Divagations on Jed Perl's second volume of "Calder"

As I began to think about finishing my reading and reviewing Jed Perl’s monumental second volume of the life of Calder, the art world was inundated by the responses to the publication of Blake Gopnik’s thousand page book on Warhol. I gathered from a few exchanges with Gopnik online that he sees the media saturated work of Warhol and Koons as the incontrovertible art of the present and in that sense world changing. The edge between mass culture and the individual has broken down and this duo with their philosophically hip intersubjectivity are defining the present and are the wave of the future. I came away with this encounter with Gopnik and the reading of Perl with what seemed to be a vision of two worlds diametrically opposed. On the one hand you have Calder who has uploaded the modernistic visual language of Miro into his own mobile work and in so doing added to its self-understanding as a transcendent language in defining the modern experience. He then heroically shepherds it from the world of kinetics down to earth into stabile sculpture where it takes its place in the public spaces created by the new urban landscape. On the other hand you have Warhol downloading the images of mass culture into his consciousness and calling them or at least being called by the art world high art. To make that claim requires that we acknowledge the overwhelming reality of mass visual media(television and movies) as dominant of the world we live in. It is a passive acknowledgment of the way the media colonizes our consciousness. It is in a sense reactionary as it is based on a parallel understanding between the flat screen of painting and the flat screen of the cinema and television. Nothing can be more antipodal to Calder who explodes the flat images of Miro into mobile 3D imagery. It is a continuation of the modernist vision of transforming our science-based notion of space and time started by the cubists. The history of Western art experiences this sort of upheaval periodically as in the perspective of the Renaissance or the chiaroscuro of the Baroque. Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro affected a change on painting that lasted three hundred years until its decadent manifestation in the Salon painters. Even the epigone of “everybody can be an artist” Jerry Saltz has come out with an article in New York magazine acknowledging his world changing genius.(did he plagiarize that as he did my exercise on abstract patterns from my book on drawing and painting where I made the above point about Caravaggio? )

In the context of Gopnik’s attempt to supplant the centrality of the modernism of Picasso and Miro with the media critique/pastiche of Warhol, Perl’s book could not be more timely. It reminds us of the uniquely inventive transformations that individuals bring to the greater culture. If Gopnik’s Warhol gives credence to the importance of the mediated world we live in by downloading its banality into his imagery, Calder uploads the individual creations of Miro into sculpture with a new notion of time and space. Reading Perl’s description of Calder’s life midst the movers and shakers of modernism creates a lucid image of the negotiations and strategies these artists pursued as they take their place on both sides of the Atlantic in the creative storm of modern art. Those events take place in the context of the political turmoil of the 20thc that could have easily swallowed them up. Interestingly, we see that the intellectual evolution of Calder’s work seems to parallel the architectural transformation of the urban scene so as to create a kind of urban space starting in the 1950’s perfectly adapted to Calder’s work. At the very beginning of the second volume, Perl describes the events leading up to the installation of the stabile “Grande Vitesse” in Grand Rapids Michigan. There was a newfound pride in the city that created sufficient wealth to replace the antiquated landscape of 19thc America with a sleek new modernism. Although the industrialists were for the most part pedestrian in their artistic tastes, in the case of Grand Rapids one town father was married to an artistic sophisticate Nancy Mulnix who had been aware of Calder’s work early in her life and was an aficionado of modernism at a time when a taste for its subversive ideas was not shared by the general public. Perl reminds us that the world out of which Calder’s work came was defined by the writings of Joyce, the art of Picasso, the music of Stravinsky and the dance of Balanchine. At mid-century this was still the avantgarde. As the old 19thc Grand Rapids succumbed to urban renewal and the 19thc city hall despite protests from a public ,who as in so many cases such as Boston, came to appreciate the old just as it was being destroyed, a new city hall was being designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill. (Ironically some of the modern buildings that replaced 19thc Boston are slated for demolition). The building that might have looked impressive if it was on the scale of a New York City skyscraper it comes across as a rather squat low budget expression of the modernist spirit. Doing some research on the Vandenberg plaza now commonly called the Calder Plaza, it appears that to this day few citizens are pleased with the outcome of the urban renewal of a half century ago. Much nostalgia is expressed toward the destroyed city hall. However, the disappointment over the antiseptic urban space does not extend to the Calder which is for the most part admired and appreciated on its artistic merit. The high tide of modernism left its mark with numerous Calder’s throughout the Urban landscape. 

