Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (German, 1797–1855). Meissen in Winter, 1854.
Meissen in Winter
Category Archives: Art
Erotic tragedy proposed: Section 5
Christian Schad (1894-1982). Count St. Genois d'Anneaucourt, 1927. Oil on wood. 33 7/8 x 24 13/16 in. (86 x 63 cm). Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
One stream of contemporary erotic tragedy must look to the urbanized Neue Sachlichkeit movement of Weimar Germany: there it will find considerable historic and aesthetic inspiration. The concerns of 21st century theatre, art and music are not dissimilar to those of Germany in the immediate post-WWI era — a government torn between radical right and radical left movements; the integration of technology and mass media into more organic cultural constructs; and, perhaps more, a malaise born of anxiety and fear (see, for this, the entry “Crisis and Melancholy”). The more polished but estranging two-dimensional figuration of the New Objectivist painters brings the erotic content of the Expressionists into a sharper focus against a city’s background of grays, browns, and blacks, the asphalt and concrete thrusting the more colorful and vibrant sexualities of the subjects to the fore. The elegance of the count is caught within a vortex of competing desires: though unshaken, he remains strangely a participant, the arm of the disdainful woman in green brushing lightly against the sleeve of his tuxedo jacket, the red-gowned transvestite treating this show of heterosexuality with some hauteur. Says one critic:
The Graf, or Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt was a well-known figure in Viennese society, where Schad had family connections. St. Genois d’Anneaucourt was known partly for being an aristocrat and diplomat, and partly for being the object of great, gossipy speculation. Where did his preferences lay? Male, female, both or neither? He never said, so Schad portrays the Count elegantly dressed in evening clothes here, looking somewhat trapped while standing before two figures garbed in sheer gowns. They eye each other as if rivals for his attention, one a rather severe and mannish woman (identified as Baroness Glasen, for whom the Count often served as a “walker,” or male escort), the other a transvestite. Schad has put a rather smug expression on the transvestite’s face, but that was merely a guess on the artist’s part.
In the midst of a Weimar culture always on the verge of collapse — even in the years preceding 1933 — the Neue Sachlichkeit artists turned subject and object against themselves; in the vast number of self-portraits these painters created, they even painted and considered themselves as sexual beings, objectifying and parodying their own masculinity. But the objectification was paradoxically liberating, allowing these subjects to see themselves anew in a mechanical culture that threatened to far outstrip their ability to keep their bearings: all bets for a static identity were off. Against the dark city at sundown (or is it dawn?), the sheer sensuousness of the fabric and textile of the clothing asserts a luxurious possibility of pleasure through a masterly technique akin to that of the painters of the Northern Renaissance.
Hard particularity instead of abstraction; the city rather than the pastoral; precision of graceful movement rather than excessive emotionalism; culture rather than alienation. What the Neue Sachlichkeit and the erotic tragedy retain from Expressionism is the same attempt to depict the drives of existence and sexuality as they flow through the phenomenon. They still retain in this urban expression the transformative potential of desire: in the city, rather than nature, and in silence and stillness, rather than chaos.
Fluxus
“Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life,” at the Grey Art Gallery. Photo: Dima Gavrysh for The New York Times.
I had a rare few spare minutes on Saturday and stopped in briefly at “Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life,” the new exhibition at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery which runs through 3 December. It’s a well-organized, impressive display of work from the movement begun in the 1960s by artist and real estate developer George Maciunas. Founded in 1962, Fluxus (whether movement, philosophy or convenient umbrella for a variety of artists) had a rather extraordinarily long life that in various manifestations continues today. (Maciunas was also a major force in the rise of Soho as an artistic community.) The visual and plastic arts occupy the main floor of the exhibition, including samples of Fluxfilms by ’60s filmmakers Paul Sharits, George Landow, Nam June Paik, George Brecht and others, but don’t miss the ancillary “Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond” exhibition in the basement, which includes excellent archival material from Fluxus music and performance events, including video of a Stuart Sherman performance and documents from John Cage, La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow.
