[BACKGROUND NOTES: #s 1-6 deal with pieces I stumbled upon at the National Museum of Catalan Art, in Barcelona, with a few exceptions as noted; #s 7-8 deal with pieces I stumbled upon at the Magritte Museum in Brussels; #s 9-17 deal with pieces I stumbled upon at the Kunsthaus Zürich, with a few exceptions as noted; and #18 is a glorious mystery.]

1.

Francisco de Zurbarán, The Crucified Christ, 1627

When I stood in front of this very large and threatening work, the thought crossed my mind Christ’s hands might tear forth from the nails, and his decaying torso collapse right onto me — me! — this puny, comfortable, 21st-century spectator. The pious grandeur, or the romance of suffering, that is depicted here is at such odds with the sensibilities of the museum-frequenting public, and yet I suspect the majority of us find ourselves mesmerized by its scrupulousness. Every detailed stroke is emblematic of a terror-stricken faith on the part of Zurbarán, that devoted chronicler of Counter-Reformation Spain. And while this consecration must have brought great comfort to the eyes of the 17-century peasant (“You, like Jesus, know pain and purpose”), for most of us I’m guessing it heralds quite the opposite message: You don’t know real pain, and you don’t bother much with real purpose, so stop drooling over what’s long gone and make your expedient way to Dalí. Then the exit. The Barcelona beach awaits!

2.

Ramon Casas i Carbó, La Mandra, circa 1898-1901

From what I gather, Ramon Casas was an inventive court painter for Barcelona’s fin-de-siècle and early 20th-century ruling class. But it appears he was far more interesting when not kowtowing to the elites.  I’m not privy to who’s featured in this portrait, although I’m guessing it’s a model and/or lover. What fascinates me is (a) the title, “La Mandra,” which translates from the Catalan into “laziness” and from the Spanish into “salamander,” and (b) the way the subject positions herself languidly about the bed, not so much like a salamander, but a chameleon. Her figure is decisively passive, so passive that she’s rendered nearly indistinguishable from the sheets and mattress that support her. (The bed-woman also appears to be levitating, which only raises further questions.) Of course, the seductive tableau is familiar, but the particulars mark a striking contrast with its latest renditions, where a supermodel is regularly cast in a more active, raw, and vibrant role, and where the environs hardly register at all, and to the extent that they do, they serve as the lifeless foil.

Sante D’Orazio photograph of Christy Turlington [I just cribbed this from Google after searching for “supermodel in bed.”]

Santiago Rusiñol i Prats, Piano Lesson

Santiago Rusiñol i Prats, Female Figure, 1894

These I love. There’s the continuing theme of female passivity — Casas and Rusiñol were friends and collaborators — but it’s further complicated.

In Piano Lesson, while the viewing subject is still the man, and the viewed object still the woman, it’s actually the latter who’s doing anything of consequence, namely, playing the piano. Moreover, while one may not be inclined to read any seduction into this scene, it’s difficult not to ignore the man’s expression, which is wistful verging on lustful. What’s additionally noteworthy is that it’s now the male who’s adopted the languid posture, even as he’s still allowed the advantageous claim of beneficiary or client (the one who gets to watch and listen), even though he’s supposed to be the benefactor in this case (the piano teacher). It’s almost as if no matter what the woman does in this particular time and place, no matter how “in charge” her specific activity or circumstance, she’ll always be relegated as object in a larger script drawn up by the man.

Female Figure, which appears to use the same model, is now being feasted upon by (who I’m guessing is) Rusiñol himself.* Again, the obvious enjoyment goes to the male, as it is he who gets to watch. But there’s a double enjoyment here, thanks to the mirror, of which the woman is granted no access. What she does have, however, is the window, seemingly a whole world “out there” to which only she holds the key. If Rusiñol wanted, he could glance “out there” as well, or better yet, position her in front of the window. But then he’d lose the mirror, meaning he’d lose the ability to watch her twice, not to mention getting to watch himself watch her. The voyeurism kick would be exponentially downgraded. And so the whole world “out there” is sacrificed. And so we, the 21st-century tourist, the receiver of this curated history, aren’t allowed into that world, either. And would we really want to be distracted from such a perfectly cropped and enticing scene? Only the female figure gets to know and enjoy and suffer whatever it is that lies outside that window frame… and she knows it all alone.

