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July 29, 2006

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July 28, 2006

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July 27, 2006

How we work: Tom Wolfe, author

In 'Shock of the New' in the excellent 100th issue of Frieze, Michael Bracewell asks Wolfe how he acquired his distinctive prose style:

I was influenced by some early Soviet writers, whose books I had come across by accident in the stacks at the Yale library. At that time only the graduate students could roam the stacks of the library, which was marvellous. I think most of us do most of our reading when we’re still in school. And so I came upon these writers known as the Brothers Serapian ­– Serapian being a character in The Tales of Hoffmann, a hermit. [...] The best-known of the group was Yevgeny Zamyatin, who wrote this marvellous novel, We (1921), which George Orwell, whom I also admire a lot, stole body and soul to write 1984 (1948). I’m surprised that nobody’s ever commented on this. I mean, Orwell didn’t take an idea; he took an entire plot! But that’s OK, they’re both great books. So if you ever read We, you can see a lot of things, stylistically, that I picked up. A lot of sudden breaking-off of thoughts with a dash – which I am convinced is more or less the way people think. We think in words, but we don’t think in whole sentences. [...]

There was this one piece I wrote for Esquire on customized automobiles. I already considered myself a very flashy newspaper writer – as newspaper writers went. But I had never even done a magazine piece at that point. So I blocked, and they said, ‘Well, just turn in your notes, and we’ll get a competent writer to put them into some sort of shape’. So with a heavy heart I sat down and just wrote it like a letter, like a memo to this particular editor. I was up all night writing it and brought it over to their office before they’d even opened. Then I was woken up at about four o’clock in the afternoon by this editor saying, ‘We’re running your memo – we’re just taking the salutation off the top’. Now that really did show me that you could cut loose! I was reasonably creative as a newspaper writer, but this was like, hey, you can get away with anything! I then started doing all sorts of things with the writing to try to bring alive the emotions of situations and gradually to start shaping them like short stories, going from scene to scene.

And then Wolfe gets a bit snippy about "modern art":

Q: In the essay that you wrote in 1976 for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ‘Chester Gould versus Roy Lichtenstein’, you make the very interesting point that commercial artisan craft can be more sophisticated, artistically, than the work of a lot of fine artists that is based on similar subject matter and techniques.

That was all part of the general theme of ‘The Painted Word’. And that brought on the most rabid, angry response that I’ve ever got for anything. I define the ‘art world’ as 3,000 people in America, and 10,000 people in the world. Of the ones in America, only 300 of the 3,000 do not live in the New York metropolitan area. And the ones in New York determine all the prestigious taste in art. As a result, artists who wanted prestige would treat illustration, comic books, the famous Brillo boxes, as if they were objects found on Easter Island. As in: ‘You don’t exactly know how they got there, but they’re interesting – they must be religious in nature.’ And it became considered primitive material.

In the case of the essay you mention, Chester Gould, the illustrator who created Dick Tracy, was a very sophisticated artist. He understood the limits of that particular graphic process of printing comics. If you look at the chiaroscuro in the Tracy comic strips, it’s brilliant! And it hadn’t been done before, as far as I know. Also some of the colouring - Dick Tracy wore a yellow hat; well, nobody has ever worn a yellow hat! So how could this be treated as primitive? He had more skill than Roy Lichtenstein. There is a line I love in Tom Stoppard’s play Artist Descending a Staircase (1988), when one of the characters says, ‘Imagination without skill gives us modern art’. And I think it’s quite true. Someone like de Kooning couldn’t draw a cat on a fence; but he was considered to have true genius because he painted like a child – a very young child, I’d say.

(If I remember correctly, De Kooning was actually one of the best draughtsmen since, say, Picasso.)

More How we work.

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July 26, 2006

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July 25, 2006

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July 24, 2006

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July 23, 2006

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July 22, 2006

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July 21, 2006

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July 20, 2006

Mona Hatoum's Map at Around the world in 80 days

I didn't make it to the South London Gallery-hosted half of this Jules Verne fest (the show has now closed), but did manage to see the ICA's half. Some notes on one of the works...

