Thoughts on Zita/Gabriel's and Mani De Li's exchanges

[spino...@msn.com]

>On Sat, 29 Nov 1997 02:20:23 GMT, zi...@interport.net wrote:
snip

>>Ever since
>>then, there have been a whole series of more and more personal
>statements which needed new understanding.
>>This is even tru e of the
>>early Corots of the period 1828-32. They look something like
>>neoclassicizing painting but there are differences,

>Personal statements? How is a Corot landscape or Picasso portrait more
>personal than De Heem, Vermeer or Bierstadt?

It is more personal because of its material basis. A Marxist art
criticism shows that material conditions were very different for Corot as
opposed to Vermeer. Corot is more personal because he was more of an
entrepreneur in the modern sense than Vermeer (and Vermeer, in turn, was
more of an entrepreneur than, say, Jan Van Eyck.) If Marx was even
partly right, then part of what we mean by being personal has a material
basis in our economic relations with others.

Consider Jan Van Eyck, who demonstrates an extreme level of skill and
precision. We should not imagine him as a modern day artist like Chuck
Close selecting the technique of careful drawing, egg tempera
underpainting, and finishing with oil-based glazes. Jan Van Eyck labored
under a guild system, aspects of which were still in force up to the time
of Corot.

Vermeer's was the Dutch art market of the 17th century in an early
capitalist society in which artists still preserved some of the
guild-like nature of the profession, including retention of skills within
families and protection of members. By Corot's time, the guild had been
absorbed into tightly controlled, top-down governmental agencies such as
the Salon, and artists outside its protection existed in the nascent
industrialism of the 19th century.

It is this material basis that confuses Mani De Li. What he perceives to
be skill and polish is merely the result of different material
conditions. Van Eyck's paintings have a high level of polish because as
a member of the guild system, Van Eyck could take more time than Vermeer
to produce a painting. Van Eyck worked at a time when lending money at
interest was frowned upon by the church, with the result that there was
not as much pressure for timely results (timely results become important
principally when money has a high time value, resulting from existence of
a mature credit system.)

Vermeer has an intermediate level because the Dutch economy had evolved
further than that of mediaeval Flanders and as such, artists could no
longer take as long to produce works in a market dominated by middle
class speculators and collectors.

Vermeer may have (judging from his limited extant output) been a
part-time painter with a "day job", and this may have freed him to add
his Vermeer-like touches, including his unique handling of the edge.

Corot had to survive in the faster-paced market of the 19th century. The
material basis of later Impressionism was the simple need to grind out
works *alla prima* without the monochromatic underpainting of Ingres,
David, and the Old Masters, in order to have enough cheap paintings to
sell and thereby pay the goddamn rent (Monet came several times close to
starvation in his early career.) The painters of the Salon, among them
Bougeareau, could preserve the more laborious and more polished
techniques of careful preparatory drawing and monochromatic underpainting
because Salon and Academy membership provided them with protection from
the realities of the marketplace!

>Corot was among the first artists who couldn't draw or paint well to
>be considered great. He interests modern academic historians because
>his work anticipates the incompetence which followed.

The idea of innate artistic ability, especially as equated to the ability
to make by hand a photographic reproduction or one for one correspondence
with the seen, is a male confusion. It achieved its modern form with the
invention of the photograph and represented the backlash of an excluded
artisan class against technology. In van Eyck's and to an extent
Vermeer's time, the question as to whether a young boy would be trained
as an artist was not settled by his natural facility. Instead, artisans
had secrets, from the indirect method of painting to the camera obscura,
which replaced "drawing or painting well."

Mani's idea is a mystification of art students.

During the Renaissance, several artists, notably Cennini, published the
secrets of the trade. If one follows these methods one is guaranteed an
"old-masterish" result WITHOUT any magical abilities: they can be, and
were, taught. It is a separate question whether one is motivated to be
an artist: if anything, Mani's conception of innate ability is nothing
more or less than the will to succeed at a profession. This will is
"talent" and rare nowadays precisely because the existence of mechanical
reproduction makes it not very salable: contrast, say, software
development, wherein many practitioners don't have "talent" (that is, the
will to improve and to learn) but nonetheless stay in a difficult field
because of the financial rewards.

