William Scott Williams
Fiction by William Scott WilliamsLoud Flash – An Exhibition by Toby Mott
Toby Mott’s collection, “Loud Flash: British Punk on Paper”, is being shown at Haunch of Venison (6 Burlington Gardens, London) until the end of October. “Loud Flash” includes works by Linder Stirling, Jamie Reid, and others.
Mott: “This exhibition seeks to capture punk’s cataclysmic collision with the cultural, social and political values of the time and show the enduring legacy it left in its wake.”
William Maxwell – Essentialism in The Château
There is a certain precision to be found in William Maxwell’s prose that is breathtaking and arguably without equal. Maxwell, however, may be best known for using atypical points-of-view to distill an experience down to its barest essence. Essentialism can be a loaded term, especially in academic circles, but I am using it here to highlight Maxwell’s aperture for experience, which he opens as wide as possible to take in every aspect of a moment in time. Essentialism in this case equals universalism.
Maxwell’s essentialism is evidenced in the following, heart-breakingly beautiful passage from The Château:
“In the first luminous quarter-hour of daylight, the Place Pierre-Joseph Redouté in the 16th arrondissement of Paris was given over to philosophical and mathematical speculation. The swallows skimming the wet rooftops said: What are numbers? The sky, growing paler, said: What is being when being becomes morning? What is “five,” asked the birds, apart from “five” swallows?”
The Château is, of course, Maxwell’s endearing novel of a young American couple abroad in post-war France. It is early morning in Paris and Maxwell begins with as wide a lens as possible to capture the moment before Barbara and Harold Rhodes awaken. He continues:
“The French painter and lithographer who belonged in the center of the Place and who from his tireless study of natural forms might have been able to answer those questions was unfortunately not there any more; he had been melted down and made into bullets by the Germans.”
Here is war’s destruction rendered completely in one terse independent clause. It is just after daylight and the couple is still not awake, and yet:
“The huge block of rough granite that was substituting for him said: Matter is energy not in motion, and the swallows said: Very well, try this, then, why don’t you… and this…”
Here is action without depiction; a painterly vision of swallows diving in the post-dawn light.
“Though proof was easy and the argument had long ago grown tiresome, the granite refrained. But it could not resist some slight demonstration, and so it gave off concentric circles of green grass, scarlet salvia, curbing and cobblestone.”
The solidity of matter again as a refrain, and even the pissoir has its say: “Everything that happens, in spite of the best efforts of the police, is determined by the space co-ordinates x, y, and z, and the time co-ordinate t.”
The lovers toss and turn and dream. Harold gropes for Barbara who evades him in her sleep. The sun rises. The rain has stopped. And then:
“Crowded to the extreme edge of the bed by his half-waking and half sleeping lust, she turns.
‘Are you awake?’ he says softly.
‘Yes.’
‘We’re back in Paris.’
‘So I see.’”
Here is a moment so exquisitely rendered that it almost defies interpretation. The timelessness of the moment is palpable in its simplicity. These passages are beautiful because they are simple and tender and also because they are universal.
The following passage from earlier in The Château highlights Maxwell’s method and needs no commentary, only a short preface.
Barbara Rhodes and Alix (a girlfriend) are swimming in a river. Harold turns to see the girls wading deeper into the water, their white thighs exposed.
“There are certain scenes that (far more than artifacts dug up out of the ground or prehistoric cave paintings, which have a confusing freshness and newness) serve to remind us of how old the human race is, and of the beautiful, touching sameness of most human occasions. Anything that is not anonymous is all a dream. And who we are, and whether our parents embraced life or were disappointed by it, and what will be come of our children couldn’t be less important. Nobody asks the name of the Greek vase or whether the lonely traveler on the Chinese scroll arrived at the inn before dark.”
The Way to All Flesh | The New York Review of Books
The Way to All Flesh | The New York Review of Books.
A great piece by Julian Bell on the progression of Lucian Freud’s work. Here follows a brief excerpt (please read the full piece at the NYRB website).
“Freud has also returned repeatedly to the dumb delight of making paint look like things. “Dumb,” I say, because whenever Freud renders mattress ticking, armchair leather, or floorboards (his daily vegetables: “My world is fairly floorboardish”), his brush naively falls in with the grain of the material; and that runs quite against the grain of the Old Master “painterliness” he is sometimes alleged to revive. Yet it communicates a primal, childlike interest in objects that can be truly moving. No other modern painter, again, is more eloquent about a flower, or a pattern on a blouse, or water twisting from a tap. How wholehearted, however, is his faith in material facts?”