Calder Plaza Grand Rapids MI

What intrigues me is the lifespan of artistic ideas from their inception and to their waning.  Perl does a marvelous and painstaking job doing contact tracing of the ideas of Calder and the avant garde of the time. He was the avantgarde and Man Ray is the only other American I can think of who played as successfully in the transatlantic stage of modernism as did Calder. One gets a sense of its transcendent nature of ideas being exchanged from mountain peak to mountain peak although the image that often comes to mind is a rather mundane one of a ball being tossed sideways or downfield in a match of rugby on its way to its destination. Or maybe a better one would be the Monty Python soccer match of philosophers shouting out their oracular insights to the world without going anywhere. Although Calder was not a theorist and kept his ideas to himself, Calder’s world seemed to function on the belief that ideas matter and that his work was destined to be the vehicle for a new expression of time and space. The ball that is being passed around on its way to the stabiles started out with Miro. One sees its effect on Gorky. So dominant and salient is his influence Perl at one point in the book wonders if Calder who was a neighbor of Gorky in Connecticut had influenced Gorky’s late work. Maybe so, but a case could be made for the parallel influence and evolution of Miro on both their oeuvres. 

The ideas embodied in Calder’s work are embedded in our day to day life. The most salient  example are the mobiles as the conceptual basis for crib toys. It is easy to ignore the fact that their prevalence has to do with the depth of their scientific understanding of time and space. Mondrian and de Stijl had an influence on architecture and fashion but to have transformed the experience of a child’s first years of life is quite astounding. Moreover, they are so seamlessly inserted into that realm that it is hard to imagine crib life without them. 

But this is the way that new concepts work. They shake things up reshaping the world we live in. And then because of their ubiquitousness like electricity their conceptual depth is forgotten. 

Reading “Calder” required an adjustment of my habitual expectations of the reading of Perl’s writing. I always enjoy his incisive critique and deflation of the art “powers that be”. I have spoken with many artists who are part of his fandom. We all seem to suffer in silence from the exclusivity of the art world with Perl our sole public voice. I wonder if they found it difficult to read a book by Perl that is unequivocally enthusiastic about its subject. Calder’s life is nothing short of a never-ending story of successfully achieving venues for his work and the best critical response. The successes come from the start: being born to a family of artists who provided important career connections, a perfect marriage, meeting up with the French avantgarde at the right time,  joining the transatlantic artistic aristocracy and then toward the end of his life achieving a near total conquest of the world of public sculpture in the USA and Europe. The only way to read this biography is to go along for the ride. Perl has provided not only the large arcs of that life but the infinitesimal detail.  

Warhol version of a Calder Mobile

The strange disconnect of this glorious life and work and its seamless embodiment of a positivistic scientific understanding of time and space seems distant from our postmodern times. A large majority of what is exhibited manifests the societal critique of the self, caught in the web of a societal construct whether it is shaped by a notion of Marxist false consciousness or the pandemic of social media.  This is Warhol’s era. Cynically Ironic. Power hungry. No wonder that Warhol and Trump were both mentored by Joe McCarthy’s lawyer Roy Cohn. 

 this essay has been picked up by Woventale Press with some edits that accentuate the difference between Warhol and Galder

 

As good as it gets on the internet (Or the Three Penny Author)

I put my blogposts on Medium, a site that promotes writing on the web. My writing rarely gets any feedback as adjudged from the dearth of what Medium refers to as “claps”( I just got one for an article on Jed Perl). They offer some remuneration as readers pay a fee for access to the site. Last month I got an email that 3 cents($.03) had been deposited in my savings account from all the voluminous reading of my blogs. I really don’t despair anymore at the paucity of interest on Medium. I get emails from them touting what they consider to be the hottest submissions that are for the most part pulp stories of unsolved murders that have no real thinking going on, let alone narrative style.