The very idea of "drawing and painting well" is based on the false idea
that there is a subset of the infinite number of possible art works that
is "drawn and painted well." This is a commodification of the art work
which assumes that it stops at the surface of the painting. I would like
to suggest that once you deconstruct this idea, the art work is more
fruitfully seen as an epiphenomenon of a more important labor process,
which includes that of the artist, that of the viewer, and that of the
gallery system and art education itself. As such, Corot's work becomes
part of a process in which Mani chooses not to take part.

My superficial reading of rec.arts.fine seems to indicate that this
super-commodification is encouraged by the Internet and high tech in
general, because the very process of digitilization commodifies the art
work by sharply demarcating it as a large-but-finite set of bits. This
is a continuation of the debasement of art appreciation first noticed as
a consequence of mechanical reproduction by Theodore Adorno, for
mechanical reproduction does seem to lower participation in art
reproduction (Adorno was thinking of how in the 19th century people
participated in the Beethoven phenomenon by laboring to learn and play
his works, whereas in his time they merely listened to performances.)

The ready availability of digital reproduction seems to generate an
anxiety in rec.arts.fine about drawing and painting well because of the
sadistic precision of such reproduction. In the 1960s, a high-quality
art publisher, Phaidon, refused to print monographs with color
reproductions because it was felt that the analog processes available at
that time would distort the viewer's appreciation and that black and
white reproduction (leaving as it did some labor for the viewer) were on
balance better. One cannot imagine a publisher making this decision
nowadays. The claim seems to be that the work has been done and that the
viewer should sit back in a vacuous zone of "appreciation". The art
student is challenged to match the sadistic precision of digital
reproduction.

The problem with this end-historical narrative is that human perception
is analog and continuous, not digital, and the very precision of digital
reproduction continually creates zones of higher analog discrimination:
"studies" that "prove" that humans cannot perceive less than an
infinitesimal analog distinction are always limited by the fact that they
use and misuse specific subjects at a specific time.

>>I feel so strange finding a know nothing to my right because I am
>>usually considered to be at the edge of the art world in some limbo
>>because I am so conservative. But there is a difference between a
>>living active artist who believes in the traditions in art and that
>>they have not died with the 18rth century and someone who feels
>>everything is over as far as established twentieth century art is
>>concerned.

>?
>You remind me of some of my art school teachers long ago. These
>maintained the latest artwork was just awful (AE) but they adored
>Picasso and Matisse etc. and rambled about the evil 19th cent.
>academics about whom they knew little and saw almost nothing. They
>still knew a bit about classical art, However, Art Nouveau and Deco
>were at that time considered artistic blasphemy. Tastes have changed.
>These teachers were already the product of three generations of utter
>incompetence. Their idea of art history was that the important point
>about the past lay in the fact that it all just anticipated modern
>art.

Theodore Adorno, on the closely related subject of music, is able to get
around this sterile and futile "ancients versus moderns" dispute that
Mani is carrying forth (its 17th century form was referred to,
interestingly enough, as "the war of the buffoons" since it was carried
out between artisans and thespians regarded as low life by the
aristocrats.) It seems that one has to choose, as an art student, between
going modern, and staying at all times *au fait* with the latest rage,
whether Picasso in 1940 or Jenny Holzer in 1990, or going conservative
like Mani.

