A Little Art On The Prairie

Follow the typical signs, the hand-painted lines, down prairie roads.
Pass the lone church spire.
Pass the talking wire from where to who knows?
There’s no way to divide the beauty of the sky from the wild western plains.
Where a man could drift, in legendary myth, by roaming over spaces.
The land was free and the price was right.
      ~ from Gold Rush Brides by 10,000 Maniacs

The bike ride south of Race Street takes you directly to Meadowbrook Park, which has preserved 60 acres of native Illinois prairie, now all but mowed down and turned into the endless soybean and corn fields of the Midwest. But here, in this oasis of tall grass, turned golden in the dessicated air, one can still get a sense of the “legendary myth of the wild western plains” that Natalie Merchant evoked in the album Out of Eden. This tenacious enclave of rural land serves as an interesting space for the modernist sculptures that are displayed along its pathways. The ample size of the pieces are dwarfed nonetheless by the vast openness of the terrain. The pastoral setting ostensibly serves as counterpoint to the curated artifice, but is itself ironically, ultimately, also contrived. There is a heightened nostalgia for pure, unadulterated Nature by the presence of decadent bourgeois art in this patch of prairie preserve.

 

Los Caprichos: Goya’s Comedy of Horrors

I found a used copy of Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos at the Smathers Library bookstore. This Dover Fine Art Books edition reproduces all 80 aquatint prints in black and white, with 6 additional prints of preliminary studies and unique proofs. Goya produced Los Caprichos after coming out of a mysterious and debilitating illness in his fifites that left him “a changed man: bitter at times, secretive, far less exuberant” (p. 2). It proved to be a turning point in his artistic development.

To be sure he was one of the court painters of King Carlos IV, but had he died before the drawings and prints for Los Caprichos were made, he would today be rated as an attractive painter of the pre-Revolutionary era and, in graphics, as mainly a reproductive etcher–not the major artist and the father of modern art which he had started to become. (p. 1)

Caprichos literally means ‘fancy’ or ‘whimsy’, but there is certainly nothing fanciful or whimsical (in the ordinary sense of lightness or playfulness) in Goya’s Los Caprichos. It is also not properly horror, despite the attendance of witches, devils, and hobgoblins. It is rather said to be a satirical attack on 18th century Spanish society, specifically “the Spanish Inquisition, the corruption of the church and the nobility, witchcraft, child rearing, avarice, and the frivolity of young women” (Indepth Arts News, Portland Museum of Art). I do not know anything about 18th century Spanish society, but I can still catch echoes of Goya’s contemptuous laughter through his unsettling images. The dead-pan commentary of the Prado manuscript certainly helps. That these graphic prints still manage to convey the artist’s dour humours two-hundred ten years later attests to both his gothic and comic genius.

4. Nanny’s boy. Negligence, tolerance and spoiling make children capricious, naughty, vain, greedy, lazy, insufferable. They grow up and yet remain childish. Thus is nanny’s little boy. What’s monstrous about this picture is ostensibly the tacking of a grown man’s head onto a little girl’s body. To me, even more repugnant than his thick eyebrows or mustachioed lips, are his stubby hands, fingers stuck in the mouth, and those heavy boots beneath the daintily embroidered skirt.

 

Behold: “The Truth”

Even third rate artists use the Obama mystique for media milage nowadays.

Artist Michael D’Antuono’s painting “The Truth” – featuring Obama with his arms outstretched and wearing a crown of thorns upon his head – will be unveiled on April 29 at the Square’s South Plaza.

(from Drew Zahn, WorldNetDailey, 25 Apr 2009)

What is it with this cultic hero worship of Obama, who has, at most, mixed reviews of his first 100 days?

The odd blurb on the artist’s own website claims that this is a “highly controversial” work–”a politically, religiously, and socially-charged statement… that is sure to create dialogue.” What!?! Is it now the artist’s place to claim their own work as “controversial” and anticipate their own relevance? I thought these things are reported on after the fact, especially if the work in question has not even been unveiled yet!

The press release describes that the “work will be seen by one viewer at a time behind a voting booth-inspired public installation”. Ah, so there’s a twist, a game, an ironic turn. Fine. But the artist, further explains, in the most pedestrian terms, the manner by which the viewer should approach/experience the work:

D’Antuono insists that this piece is a mirror; reflecting the personal opinions and emotions of the viewer; that “The Truth” like beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

Sheesh! Can anyone get more hack than this?

What I anticipate is that when the viewer finally goes into that booth to behold “The Truth”, he will get, not that spine-tingling encounter with great art for which themes like Also Sprach Zarathustra was written for, but a WTF!?! moment typical of gimmicky postmodern art.

 

DalíWood: Where Surrealist Dreams Turn Into Dollars

Dalí and wife Gala enjoying their San Miguel Beer. Itaas Mo! Postcard from the Dalí Museum St. Petersburg, FL

What is the Salvador Dalí Museum doing in St. Petersburg? This resort-town in South Florida, locals refer to as St. Pete, where old geezers from the colder Midwest roost to retire, apparently also hosts the most substantial collection of the late Surrealist’s paintings. A silver-haired lady next to me, in pink cardigan and sweatpants, asked her granddaughter as a matter of fact if the painting she was looking at was indeed the one labeled Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano. If this is not an indication of how popular culture has accommodated subversive Surrealist images, I don’t know what is. Surrealism, as originally conceived, was anti-rationalist and anti-bourgeois. It privileged the irrational and unconscious motives of man, lending a visual idiom to anxieties stemming from repressed sexual desires. Its strategy, at least in painting, included the juxtaposing of disparate images to produce dreamlike effects intended to startle and shock. Surrealist exhibitions, like those of the Dada movement, were very much political acts, and staged as events aimed at scandalizing common bourgeois morality.

Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano 1934

 

Spring Break, Dada, and Cartesian Dualism

Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity 1915	Girls Gone Wild Spring Break 2005: Anything Goes

Aaah, Spring Break in Florida. I took up Mike’s offer to hang out at his folk’s place in St. Pete, a small peninsula at the mouth of Tampa Bay. It’s a resort-town, and, according to its official website, with the “advent of air conditioning” in the 1950’s, also a haven for retirees. Mike’s folks, believe it or not, live in Paradise Island, a small islet in a cove enclosed by Sunshine Beach to the north, Treasure Island to the west, and Sunset Beach to the south. The backyard of their bungalow abruptly ends at the sea, where their boat is docked, and where pelicans and herons would occasionally roost.

Mike is an undergrad working on the same project as me, investigating the tribological properties of polymers at interfaces. A regular surfer dude, he braved the 60-degree waters of the Gulf, while I chickened out on the beach, and stayed a safe distance away reading Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. What I wanted to do on this trip was to visit the Salvador Dalí Museum which holds one of the most important collections of the painter’s works, covering a broad period from 1917 to 1970. I was also curious what a museum of avant garde art is doing in, of all places, a resort and retirement town of tacky-colored condos and townhouses.