*It’s possible the “piano teacher” is also Rusiñol.

4.

Salvador Dalí, Portrait of Joan Maria Torres, circa 1921

For the sake of surprising argument, let’s compare this with Zurbarán’s The Crucified Christ (#1). It first needs to be noted that this was painted around the time Dalí’s mother died from cancer, and the 16-year-old artist was in a bad state. I don’t know who Joan Maria Torres is, but I’m going to pretend the question is irrelevant and that, no matter who he is, Dalí is focused, consciously or otherwise, in venting his own grief. There is so much to be said here, especially in contrast to the Zurbarán. For starters, the 20^th-century artist — in his narcissism, nihilism, and salesmanship, in many ways the prototypical 20^th-century personality — no longer needs to retreat to religious myth in order to convey suffering. Secondly, the suffering conveyed can be of an entirely personal sort, and need not speak to the peasants or people beyond. Thirdly, both Zurbarán and Dalí’ use unreal color contrasts and shades to make their morbid and/or solemn points, although the former’s tactic is still rooted in some believable physical reality, whereas the latter’s is not. Dalí’s genius lies in turning the predicament inside out, so that his own internal soot is made to appear as the soot of the world, so that the two — the self and the world — become almost indistinguishable, except in the fact that the world is made to be the polluter or aggressor. In other words, the opposition is that between 17^th-century self-sacrifice and 20-century self-pity. What is not communicated in either of these images, however, is the third progression, which can only be delivered by we, the audience. While a good part of the world, and even a good part of the rich world, still exists in a 17^th-century context of self-sacrifice (i.e. the wretched of the earth), and while a good part still exists in the 20^th-century context of self-pity, I would venture that for many, especially among the privileged museum-frequenting public, we have advanced to yet a later stage of total forgetfulness, both in relation to ourselves and our world. This is the stage that is acted out by the carefree iPhone-boasting tourist who, having stumbled upon the Dalí toward the tail end of her exhausting chore in “culture,” turns to her present company and says, “Ugh, so depressing! I think it’s time for the beach!” And so Dalí and Zurbarán finally join up, as mutual sufferers, in the graveyard of the obsolete.

5.

Agusti Centelle, Guardias de asalto, 1936

I’d like to think the collection of unpublished Spanish Civil War photographs subsequent Dalí’s Portrait of Joan Maria Torres (see #4) was intentional, if only to re-inject some hope into übermensch types like myself.* If so, it almost worked. I say “almost,” because as much as I admire the great courage and solidarity that was embodied by the Republicans fighters, I also must fess up to the fact that Franco won, and that in the larger scheme of things, Franco still wins. That’s not to say there haven’t been flickers of resistance since. (Of late: Egypt, Occupy, and of course, the Indignados.) But as I strolled from frame to frame, equally enthralled and saddened by the passing imagery, I couldn’t help but notice how much the crowd had thinned. It was as if the one explicitly political exhibit was optional, whereas the rest of the show was obligatory. Even when so depressing, each piece was still politely endured, until you arrived at the homage to Catalonia. That, my comrades, could be politely ignored.

It’s an interesting commentary, that while every upper-middle-class school kid reads and loves Orwell, and some even put up Orwell as one of their favorite reads on Facebook**, the privileged class as a whole finds any politics lying outside the conventional electoral system as not only optional, but thankfully nonexistent. Perhaps this is a good segue into another little tidbit. When I first arrived in Barcelona, and went off on my customary walk to nowhere, I happened upon a brochure concerning a tour centered on Spain’s civil war. The text exhorted me, the consumer, to “see Barcelona from a new perspective!”*** and Lonely Planet called the thing “ENGROSSING.” I have yet to decide whether or not this effort should be welcomed into the annals of collective memory.

*Not that I am an übermensch, or that I ought to be, but simply that I oh-so wannabe.

**Although I figure, with the coming generations, this pattern is in steep decline — both the Orwell reading and the book reading more generally. Most students of higher education, even at the elite institutions, don’t even know there was a Spanish civil war.

***As if Spain’s greatest modern catastrophe had been demoted to a footnote, which it clearly has been.

6.