Mona Hatoum's Map. Looking west, from Australia Mona Hatoum's Map (1999) comprises a lot of clear iris-sized glass marbles arranged in clusters on the concrete floor to form a large map of the world. The projection looks like a Mercator, and you walk round it on two sides, west and south, which puts it in the orthodox North-is-up orientation. The patterns of light, often where the marbles are stacked two-deep, hint at geo-political boundaries, but there are no labels, nor is there any political colour-coding. The show's booklet says: "Precariously balanced, fragile yet potentially dangerous, Hatoum's work powerfully suggests the contingency that defines the geo-political landscape". Or: the map is pre-political, pre-historic, showing continental land in a ghostly, glassy white, and the sea is polished grey-brown concrete.

Looking at it, you forget everything else in the room. The problem is that until you see it, the map is actually quite easy to miss: at first glance your eye goes straight to some bright photos on the wall. Not noticed by the invigilator, and not noticing that he's entering the map's space, a man strides across the Pacific and his foot crunches down on the Western seaboard of South America. It's a natural disaster for the people of Northern Chile and Bolivia. The UN prepares relief flights in helicopters made of tiny glass beads. It's also a disaster for the marbles -- they aren't stuck down. A ripple propagates through South America, nudging Brazil, and there's a spray of marbles rolling back into the Pacific from the impact site. The invigilator yelps, and trots over to brush the marbles roughly back into shape. The man looks at his trainer as if it has betrayed him.

Some commentators see this as an intentional metaphor:

Visitors to the show repeatedly found themselves literally stumbling into the piece, sending bits of the world skittering across the concrete, in what is a convincing metaphor for the various human depredations of Mother Earth

And speaking of a similar map in Basel, Hatoum said:

the map was very fragile: as soon as one set foot on the parquet, the marbles on the floor started moving. At the same time, the work was very menacing. I like it when things are attractive and forbidding at the same time; both seductive and dangerous. The marbles made the floor hazardous, because you could slip on the glass balls and fall down. I've done quite a few works which destabilize the ground you walk on.

Mona Hatoum's Map. Looking east at South America Five minutes later, the invigilator explains to a woman that she's about to do the same. She stops in time, and looks down at the Pacific where she sees a few marbles scattered about, one here, a pair over there. She pauses for a couple of seconds. She assumes that they're stray outliers that have accidentally rolled away from the pack, rather than say, dutifully representing French Polynesia, because she helpfully sweeps them with her foot, tidying them towards South America. More yelping from the invigilator (and the UN wrings its hands over a most unlucky region). Even though it would only be clear to cartographers whether this marble is accurately placed to represent Vanuatu or not, the standard is to assume that things in galleries are deliberately placed. Look don't touch.

But perhaps it's not just a matter of an almost-camouflaged field of delicate material, or of the inherent manipulability of maps. It could also be the materials. Marbles are for play, for throwing. They're built to be rolled. The feel in the hand, the clacking sound they make, the flashing light as they roll - all make us want to throw them. And so, faced with marbles at her feet, her body reacted involuntarily sending them flying. A designer might say that marbles afford play more than they afford representation. Perhaps Hatoum is telling us that the world needs play -- the fluidity of happy give-and-take -- more than it needs the enframing, classifying, ossifying urges of cartographers and bureaucrats?

#

There is a growing history of accidental iconoclasm: in 2001, Damien Hirst's Painting-By-Numbers was binned by a cleaner. Usually it's the cleaners, but I would imagine they're just trying to do and keep their job, rather than being the front-line for some shadowy cultural hygnenism dedicated to homogenising the art experience. I wonder if a cleaner has ever tried to casually swing one of Gary Hume's bronze bin bags into a skip.

Posted at 06:19 PM in Art, architecture, books | | Comments (0)

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