Mr Tanaka Mr Tanaka Mr Tanaka
I repied only to Mr Webster'words "painterly" & "abstract" in order to point out to him that his picture is neither.
To define art terms for an artist's benefit is pompous? Giving Mr Webster powerful tools for the development of his art is being self-important?
Pompous to talk about great past artists for the benefit of pressent ones?
Pompous to cite one's credentials, which give one's contribution authority?
You ask if I had no papers to grade.
I don't grade my students' papers. I only read and comment on them. I teach art appreciation. There's no way to weigh one student's appreciation against another's.
If my students attend class, turn in their assignments--to trace 2 reproductions in the textbook per week--and turn in the term paper, they get an A.
Their work doesn't have to be good or on time. It just has to be done.
So I never have papers to GRADE.
By week 10 of the semester my students don't need me any more. They can appreciate art by themselves. If they've finished the work they can stop coming to class.
A teacher's job is like the psychiatrist's: bring the student ASAP to the point that he doesn't need you any more.
This semester my students are teaching me more than I'm teaching them. So I've stopped preparing. I look at their tracings before I leave for campus and start class with the works that most interest the students.
Today it was Ingres' Grande Odalisque, c. 1820s
90 min later we ended at once in 1848, with Delacroix saying he hated subject matter, which is "only an excuse for putting paint on canvas" and in the 1780s with the beginning of Goya's paintings about the madness of social life.
In between we covered
Stiubbs' dissections of horses & the 18thC trade of the horse knacker
Sylvia Plath in "The Bell Jar," on how a flaccid penis looks like "the neck of a plucked chicken"
Goya's painting of a plucked Turkey
The visual viruosity of the film BREACH
The literary brilliance of the contemporary Moroccan writer Mohammed M'Mrabet, who can neither read nor write
The scene in John Barthe's The Floating Opera in which the hero, about to make love for the first time, sees his and his girlfriend's naked bodies in the bedroom mirror, laughs at how funny sex is, & so loses erection, opportunity and girlfriend.
Iago telling Brabatio his daughter and Othello are "making the two-backed beast"
The difference between Linear and Painterly art.
The nature of the aristocrats who sat for Ingres' portraits
The grotesque anatomical disproportions Ingres gave them but which can be seen only by looking very closely at the paintings.
The way the hands of Ingres' sitters resemble horrible spineless sea creatures creeping out of their shells.
Tolstoi telling Gorky to "write about everything," even a child trying to pull his drunken mother up from the mud & filth of an unpaved Moscow street because "If you don't, he will come to you later & say your art is false because you didn't write about everything. He's passionate for the truth, that little boy."
That Ingres had the courage to tell the truth about his aristocratic sitters' ugly vicious world through their bodies' grotesque disproportions and about the beauty of their material world., gowns, jewels, suits, flowers, rooms, art objects, wall paper. How he had the courage to show at once the beauty of their corrupt world & the corruption in their beautiful world.
Akira Kurosawa's great early movie THE BAD SLEEP WELL.
Not bad for 90 minutes in which a lot of students learned a great deal about painting & stayed after class to talk about it.
One student & I talked about how Photo Shop might better express what she sees in art than do her tracings.
This made me suddenly wonder if Photo Shop mightn't be a powerful tool for the teaching of art appreciation.
Have students download a scan of a painting. manipulate it in Photo Shop...I think people would learn a lot about pictures this way
By making a large dark area in the middle of Ingres' Grande Odalisque a little darker...would totally change the painting and show us the difference between dark & black, solid & void, space & flatness, design & composition...We'd learn more about pictures in 10 min tham from a whole art history course.
Imagine making some of Henri Cartier'Bresson's painterly pictures a little bit more linear!
E.g. the two gypsy boys blowing smoke, or that strange picture of the Mexican woman with the baby hanging down from her shoulder in a black shawl so thin & transluscent that it's as tho' we're looking into the wman's uterus at her sleeping unborn child
Our Photo Shop linear versions of these powerful painterly photographs would be failures precisely BECAUSE we made them linear. for H C-B conceived & executed them as painterly.
But our failures would show us why the original painterly pictures are great.
So you see, Mr Tanaka, my method, which may seem self important, pompous etc. to you really isn't. It's just free-association rambling toward some simple idea
"Mary-Ann," said a friend about a fiend of ours, "is amazing. She starts with simplicity & goes to complexity. Bit I have to start in complexity just to GET to simplicity." Mr Tanaka, it's the same with me.
If I don't ramble, no holds barred, I don't learn anything. For example, Asher's experiment w/ the picture from the car was, I'm sure, behind my conversation with the student today, although I wasn't aware of it. Now the conversation w/ the student, recounted here, has brought me back to Asher's experiment but w/ a difference.
As for long, what's wrong with it?
"Some questions," says the hero of William Cooper's novel Scenes from Later Life, "can only be answered with more words than will fit on the back of a penny postcard."