Juli González i Pellicer, Head Shouting, Circa 1936-1939

Juli González i Pellicer, Montserrat Shouting, No 1, Circa 1936-1939

Juli González i Pellicer, Montserrat Shouting, No 1, 1940

Juli González i Pellicer, Head of the Montserrat Shouting, 1942

Juli González i Pellicer, La Montserrat, 1936-1937

This is an extraordinary series of sculptures, sketches, and paintings, of which I’m only posting a selection*, all evocative of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (see below). But unlike its unspoken inspiration, there’s an involved social context here that’s worth discussing. It’s not an accident the sequence’s realization coincided with the Spanish Civil War, and even though González had escaped his homeland for Paris as early as 1900, there’s no question he felt the reverberations from afar. Montserrat, in fact, is the name of the mountain range that presides over Barcelona. So this woman screaming with her child in her hand is hardly isolated, but a representative scream, one bursting forth from an entire people, and perhaps even an entire continent and civilization. Again, keep note of the historical interval at which these works were composed. Another intriguing fact is that, as far as the iron work goes, González was employing an “autogenous soldering” technique he had learned in a French factory during World War One. It’s invigorating (and instructive) to learn that through the rise of industrial capitalism and total war, one artist exploited the very tools of his epoch as a means for such affecting protest.

Edvard Munch, The Scream of Nature, 1893

*All but the last can be found at the National Museum of Catalan Art.

7.

René François Ghislain Magritte, The Breast, 1961

Magritte claims his titles were assigned in total disregard to the contents of his works. Then again, Magritte claimed a lot of things, many of which didn’t adhere to anything nearing logic. So let’s take him at his word on this one, and then let’s not take him at his word. And let’s also keep in mind the role of the subconscious. Before even acknowledging the title, I found this to be a biting commentary on the state of postwar architecture, and its relation to culture more broadly. There’s a long and worthy tradition that outlines our culture’s departure from the notion that our man-made surroundings should in any way reflect a culture of creative and communal purpose. Instead, we’re all treated like cows in a cow pen, or in the above context, like trash in a trash pile. As long as there’s some kind of roof, the requisite number of sides, and an entry/exit point, the functionalist goal has been achieved. Woe to those who demand anything more. Woe to those who expect to be treated as human brethren, as works of art. So Magritte returns the favor and treats postwar urban and suburban planning like trash, too. Oorah to that! But now let’s factor in that seemingly inconvenient title, The Breast. Assuming there’s some relevance to it other than its shape, what does it mean? For me, if there’s a hidden didacticism, the answer lies in the symbolism implied by a woman’s breast, or the idea of nurture. The meanings behind the words culture and nurture are not identical, but they are coterminous. Whether it’s the painting or the painter who is affirming it, the force of the message becomes clear: If we’re nurtured by a culture of trash, so will we be condemned by it.

8.

La Memoire, René François Ghislain Magritte, 1948

For what it’s worth, I find this take on memory considerably more compelling than Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. Fuck Dalí.

In the background we have the sea and the sky, or rather, the fluidity of the two. As modern art and literature (especially psychology) were making abundantly clear at the moment of this conjuring, our perception and experience of time is more amorphous than our everyday language would have it. What we feel, think, say, hope, fear, and remember subsists in a web of instability that we routinely deny. The objects that foreground our conscious life, objects of provisional solidity, are engulfed by a daunting reality (or surreality?) comprised of liquid and gas, of which even these terms prove ambiguous.

I’d like to argue the curtain alludes to Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage,” but that would be too Anglo of me. The velvet nevertheless evokes life’s final closure, and how that knowledge looms in the wings. Notice the placement of the drape, hovering behind and above the head, casting a quarter moon on the face, in perfect alignment with the darker half. Notice how the cloth blocks out the symbolic unconscious altogether, as if it is only at this juncture of mental activity that a single ghost reigns supreme, the ghost of death.

Then there’s the ledge itself, our floor, the stuff we stand on, the concrete we rely on as a means of getting by, as a means of not falling through, of not drowning. The cruel joke here is that, like everything else, it still floats amid the liquid-gas abyss like everything else. It’s another provision among provisions.