This is all clearly visible in much of Freud’s work. For example see Factory in North London and Interior in Paddington. The first of these displays a reverence for and a fascination with the material world. The second, the complex relationship of humans within that world.
In reference to Freud’s Large Interior w9, Bell continues:
“On the floor beneath the mother and the lover, one observes a pestle and mortar. When I returned, a little older, to that picture, a nasty suspicion dawned on me: Was the Freud who hated symbolism here to be found toying with Freudian symbolism?”
Freud’s naturalism is imbued with mortality. Freud’s tactile representation of human flesh is very much an attempt to capture not only the character of the subject and place it on the canvas, but also to preserve a precise moment in fluid time.
The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl
On September 16, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University continues its series on art and vinyl with an artist talk by Xaviera Simmons followed by a performance by Superchunk.
Trevor Schoonmaker, curator, on The Record:
“Since the heyday of vinyl, and through its decline and recent resurgence, a surprising number of artists have worked with vinyl records. The Record presents some of the best, rarest and most unexpected examples. The artists in the exhibition use the vinyl record as metaphor, archive, artifact, icon, portrait, or transcendent medium.”
Adam Pendleton on Xaviera Simmons
New York artist Adam Pendleton on New York photographer Xaviera Simmons.
From Bomb Magazine Summer 2009:
“[...]
Simmons, as an artist, doubles down. She captures the fiction/truth dialectic as well as anyone, dis-articulating assumptions about the quietly composed and staged images she makes. She’s a Brecht of the photographic endeavor. In her work, Simmons is not so much documenting the performance before the camera, but the performance itself. In one image from the series If We Believe in Theory, Simmons captures a young girl in the woods dressed like Little Red Riding Hood. It’s an example of Simmons using the suggestion of performance to capture the explicit and contradictory nature of individuality. Her subject becomes herself, and also a dismembered characterization of what we’re accustomed to look at. Still, it is not simply Simmons’s understanding of the imagistic theater of photography that is useful, but her way of using form to acknowledge that image is at the center of the creative construction of collective and personal histories. Simmons is a lexicographer who fuses live material and conceptual conceit; she deconstructs and retains a relation to specific times and places. Perhaps paradoxically, she often achieves this through unabashedly excessive detail, like in One Day and Back Then (Standing), where her character stands in a field of sea reeds in blackface, looking out at us, wearing all black (including stiletto boots), ready for a night out on the town.
[...]“
Merleau-Ponty on “Cézanne’s Doubt”
Setting aside the tortured artist trope for a moment, it can be said that art is a living philosophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his essay, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” (from Sens et non-sens, 1948) extracts Cézanne’s aesthetic from a life seemingly ill fitted for day-to-day existence. Cézanne was unhappy, unapproachable, at times quite unfriendly; a man at odds with himself and the world around him. Diagnosed schizothymia could explain away the rough behavior, however, Cézanne’s actions are also a by-product of his “painting from nature.” Building a living aesthetic is hard work and Cézanne took this work very seriously.
A Cézanne still life is a physical exegesis of perspective. According to Merleau-Ponty, “The lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one. [...] To say that a circle seen obliquely is seen as an ellipse is to substitute for our actual perception what we would see if we were cameras: in reality we see a form which oscillates around the ellipse without being an ellipse.” Cézanne’s cups and saucers and pears and oranges are seen almost from all sides at once.
Cézanne’s landscapes are an even bolder undertaking: to represent the world fully, as it exists in a single moment in time and all at once. To this end, “…All the partial views one catches sight of must be welded together; all that the eye’s versatility disperses must be reunited; one must, as Gasquet put it, “join the wandering hands of nature.””
The science behind this aesthetic is crucial; Cézanne’s palette more than doubles the number of colors in the spectrum. “If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must bear within this indivisible whole, or else his painting will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, unsurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real. This is why each brushstroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions. Cézanne sometimes pondered hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke, for, as Bernard said, each stroke must “contain the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style.” Expressing what exists is an endless task.”
