our perceptions
warped by the "patriarchal brainwashing" of our "phallocentric" culture.
("All of us" includies many female art critics, like Camille Paglia, who
angrily claims this
argument has crossed the line to an idiot caricature of Feminism) Maybe we
all need a long de-programming at a Feminist re-education camp. Then we
will realize that Hildegarde of Bingen not only outclassed Beethoven but
wrote more first-rate music than Mozart, Bach and Scott Joplin together,
and without any rape fantasies creeping in. Third World revisionists have
raised similar objections to the canonical centrality of DWEMs. They ask
us, not too gently, do we really believe that all the great art of
humanity came out of one sub-continent, created by white males only? Hmmm?

Do we trust these revisionists or do we trust our own sensibilities?
After Elmyr, do we dare trust anybody?
As a famous bard wrote
He stood in his socks and he wondered, he wondered
He stood in his socks and he wondered
At the end of Welles's F For Fake, after we have suffered prolonged doubt
about how many Picassos should get reclassified as Elmyrs, one character
cries
passionately "I must believe, at least, that art is real!" -- a noble
thought with which I might finish this chapter... But this voice of Faith
and Tradition belongs to
another art forger, one who allegedly faked even more of the canonical
Rennaisance masterpieces than Elmyr had faked of the canonical Moderns. We
cannot have
faith in this faker's faith....

happy surf herlu, from hamburg, de; gate to the world
http://members.aol.com/herlu/home/index.htm
home of the links: internet, ufo, para. magick, nu-energy, busi./invest, jobs,
entertainm., travel, martial a., sci fi, pers.pgs, java
+ !MACHTJUNKIES!