Mani de Li's "No skill no art" web page

[spino...@msn.com]

YOU MUST HAVE *ONE* GRAND PASSION - Jenny Holzer

Mani, let me start by congratulating you on your artistic and webmaster
labor, as well as your courage and honesty: real qualities which you need
to retain. I have, of course, some negative but hopefully constructive
criticisms to make here that may assist you pursue your vision.

As I open your Web page, I first see an opposition between a Bouguereau
and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. I like Bouguereau's work, but
it and Picasso's work (close chronologically) are situated in art history
differently.

How much artistic merit does the Bouguereau really have, or to avoid
reifing a mysterious "merit" similar to a fetishized "talent", what
actually goes into the Bouguereau, vis a vis Les Demoiselles? Bouguereau
manifests the skill and polish resulting from a variety of tricks and
artisanlike moves, including careful drawing, use of cartoon transfer of
full-sized drawing to the canvas, and monochromatic underpainting that
lends depth.

Sadly, Bouguereau also steals the group of marine gods directly from
Nicholas Poussin's Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite. The group is
elegant and balanced but we largely have the labor of Poussin and not the
labor of Bouguereau to thank for this! You claim to know art history,
and therefore you should, in my opinion, be alert to lack of originality.

Bouguereau also reifies to the point of exploitation the figure of Woman.
Picasso is guilty, in a different way, of the sexism found in most
Western studies of the female nude. Bouguereau's particular sexism is to
make a painterly statement that properly, females should have the anatomy
displayed. This is an anatomy that renders them victims because it
emphasizes fat at the expense of musculature.

Dr Paul Richert was the leading authority on the human body at the time
of Bouguereau. Another, more contemporary, Frenchman, Michel Foucault,
has studied the ways in which the human body is not so much as a natural
thing as constructed with ideological goals in mind. Astonishingly,
Richert, who taught many of Bouguereau's contemporaries, names and
descibes, as permanent features of the female body, folds and rills of
fat that have completely disappeared from women in the present day.

Bouguereau, and Bouguereau knock-offs, were popular in the saloons of the
American West, and the use of the nude over the bar-room was to construct
the idea of the "soiled dove of the prairie", the cowboy's companion who
needed his protection. Actual women, of course, ranged from Calamity
Jane to the even more calamitous smasher-up of the same bar-rooms, Carrie
Nation, and without a doubt their bodies did not follow the dictates of
either Bouguereau, or le redoubtable Richert.

Picasso's painting is painted alla prima and confronts, in Les
Demoiselles, a row of prostitutes in the ancient city of the south of
France, Avignon. I suggest that it is in the terms of feminist art
criticism somewhat of an advance over Bouguereau, since by no stretch of
the imagination could it fuel a wet-dream. It also owes nothing to
Poussin. And if artistic merit is at all a question of how much we need
to credit novelty and originality, it is measurably more original. It
forces us to ignore the bourgeois' reification of a row of whores and
abstractly see an underlying rythym of gesture which unifies the group.

While overtly stealing from Poussin, Bouguereau knew nothing about how to
unify a group on its own terms, as did Picasso. His unity is imposed by
a predefined, intellectualized scheme, or simply absent in your example.
One asks why the nude is simpering and what relation does her simpering
have to do with the antics of the marine gods: although Bouguereau steals
images from Poussin, he knew nothing about Poussin's iconography, in
which all elements of a painting have an inner meaning. Poussin labored,
mightily, to let the subject and figures dictate the unity, as did
Picasso and Cezanne.

Bouguereau presents compositional unity in all to obvious, narrative
terms: a group of naked and quite horny nymphs want to fool around with a
reluctant satyr (ideologically locating desire in Woman), therefore, the
entire gang of figures head for the river in an overt way, accessible to
Monsieur the attention-disordered Bourgeois, to Water, coding quite
obviously Le Sex et les ooh-la-la Whoopee. This is the same way,
according to Theodore Adorno, Wagner coded his themes: both artists have
to seize attention by crude and obvious means...simplified composition in
the case of Bouguereau, and "leitmotifs" in the case of Wagner. The
nymphs and satyrs are practically drafted into this riot, which has
nothing to do with the serene and classical construction of their
bodies...is indeed quite at odds with it.

Whereas the rythym in Les Demoiselles goes all the way down and its
structures (inspired by African art) are repeated in the small as well as
the large.

Let me turn to your stuff, which manifests craft and most especially a
nice color sense.