On landscapes: “”A minute of the world is going by which must be painted in its full reality.” His meditation would suddenly be consummated: “I have a hold on my motif,” Cézanne would say, and he would explain that the landscape had to be tackled neither too high nor too low, caught alive in a net which would let nothing escape. Then he began to paint all parts of the painting at the same time, using patches of color to surround his original charcoal sketch of the geological skeleton. The picture took on fullness and density; it grew in structure and balance; it came to maturity all at once. “The landscape thinks itself in me,” he would say, “and I am its consciousness.””
On the constitution of a romantic realism: “In La Peau de chagrin Balzac describes a “tablecloth white as a layer of fresh-fallen snow, upon which, the place settings rose symmetrically, crowned with blond rolls.” “All through my youth,” said Cézanne, “I wanted to paint that, that tablecloth of fresh-fallen snow…. Now I know that one must only want to paint ‘rose, symmetrically, the place settings’ and ‘blond rolls.’ If I paint ‘crowned’ I’m done for, you understand? But if I really balance and shade my place settings and rolls as they are in nature, you can be sure the crowns, the snow and the whole shebang will be there.”
Despite the certitude of the above statement: “[...Cézanne] was never at the center of himself: nine days out of ten all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration. Yet it was in the world that he had to realize his freedom, with colors upon a canvas. It was from the approval of others that he had to await the proof of his worth. That is why he questioned the picture emerging beneath his hand, why he hung on the glances other people directed toward his canvas. That is why he never finished working. We never get away from our life. We never see ideas or freedom face to face.”
(Text from “Cézanne’s Doubt”, Sense and Non-Sense by Maurice Merleau-Ponty; images from The National Gallery of Art – Cézanne in Provence: http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/cezanne/)
Light and Space with Julian Bell
Julian Bell is a master of light and space.
In “Skylit Room,” a shaft of light descends from a skylight and dominates the canvas. Time passes as four men sit against three walls in stiff, ladder-back chairs, waiting to begin a spiritual exercise. Of course we cannot see the light move across the room in real-time but we know that it does. Time as a concept we know a priori is immobile, yet it continues to pass. We sense in “Skylit Room” a still frame from a motion picture.
“Shooters Hill” captures motion as well as light. We are in medias res. At the bend at the top of a hill, commuter traffic mixes with pedestrians. Multiple gazes cross paths and again we have the sense of a very fluid moment captured forever in time. On the left and closest to us, a young man stares hard at the woman to the right of center. There could be recognition here or there could be something more significant, more sinister. Perhaps, the moment before an illicit touch or even a grasp.
In “Bathroom in Bow,” a woman soaks in a tub in a sunlit bathroom, surrounded by the ordinariness of daily life: towels, clothes, a boom box, a bathroom scale. The lid to the toilet is up. Natural light cascades into the room and there is a square of bright sunlight reflecting off the polished tiled floor. Outside there is a courtyard. The mirror above the fireplace shows the neighbor’s flat at a hundred and forty degree angle from the center of the composition. We see the light first certainly because it is in the middle of the frame, but the theme of the painting is the woman who occupies the tub, and all of the space around her, including the out of doors. She is the center of the story.
Present in all of these paintings are the play of light and motion as well as the “consumption of space” by human beings. The commingling of these two in my mind constitutes a parallel to fiction. I am thinking here of Forster’s premise regarding plot versus story: when the queen dies of a broken heart you know you are on to something.
In the best example of this argument, “Light of Dawn Palermo,” based on Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel “The Leopard,” firmly captures the moment and the story at the breaking light of day. On the left, a long soiree in a golden ballroom is finally breaking up. A woman sleeps in her finery leaning against the wall. A man in coat and tails is still holding forth in front of the last of the diehards. On the right a bohemian, probably the dishwasher, perhaps himself a painter, drinks from a bottle, while over his shoulder dawn breaks over the city. The door in the center of the composition is the bridge between night and morning, between recreation and work, between old regime and new.
Each of these paintings share with Cézanne’s stills that the viewer is almost seeing around corners, around dimensions, around and through time. But this latter piece most directly highlights a conjunction of themes whereby fiction intersects with painting to preserve a human moment in time and space. Bell is both a writer and a painter and in an interview with Bell in The Tamarind, from April 2010, Giovanni Biglino, follows this thread:
GB: Looking at your paintings, it appears that light is a major preoccupation in your work. How do you approach light?