Adorno's work demonstrates that neither choice makes historical sense.
His critique of moderns like Brecht (who rejected older art because of
its association with the aristocracy) makes clear that there can be no
such thing as forgetting within art considered as a tradition: Picasso
simply could not be not aware, say, of Velazquez' Las Meninas and still
remain Picasso, and not a Spanish *naif.* But to paint like Velazquez or
Poussin having this as a memory is also to lack a memory because it is
part of the phenomenology of memory (whether personal or historical) to
tag each memory with a relative time coordinate. This is why Adorno
disliked Stravinsky so much: for Stravinsky, under pressure of
nonacceptance of modern composition by attention disordered members of
the haute bourgeois, simply executed a crablike motion backwards to sweet
celebration of the middle class virtues, stealing his operatic themes
from second-rate artists readily accessible to the bourgeois superego
like Hogarth (cf. The Rake's Progress.)

So in a sense the art teachers, second-rate as they were right in that
ancient art, in a quite ordinary sense, leads to the moderns. Praxiteles
could not think of Rodin: but Rodin, *qua* Rodin, had perforce to think
of Praxiteles. This is less scientific progress and an accretion of
results (Mani misheard his teachers if he thinks they were claiming the
relation of ancient and modern art as the same as Aristotle's physics to
Heisenberg) than a dialectical (and dialogic) family romance. Cezanne's
Poussin represented a father figure with whom Cezanne had to deal, but in
no sense does Cezanne "advance" Poussin.

>Dali in his "secret Life" describes much the same situation when he
>attended school. His teachers talked about emotion but couldn't teach
>him technique.

I agree with Mani that art teachers need to teach ancient techniques if
they feel so inclined. Daniel Thompson revived, almost single-handedly,
the practice of [egg] tempera painting at Yale in the '40s and has a
book by that name still available, if I am not mistaken, from Dover.
But I suggest that the lack of ability, or will, to teach either good
techniques or Robert Henri's The Art Spirit has little to do with the
arts or the corruption of the age, and much to do with the administration
of arts schools in an era of Jesse Helms and declining funding.

And I suggest that Dali's contempt for his teachers is connected with
his support for Franco. Picasso and Casals refused to live under
Franco but Dali did not. Dali's work is Fascistic in that it combines
rebellious content with reassuring magazine-style execution, in
somewhat the same way Rush Limbaugh encourages his
audience to express rage and then channels it into safe patterns.

I paint in a traditional, indirect style that in an era of capital could
not by any stretch of the imagination make a living. At the same time, I
refuse to paint "traditionally" by observing a living model: instead, I
paint figures from memory, by deducing movement and structure from my
knowledge, such as it is, of anatomy (a quite traditional move) and my
own kinesthetic sense, refined somewhat by my physical workouts.
Sometimes my work goes way the hell off the rails because of this
approach, but I find in life drawing classes (readily available at
Chicago's Pallette and Chisel academy down the street from where I live)
that economic circumstances produce models with absurd distortions that
seem a waste of time to get right (breasts that look like phalluses and a
great deal of excess fat.)

My distaste for these models may be Fascistic, but I cannot accept that
the distortion of the body produced by late capitalism (whether the
"buff" body of the gym rat, or the far more typical body produced by
McDonald's) is something that art should celebrate, or even observe.
Adorno points to the need for imagination to think around the "black
shrouds" covering the future, which for him was not Bertolt Brecht's
trashy and proletarianized existence, one in which abuse of women was
common coin. I think art has to imagine this.

A final word. Zita, or is it Gabriel. seemed to be expressing feelings
in a nonthreatening manner, and Mani's anger seems overblown. I suggest
that Robert Bly (of the misunderstood men's movement) is right: the
Internet encourages a raging sort of flatness in which any sort of
authority, save for safely dead and safely misunderstood authority of
tradition, is suspect. Mani's contempt for his actual teachers, as
opposed to dead works in museums that exhibit a "skill and polish" that
was the product of tricks from the camera obscura to the indirect method
of painting, is I think an example of this. The arts are under assault
from Jesse Helms, and from their devotees in the form of sadistic
reproductions like those of Bill Gates…reproductions which drain art of a
bodily ground. This appears from my superficial contact with today's art
students and rec.arts.fine to create a dysfunctional Bart Simpson
view…"that music sucks, man."

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