I had trouble accessing all of it, but what I mainly see in it is what I
sadly consider an easy and less than honest move. This is Surrealism,
alas.

You see, your old masters, your elders, would not sympathize with the
Surrealism of your art. Surrealism is part of the modern movement which
I thought you rejected.

Not only that, Surrealism was the first commodification and reification
of high modernism and it's my belief that it was a move made by lazy
second raters (like Magritte) who'd acquired skill with paints in a fit
of diligence.

Surrealism is popular with the uninitiated precisely because its skill
and polish is reassuring. It reassures us that Marx was wrong when Marx
wrote "all is solid melts into air." For Surrealism makes the Modernist
move of deconstruction of the image, only to reconstruct it into easily
demarcated new objects which can return to the market-place. The
financier, as opposed to the land-owner, is quite skilled at making money
in a revolution as long as abstract property relations don't change,
while estates change hands, and are parcelled-out. Magritte's paradoxes
therefore may not trouble he who can hedge both sides of the bet, and the
bowler hat is secure.

There is no secure place in Picasso's analytic cubist portrait of his
dealer Kahnweiler, for the entire image is constructed of small,
semi-monochromatic brush strokes. There is no way to point to a zone of
the picture and reassure oneself that that's a watch, or a woman's face,
systematically distorted but nonetheless an OBJECT.

In your work, you take from the modernists you profess to dislike the
male privilege of distorting objects, which in your work include the
female face and body. Picasso's own distortions were indeed in part an
expression of his rage and sexism but he reconciles these distortions
with the actual creation of a picture, by mapping the distortion onto the
picture plane.

In your surrealism, I believe this process is skipped and as such
represents less overall artistic labor. The surrealism permission to
distort enables you to evade the opposite journey of Bouguereau,
realistically placing subjects in an imaged three-dimensional space. It
therefore uses Modernism as a way of investing less struggle into the
painting...even as companies produce animation with "cool and post
modern" crudity (South Park and Beavis and Butthead) as a way of hiring
cheaper animators.

This is dishonest. It is an artistically fascistic move because
political fascism uses the cynicism of the modernist to find a cheap path
to power over people made cynical by real oppression: artistic fascism
appeals to the rage of the viewer as produced by economic relations,
while reassuring him that nobody's getting away with painting like a
three year old if he has to labor six days a week at an insurance firm,
and can barely afford the price of a museum ticket.

You need to explore the rage you express by showing Mondrian's tiles as
the background for a roll of toilet paper. It was said of Mondrian that
visits to his studio were healing because of the ascetic serenity of that
artist: he and his work had a shaman's power to heal. Now, a good dump
can also be a healing experience in its own way, but your work seems to
state that there are no levels...no higher healing than a session on the
loo. The work therefore has the emotional flatness that Robert Bly
writes about in the Sibling Society.

The work in which the painter confronts a female face and ruins,
despite a strange and disturbing compositional emptiness in the
middle which to me expresses a great deal of sadness, is essentially
The Artist Playing In The Rubble. It is by no stretch a return to the
masters.

Mani, my work, which I shall be posting in black and white form in the
near term, is not much better. It's actually closer to Bouguereau than
yours and inspired by the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue...I kid you
not. However, it does take the increased masculinisation of today's
Jane Fonda-ised body and it gives the face an emotional expressivity
of a masculine cast. When I post it, I invite you to deconstruct it with
the same rigor I have brought to your work.

CRACK THE PELVIS SO SHE LIES RIGHT. THIS IS A
MISTAKE. WHEN SHE DIES YOU CANNOT REPEAT
THE ACT. THE BONES WILL NOT GROW TOGETHER
AGAIN AND THE PERSONALITY WILL NOT COME BACK.
SHE IS GOING TO SINK DEEP INTO THE MOSS TO GET
WHITE AND LIGHTER. SHE IS UNRESPONSIVE TO
BEGGING AND SELF-ABSORBED.

LIGHT GOES THROUGH BRANCHES TO SHOW TWO
CHILDREN BORN AT ONCE WHO MIGHT LIVE.

- Jenny Holzer

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[Craig Eliason]

On Tue, 09 Dec 1997 08:32:57 -0600, spino...@msn.com wrote:

>Picasso's painting is painted alla prima and confronts, in Les
>Demoiselles, a row of prostitutes in the ancient city of the south of
>France, Avignon.

Actually, Avignon was the name of a notorious avenue in the red-light
district of Picasso's hometown of Barcelona.

For what that's worth.

Craig.