JB: The most difficult question first! In fact, when I’m at work painting, the thought of ‘light’ as such never enters my head. There are just different pigments which I put on the canvas to make the figures and the environment in my image look the way they need to look – that’s how I approach it – and some of those combinations of pigments happen to be lighter, some darker. (I wonder if this is the kind of Cezanne meant when he said ‘For the painter, there is no such thing as light.’) And yet of course when I stand back and look at what I’ve done, what stays in the mind is the light. I realize that I’m typically drawn to scenes where low-angled sunlight jangles against strong artificial light, and for that very reason I try to break my own habit, avoid my own clichés – do scenes where the light is very muted; where it’s all artificial; or where it’s high in the sky and purely natural. One canvas just has sunlight falling from a window in the ceiling into a room where four men sit with their eyes closed. And thinking of that, the best way I can express my sense of how this theme operates in painting is to get paradoxical and to say that light is natural metaphysics. It is a physical load of pigment with certain optical properties, and equally it is nothing less than understanding and grace.
[...]
GB:
Human beings, the interaction with the crowd and the surroundings, the human figure – these also appear to be important in your work
JB: Yes, that is what I am mostly thinking about when I’m making the pictures – rather than ‘light’, per se. My general theme is how human beings occupy environments, occupy different types of space. Or I could turn that upside down by saying, what concerns me is that a rectangular picture has got to have something in it, something that’s not simply coextensive with it, and that entity is generally going to be an analogue for myself or things of a similar nature, i.e. a figure, one way or another. Many of the present collection of pictures have become crowd-filled, as you say. Partly because I had the use of a big studio and thought I’d take the chance to try painting some big canvases – but more deeply because the artist I’ve always looked up to most is Brueghel, and I’ve always longed to imitate his panoramic sociological approach to humanity.
(cf. Giovanni Biglino, “Conversation With Julian Bell, http://thetamarind.eu/en/2010/04/19/english-conversation-with-julian-bell/; April 2010, Accessed August 2010)
“Orchidaceous Extras” – Half-Tonning it with Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty’s essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” published in Philosophy and Social Hope, is a brief but powerful intellectual biography. Here Rorty charts his interests as a child through his philosophical education to his conclusive pragmatism.
We follow Rorty from his prurient, affable, pre-teen interest in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and his well-intentioned (but understandably incomplete) efforts to conquer Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, to his volunteer years with the Workers’ Defense League, to an obsession with wild orchids. Finally to the University of Chicago in 1946 where Rorty, as an undergraduate intended to, “[...] reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me – in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats – ‘hold reality and justice in a single vision’.
He continues, “By reality I meant more or less, the Wordsworthian moments in which [...] I had felt touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance. By justice I meant what Norman Thomas and Trotsky both stood for, the liberation of the weak from the strong. I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity – a nerd recluse and a fighter for justice. I was very confused, but reasonably sure that at Chicago I would find out how grown-ups managed to work the trick I had in mind.”
For quite some time I believed likewise that philosophy, theology, and art held the keys to this sort of ‘unification theory’ wherein absolutes could be distilled, understood, and then held up as signposts pointing the way to a truthful life. In this manner, I could transcend the ‘Thuggism of Ideas’ prevalent in evangelical Christianity and Conservatism (this was the 1980’s; the term ‘neo-con’ was not yet a part of the daily vernacular, this was the real deal).
Much of my youth and early adulthood was spent trying to reconcile multiple different aesthetic and religious frameworks and mash them together (a love for the Grateful Dead with a love for Black Flag for example, or Gnostic Christianity and the Old Testament, or Jean-Michel Basquiat and Mark Rothko—the list is fairly long).
In retrospect, these pursuits were just easy ways to lose oneself for months or years at a time. What mattered not was the assemblage of these items; what mattered was the enjoyment of them. A few steps further, however, takes us to Rorty’s conclusion that no matter how much we enjoy Proust or Yeats or wild flowers, Dewey’s community of human solidarity and secularist society make these artistic achievements orchidaceous extras.
In the end, I lacked the intellectual fortitude—let’s face it, I can be rather lazy—to assemble something along the lines of Rorty’s pragmatism. But I still like to think of Rorty as the strong man at the circus and I recall the lines to Superchunk’s “1000 Pounds”:
“Now you wish you weighed a thousand pounds / So you could crush all those bullies and demons down / From your seat at the back of the bus / You’re still waving back at us.”