Which brings me to the leaf and the sphere. In addition to claiming the titles of his works had nothing to do with the works themselves, Magritte also shocked us with the seeming confession that his images hold no symbolic import either. And while this may be true in a limited sense, meaning the artist didn’t construct his pieces with any deliberate attempt at metaphor, Magritte was too frequent a reader of Freud for us to take this statement at face value. Intention, like consciousness, only tells a tenth of the story. When I pondered these items for the first time, and the jarring juxtaposition between them, one easy allegory sprung up — that between past and future, nostalgia and hope. The leaf represents green memory, the lie of a fertile past cast against a sterile and lonely present. The sphere exudes an alternative myth of the future, one perhaps just as cement-like as the present, but imbued with a futurist’s (or Prozac booster’s) knack for a whimsical (or a clean and rounded) escape from the craggy present. The former, however, is still the more potent of dreams, the inner outlier in the fight for the mind’s eye. And it’s likely the blade’s very prickles responsible for the rivulets of blood, the only sign of vitality on an otherwise sleepy visage.

We may be approaching a stage in our psychic personalities where the leaf’s been swept away by the gusts of history, where there is no leaf.

9.

Otto Müller, Akt auf Sofa liegend, 1919

I know next to nothing about this artist, other than he painted many nudes and gypsies, and that a running theme in his work was the oneness between humanity and nature. So I’m going to disregard his biography and just offer up what seems to me to be an obvious but worthwhile interpretation. Here we have a naked woman, uncoiling herself on a sofa, thinking naughty thoughts. What makes the image interesting is that it’s not her precise thoughts that are being conveyed, but the overall mood from which those thoughts crawl out. She is thinking filthy thoughts, carnivorous thoughts, thoughts that belong to the swamp, with the lizards. She is thinking she’s dinner, for a whole jungle of them, her summoned predators. There’s something especially erotic about this, something whose eroticism surpasses the standard hypersexual role-play. I suppose it’s the object’s* explicit association with cruel animal life, with the blood-soaked fancies and goings-on of the beasts. One would imagine, then, that this would accord with Müller’s alleged mission of portraying humanity’s identity with nature. And yet, I think this piece effectively points in the opposite direction, toward a reality where men and women get off on the very thought of surrendering their humanity, their uniqueness, their nagging moralism, in a way a lizard never will.**

*It’s the object if you’re looking at this as the predator, and the subject if you’re looking at it as the prey.

**A contrary and comical layer to this is the stuffed-animal quality of the depictions. It’s as if the woman thirsts after a hard brutality and a soft protectiveness all at once.

10.

Marc Chagall, Le Martyr, 1940

Marc Chagall, La Guerre, 1964-1966

Perhaps there’s no finer exemplar of Magritte’s “green leaf” (See #8) than Chagall’s Vitebsk, the Belarusian city of his youth, and the guiding inspiration for so much of his most stirring canvases. Le Martyr and La Guerre — presented together at the Kunsthaus Zürich —signify a watermark in this exercise of redemptive nostalgia. It’s a nostalgia that reaches decisively outward and forward instead of inward and backward. Hence the inclusion of (and identification with) the Jesus figure in both montages, despite the predominant theme of Jewish devastation. Hence the hints of hope amid twentieth-century wreckage; the fiddler entering stage left to string up a tune; the incandescently imposing scapegoat rising like a phoenix to extinguish the flames. Of course, like so many other modernist achievements, were I to conclude my analysis here, I’d be denying the complexity, ambiguity, and subterranean mystery at play (and at war) in Chagall’s oeuvre. What, after all, could possibly be meant by the counterclockwise swooping and satanic goat, an icon that obtrudes throughout the artist’s career? Other than maybe a life and death interplay with its white analogue, I haven’t the slightest…

Nevertheless, in this deliberate couplet, spanning across two and a half decades, it’s hard not to appreciate Chagall’s role as the quintessential modernist, which is indistinct from dubbing him (as so many are wont to do) the quintessential Jewish modernist. He stared down the bloodlust of modernity, and forced it to blink. He did so not by forgetting or excusing or surrendering, but by confrontation, day in and day out, with the depths of memory and strife. Through this heroic act, he pointed us toward a way out, or at least a way againstthe destructiveness of his age, one steeped in a strenuous ethic of communal dignity and cosmopolitan grace. There was a fleeting moment, even, when modernist brilliance and Jewish resilience sang in unison. Is it too impolitic for me to suggest, as a proud Jew, both in rage and longing, that our Marc Chagalls have been seized by our Bernie Madoffs, and that the next cycle of the goats is upon us?*

*We’ve come a long way from Moses and his Decalogue, or the colors of Chagall. At dusk, accompanied by hostel mates, I strolled the riverfront in Prague. I struck up a conversation with a “half-Jew” (his avowal) American, a recent graduate of New York University, a political science major, an obvious frat boy, someone who made it clear he had no passion for anything, no inkling as to what he was meant to do with himself, that his trip to Europe was comprised of excessive drinking and risky sex, and that all this probably marked a desperate adjournment of the inevitable — that “inevitable” being his return to the states as an up-and-coming Wall Street or legal maven, just like his frat bro fellows. “What the hell,” he said, “there’s a lot of money and pussy in it.”