I plan to stop in to spend more time there later this week, but for now, the exhibition raises a series of questions and issues regarding the role of art in 21st century culture: the reproducibility of the work of art and its dissemination through society; new technology, mediation and expressivity; the aesthetics of political protest, and much much more. As my walk to work takes me directly past Liberty Square every morning, comparisons between the “Occupy Wall Street” project and the student protests and war culture of the 1960s and 1970s, when Fluxus flourished, are perhaps inevitable. For now, take the time to visit the exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery on Washington Square East (suggested donation $3.00, free to NYU faculty, students and staff). Ken Johnson reviewed the show for The New York Times last Friday with a dizzying combination of enthusiasm, condescension and trivialization — a trick at which Times‘ arts and culture reviewers are singularly adept.
Portrait
Paul Cava. Denise (Rope). 2010. Archival pigment print; 13 x 19" sheet. Edition of 15.
Paul Cava‘s photo-based collages and montages generate juxtapositions of the forbidden, the natural, the technical, and the human. The layered planes of the collages have a tendency to estrange the viewer from the photographic plane most distant from the viewer: the human, Eros, must be sought beneath writing, the natural world, and this technology (airplanes and Ferris wheels have played a large part in his collages of the past five or six years, particularly underscoring artificial and technological means of vertical transcendence). He has more recently turned to a series of photographic portraits, like most photographic portraiture presenting a more unmediated experience of the subject (and for that more erotic and in some cases disturbing, but no more provocative surely than the more sensual of his collages). More interestingly these portraits undo the collage, the layers of which mediate the experience through the manipulation of the artist. As does the photograph, of course, but like the portraits of the New Objectivity they are similarly confrontational and welcoming. Cava is no provocateur however: any provocation is a second-degree experience of his work, which first suggests interior transgression.
I have written about Paul Cava’s work on several occasions and call attention to this writing here. More from his own online portfolio here.
Crisis and melancholy
Georg Scholz. Self-Portrait in front of an Advertising Column. 1926. Oil on pasteboard, 59.5 x 78.5 cm. Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle.
The melancholy that attends the work of the late Expressionists, and especially those of the New Objectivity, is inherent in the work. In Scholz’ self-portrait above, the individual is surrounded by advertising slogans and commercial businesses on a concrete street, and as in many portraits of the era, the subject himself seems set in amber. It is as if the Dionysian qualities of the German Expressionists, with their dynamic action and bright colors, had exhausted themselves, leaving only an Apollonian contemplation of the cities that were left in their wake. The New Objectivists also abandoned the explicit nature-mysticism of the Expressionists — when nature is absent, as through the asphalt alleys of the city, one can’t see the spirit that inheres in it.
When we look back at these pictures from the perspective of history, knowing that the second European war was at least ten years in the offing, we may be accused of inferring from the work our own sense of impending disaster for the subjects in the portraits themselves — a critical malfeasance to be sure. But the melancholy and sadness exhibited by these portraits, even those of an erotic and sexual nature, are inescapable, even once the historical context has been set to one side. The expression has a different spiritual quality: the subjects look out to us with a self-knowledge that they are doomed, and that they are losing their grip on the imaginative sensuality that their bodies express: a mourning. Art becomes a means of preserving the expression of sensual imagination for future generations, should they exist. Scholz, and the other figures in this portraiture, are becoming lost in the Culture Industry of 1920s Germany; propaganda and fascism were already imposing themselves on the individual imagination in the effort to exterminate it in the interests of a greater German whole. Hitler’s government grouped both Expressionists and New Objectivists in its definition of entartete Kunst. We need no government to do that for us in 21st century in America. We have learned from our Culture Industry to do it for ourselves.
During his sojourn in Germany in 1936-1937, Samuel Beckett acquired a familiarity with (if not an expertise in) both Expressionist and New Objectivist art. In 1949, he may have had in mind the German movement when he defined the project of the postwar artist in the Three Dialogues: “The expression that there is nothing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” It remains a project of the artist who recognizes that he or she lives, writes, and paints in a post-catastrophic era.