The same is true for some responses to art.
Is it any more self-important, Mr Tanaka, for me to TELL of my achievements which can't be SHOWN here? Others can SHOW their achievements here, & do so often/
What's the difference between Mr Webster showing a picture he's proud of & me telling of a class or a curriculum I'm proud of? Am I self important and he's not?
If you yourself make a picture you're proud of, will you NOT share it with us here because you think Sharing Your Work With Us is Self Important Pomposity?
I was sharing past INTELLECTUAL work with Mr Webster. Work as important to me as Mr Webster's is to him. Is it because my work was intellectual that you call my sharing it pompous and self important?
Are you saying that intellectual work is of a lower order than visual work, which is why sharing the former but not the latter is pompous and self important?
Does it follow, therefore, that my being proud of having founded a Cal Arts curriculum and led a Harvard department is being pompous and self important because that was only INTELLECTUAL work but that for Mr Webster to be pleased with his picture is ok because it's VISUAL WORK?
Was it self important of me to speak of teaching 3 times at Yale but not self important of Nikolai to share those extraordinary group portraits with us?
Is it self important of me to be sharing my experience with you & my feelings about it?
All my stories about artists, books, paintings, etc. are part of my DEEPEST EXPERIENCE & have given me some of my STRONGEST, DEEPEST & MOST MEMORABLE FEELINGS. Mr Tanaka, my strongest, deepest & most memorable experiences & feelings.
Both live inside me as the experience & feelings of seeing one's first born come into the world live inside a father. Is it pompous and self important of a father to tell you of watching his first child being born, and of what he felt then?
The first time I read what Tolstoy said to Gorky, saw Brueghel'"Netherlandish Proverbs", got a class to see the difference between painterly and linear etc. are events in my experience as great. thrilling, moving and determining as was the moment on May 16, 1971, when I saw my first child be born, heard his mother say "Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby" and reach for him.
As we entered Berlin's Boda Museum one day the German artist Lothar Baumgarten said, "Be careful. You're going to faint."
An hour or so later I saw Roger van der Weyden's "Descent from the Cross" & had to hold on to Lothar to keep from fainting.
When I first saw Piero's unfinished Nativity in London, I had to stay conscious long enough to find the men's room. lock myself into a stall & almost faint, & sob for 30 minutes.
The first time I read an ornate line from Hamlet I almost fainted at the discovery that anyone could use language that way. I was fifteen.
At this moment a thumbnail portrait of Kafa stares down at me from the back cover of a paperback The Trial. I tore it from the book so that I'd always have Kafka's picture with me. I was thirteen & had never read a book so powerful.
When my nephew, then 26 and a world-class silversmith, first saw the Metrolitan's great Courbet Nu_e (unclothed person) with a Parrot he studied it, speechless and motionless, for 30 minutes then said to me "Now that I know people have dreamed dreams like this and have expressed them in forms like these I also know that I never again have to be afraid of being lonely."
It's experiences and feelings like these that, living in me for decades as though I were experiencing and reeling them for the first time, that have led to my knowledge, which is also not, to me, knowledge as a scholar or a pedant defines it. It is knowledge like my knowledge of my desire for the woman I love, when I feel it.
And you accuse me of pomposity and self importance.
What are we if not our experiences and our feelings?
Then why do you tell me that by sharing the fruit of my deepest life experiences and feelings I'm being pompous and self important?
When I wrote to Mr Webster about linear and painterly and abstraction I was sharing the fruit of my deepest experiences of and feelings and knowledge about art with him.
When my Parisian friend Genevieve was friends with a French Formula 1 driver she visited him at his track a few days before a Gramd Prix & he let her drive the car by herself once around the track. It was, she said, one of the deepest most thrilling most transporting most other-worldly experiences of her life.
Was she pompous and self important to share this experience with me because it wasn't even work, either visual or emotional? Because she didn't make a picture of it?
I'm sure the Piero Nativity is as awesome in its way as a Formula 1 car is in its way
But you seem to think that if I share experience of my own as deep as was Genevieve's drive around the track I'm being pompus & self important.
You also seem to think sharing knowledge is self importance.
But "Knowledge," as my friend Nana ...The Fourth (in Ghana means "Chief" but I can't disclose his royal name here), who is king of an area about a third of the size of Rhode Island in the interior region of the Ashanti tribe, always reminds me "Knowlege is sweet"
So I'll keep sharing it here even though you think that sharing sweetness with others is pompous.
Well, that's the end of the ramble.
ASHER, THIS IS NOT AN ESSAY. THIS IS A LETTER AND ACCORDING TO THE 2ND CENTURY BC RHETORICIAN DIONYSIUS, A LETTER IS "A GIFT FROM ONE FRIEND TO ANOTHER," IN THIS CASE, FROM ME TO MY FRIEND MR KEN TANAKA.
It is also medium tempo jazz in a meditative mood
Happy Trails to You
yrs
ben
www.benlifson.com