11.

Giovanni Segantini, Alpweiden, 1895

It’s one of the stark ironies of history that the myth of the rugged individual culminated with the rise of the city. The mantra elicits images of the solitary masculine personage, adept with his hands, at once in command and at peace with the hazards around him. While it doesn’t necessitate the pastoral ideal, it slouches in that direction. And yet, when Herbert Hoover and his flock employed (and still employ) the term, it’s almost always on behalf of demonstrably opposing interests and forces, those entangled with stultifying work routines, paralyzing consumerism, soul-defying bureaucracies, helpless communities, sheepish dogmas, and countless other forms of mass surrender that encourage anything but self-sufficiency and a shepherd’s mastery over nature. It is, in fact, the worst of the faceless urban realities that such rhetoric comes to reinforce, as it always manages to labor in the service of a minority capital actively opposed toindividual empowerment. Segantini’s Alpwieden (translated from the German as “Pastures”), at the dawn of our corporate and state capitalist epoch, offers up the “rugged individual” folk ballad in spades, as he combines his own childhood inner tumult* with the scenery of his later years ensconced in the Alps. What is noteworthy in this work — which takes up a full wall at the Kunsthaus Zürich — is the loneliness and exhaustion that such a life entails. There’s the grandeur, the beauty, and the implied moral and physical rigor, but there’s also the sad sloping posture of our Arcadian antihero, and an unintentional commentary on how and why city life, even its ugliest aspects, came to prevail.

*At the age of seven, his mother died and his father abandoned him. He wandered Europe, a stateless vagabond, for almost a decade thereafter.

12.

Max Beckmann, Strandpromenade Scheveningen, 1928

This is the most terrifying creation I ever had the displeasure of embracing. I embraced it (and embrace it still) for therapeutic reasons, for the painful relief it brings to know I’m not alone. Unlike Beckmann, who served as a medic during World War One, I was never traumatized in combat. Nor did I return to a sick home front ripe for Nazism. Nonetheless, as Beckmann reached into the darkest corners of his soul so as to pull out some simulacrum of what it was like to walk about the most advantaged, frequented, or self-satisfied sectors of public life with war and poverty and injustice and cultural demolition weighing heavy on the mind…  I can’t help but indulge in his result 80 years ahead. Are those not human heads hanging from the tall and proud poles where the lanterns ought to rest*, and a daunting storm rushing in from the sea, and a high-society lady protected and gliding about in her advanced escort, and a spectral and ominous countenance glaring up from the pavement? And are these not the same staples of privilege and latent horror that any veteran will recognize whenever he or she ventures off to Fifth Avenue, the lavish promenades of Europe, or anywhere outside the official spheres of death?

*This was my first impression. I have since come to doubt my own senses; they were just intended to be lanterns, no? Whatever the case, I still consider my first take worthy of a voice.

13.

Alex Prager, Ellen, 2007

Alex Prager, Annie, 2008

Alex Prager, Helen, 2008

These stunning photographs can be found at the Kunsthaus Zürich, interjected between very serious masterpieces. I wish I could claim the colors of Prager are teasingly positioned on both sides of our colorful Chagall couplet (see #10), but they aren’t. No matter who their most immediate neighbors may be (I don’t remember), the point is well made. If you Google “Alex Prager,” as I have, you’ll see that the early-thirty-something daughter of California hippies isn’t interested in the high modernist stuff of yesteryear, with all its grand themes and grave narratives. Her ambitions are decidedly antic, she a postmodern playmate with Quentin Tarantino, the producers of Mad Men, and even the minds behind the better half of the superhero craze. Like Hitchcock before her — and to a lesser extent, the Dadaists and Andy Warhol, too — Prager fits comfortably in the Anti-Art tradition, that now omnipresent body of objects and personalities which deems the whole business of art as so conclusively just that, a business. This anti-elitist realization whips itself up in many forms, to include the political and condemnatory, but usually with an accepting irony. As Gertrude Stein said in relation to place, and as I’ll reenact in relation to value, there’s no there there. What we’re left with is another sale, one marketed (ironically) within the same elitist packaging as the days of yore, and one obtaining a more interesting plane of cleverness or technique, but a sale all the same.

This makes my efforts, up to this point, something of an embarrassment. There’s no worse crime, vis-à-vis postmodern quiescence, than earnestness. Unfortunately for me, seriousness is a mandate. I still see human heads falling from the street poles where the lanterns need be (see #12). I’m open to the notion all’s a sale, and I’m even eager to bask myself in the lightest of the stock. But I can’t forfeit the possibility of a creative sobriety — alongside the drunken pulp — that might just prod us toward a community where the heads don’t hang.

14.

Berlinde De Bruyckere, Speechless Grey Horse, 2004

Berlinde De Bruyckere, Into One-Another III To P.P.P., 2010

Berlinde De Bruyckere, Marthe, 2008

Here are three examples of the kind of “creative sobriety” I have in mind (See #13).* Bruyckere, like Prager, is a product of the late capitalist art market, which is why her Wiki page can close with the sleek Berlinde de Bruyckere is represented by Hauser & Wirth. This is not to say patronage in art is new, only to suggest that it’s progressed alongside the business-speak of the times. Bruyckere, for her part, doesn’t appear fazed, maintaining what can only be interpreted as a solemn mission statement. Back to her Wiki page, just prior to the merchandising plug, we are informed that many of her major works have featured structures involving blankets. Their use is symbolic both of warmth and shelter, and of the vulnerable circumstances such as wars that make people seek such shelter.

 But the above tidbit hardly marks the scope of Bruyckere’s humanism. The artist is known for rooting her work in the somber tributes of her Flemish forebears (see below). She also dedicated a recent exhibit, of which Into One-Another To P.P.P. was snagged, to one of the great and haunting students of human nakedness, Pier Paolo Pasolini (hence P.P.P.). For Pasolini and Bruyckere, as it was for church art (See #1), drawing attention to the suffering body is synonymous with reminding the viewer what it means to be alive, and more to the point, what it means to be a moral actor. Whereas artists like Magritte (See #7-8) and Chagall (See #10) beckon the responsible in us by way of fanciful layered symbolism, the aforementioned company arrives at the same end by way of an unremitting re-acquaintance with our own squirming flesh. The more abstract masters respectfully encourage us to think beyond a permanent state of narcissism, distraction, and social injustice, while the latter moralists merely scare the shit out of us, so as to shock us from our slumber. They remind us what’s at stake in our actions — or more relevant in our lot of mass consumerism and complacency, our inactions — by forcing us to look death in the face, the very death that insinuates itself into our delicate bulk and pallor.  By doing so, we come to hone in on limits and continuities with nature (Marthe), as well as our need to unite with one another (Into One-Another III To P.P.P) in the wake of mutual frailty.

Rogier van der Weyden, The Descent from the Cross, circa 1435

*I discovered Speechless Grey Horse at the Kunsthaus Zürich, and I sought out works like Into One-Another To P.P.P. and Marthe on the Internet. You can find more here.

15.

Juergen Teller, Paradis Serie, 2009

While this isn’t one of Teller’s most visually enticing shots, it’s one of the few I happened upon in Zurich, and it’s worth a gloss. I’ll begin by admitting someone like me ought really hate someone like Teller. The short of it is that I’m an aspiring writer and thinker at a time when reading and thinking have been degraded to the point of approaching erasure, and Teller is a glamorous fashion photographer in the age of the spectacle and the image. I can only fathom the temptation to despise is even more corrosive for the serious artist contingent, seeing he’s been intervening on their turf (and their gallery space) with works like the above, which when all is said and done, amounts to a gimmick. But when I read this glossy profile on him here, I can’t help liking the guy, even though he boasts a Mercedes and a Rolex, even though he’s a prodigal son of model mayhem, and even though he’ll never even flirt with the possibility of a social conscience. For one, he’s monstrously talented within the confines of his craft. And more pressingly, he reminds me of some of my Marines, all those rude lively souls, born into shitty families and forsaken towns, determined toward stardom, who by the rules of some cosmic arithmetic, I respect unconditionally, whether or not they ever have it in them to show up at a rally or a protest. And, yes, I find this as patronizing as you do.

But let’s consider the work at hand, or rather, the series of works, in which Juergen Teller gambols through the Louvre with a nude sixty-something friend (Charlotte Rampling) and a nude twenty-something model (Raquel Zimmermann), snapping stills. As others on the Internet have already noted, the stunt isn’t terribly imaginative. It exposes the gap between stuffy art ideals and more gritty realities, and this is clever. But then why employ 21^st-century Mona Lisas to do the bidding? I’m assuming Teller couldn’t quite live up to his own critique, seeing he was disinclined to spend a night at the Louvre with two bare mediocrities. He likely believes a gorgeous sixty-something with no coverings qualifies as the subaltern, not to mention the twenty-something, who is way past her prime according to the absurdities of his profession. So the experiment turns in on itself, thus indicting the heretic with the same sin as the true believer — the sin of aloofness. While Teller displays signs of thoughtfulness, maybe even a creeping guilt, he’s unwilling to make the sort of break that could leave a lasting dent, both in the world of fashion and the world of art.*

*I say this with ambivalence. He’s clearly moved his peers in more interesting directions. But based on the Paradis exhibition, as well as his comments in the New York Magazine sketch, it’s hard not to doubt any higher ambitions. A comparison might be drawn with Robert Crumb, specifically his Comic Book Version of James Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763 (also featured at the Riotous Baroque exhibit in Zurich), where he performs a similar trick, but in a separate context, and to a more committed effect:

Robert Crumb, Comic Book Version of James Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763, 1981 [This is just one of many selections from the book.]

Christian Van Couwenbergh, Rape of the Negro Girl, 1632

When this shocker first came into view, I figured it was a contemporary thumbing of the nose at some establishment narrative, something along the lines of Teller’s Paradis Serie or Crumb’s Comic Book Version of James Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763 (see #15). I was pleasantly surprised to discover such irreverence made itself available as early as 1632, by a Dutch painter at the height of the Dutch Empire, about twenty years before their settlement of the Cape Colony. This mammoth canvas, which reproduces the rape of a black girl with painstaking attention to the exchange of total horror for total bliss, could easily serve as the iconic memento of the coming Afrikaner conquest… or white conquest more broadly. And then there’s the victim’s minstrelsy complexion, raising the question as to whether or not the artist is in fact censuring or celebrating. But no matter the verdict, this tableau deserves a place in surveys of the Baroque, right alongside the Catholic masterpieces (see #1), if only to remind the student that no style need remain the purview of any given authority.

17.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, #464, 2008

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, #465, 2008

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, #468, 2008

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, #470, 2008

I’m a bit of a puritan, so as I arrived at the Cindy Sherman corner and this quartet bestowed their greetings, my first reaction was decidedly Aesopian. The lesson was straightforward, a warning of what not to do, and who not to be. Each specimen told her story by way of the scowl (#464, #465, #470) or the daze (#468). I had trouble making out the details, and a good part of the cast seemed to be speaking in concert, but the overall tone was evident. This is what happens when you worship false gods. Your  lineaments tell all, no matter how haute your haute couture, and your foundation and blush fail you.

But this is a cheap slant. While the tale resembles a select few among us…

Duchess of Alba

 … there’s always been an army of elderly socialites who’ve begged to differ…

Pat Buckley

And, besides, dowagers make too convenient a target. What of the men, who perhaps hold a far more demonstrable claim to the Cindy Sherman universe?

Donald Trump

Irrespective of wealth and its surrounding moral questions, Sherman’s grotesque setups bear down on more uncomfortable thoughts about the aging process itself. By my calculations, Sherman is approaching the regal perch of sixty, and it’s not too far a stretch to presume her latest work reflects this. One of the remarkable elements of these photographs is the superficiality of the backgrounds. This, combined with the over-the-top dress and makeup, leaves the audience with very little to latch onto as directly relatable to our shared experience. Except for the dour expressions themselves, which can just as easily speak to the turmoil of senescence as to the futility of privilege. In fact, in the act of taking Sherman’s arrangements seriously, the former pathos gives way to forgiveness of the latter corruption. Just as we come to disregard the photoshopped venues and the exaggerated costumes, so do we learn, in time, to forget the social circumstance. All that’s left — in a reverse calculus of previously discussed achievements (see #14)  — are tender bodies and wounded souls.

18.

Chai