I recently got sucked into another site called Academia that distributes scholarly papers. As an enticement to join they said my name is getting mentioned on their site. The only way to find out who mentioned me is by joining them for around $100 a year. (Linkdin uses the same trick where they say someone is talking about you, but again you have to pay  to find out) When I finally gave in and joined, the “mention” that they half-described was nowhere to be found.  There have been other mentions since that I vaguely recall as authentic but they tend to be chaotically strung together obscuring any real sense of where the mentions were made. They do reach out to people I have mentioned in my articles toauthenticate my referencing them. My blogs are not formatted academically but they have been disseminated by the site to numerous individuals who are often associated with universities worldwide as resident scholars, students or alums. Since my blogs are for the most part illustrated, I hope the recipients are finding them at least visually entertaining.

Twitter is all about power and the participants obviously love to wield it. Interactions with the famous can happen but they are for the most part short lived. You might be flattered to find your tweet acknowledged but it is never for long.e.g.my interaction with the Pulitzer prize winning critic Jerry Saltz. I had sent him a rough draft of my self-published book on Drawing and Painting to New York magazine offices where he is on the staff. A week later I found him describing one of the exercises in his own words but with an illustration he could have only taken from the copy I sent him as the source of the image was rather obscure. I sent him a message asking him about the rip-off and he replied with cryptic .  He never acknowledged that I was the source of the exercise. He got 55 likes. Why did he bother to reprint what I wrote? With one hand he showed what I had written to his followers all of whom thought it was interesting but with the other hand made sure I did not get credit for it. It hurt and I think that was his intention. I think my hope was for the much vaunted and desired “retweet”, so important that often tweeters will say that a retweet does not represent an endorsement.  If he wasn’t interested in power then he might have just given the book a tweet. I would have sold a few copies and that would be the end of it. But that would mean I am piggybacking on the precious reputation he has so assiduously built on and cultivated over a lifetime. That reputation has monetary value.

I had a rather pleasant exchange with Blake Gopnik, a propos his recently published “Warhol”, where he engaged me in a dialog about what I had written on Warhol which he found very interesting but wrong. It was a quirky linking on my part of Warhol to Flannery O’Connor due to their shared umbrella of nihilism. Nihilism is sort of a dog whistle that you are clearly anti-humanist and he rejected that Warhol was a nihilist. And that the shared religiosity of Warhol and O’Conner was bogus as Warhol’s connection to his religion was rather shaky. Maybe he at least gave me the time of day as I knew from the horse’s mouth that Philip Pearlstein was Warhol’s roommate at Carnegie-Mellon. The accessibility he provided me by  answering my questions was an opportunity to show that he was the expert and that I should buy the expert’s book to have the definitive answer on Warholiana. He is promoting his book. That’s all. Nothing wrong with that. I was able to extend the discussion to his opinions on Koons whose artistic value is based on what Gopnik calls “esthetic agnosia” and the exchange ended there.

Facebook is folksy in comparison to the ego flaunting/flouting on Twitter. Twitter with its message limit forces you to hone your message whereas on FB you can ramble on. Topics are  mostly about family events and the Peaceable Kingdom where Lions get along with baboons and the endless casts of clever cats and more cats. If I get sporadic feedback on Twitter (as indicated by the stats)I am sure to get lots of likes on FB. I am sure this folksy image is  cultivated by the managers. The world of twitter discussions are short lived storms and then subside and can’t be revived. Maybe you leave a mark on your interlocutor or not. Things are more relaxed on FB. I recently posted for the hell of it an image of a painting I had done in NC years ago that ended up in the Weatherspoon Museum. It created some interest from students at UNC-Greensboro and some sincerely thoughtful comments from people who follow my work. I tried to flip the conversation to my book on drawing and painting in the hope of maybe selling a copy. FB is not a platform for forcing anything on anyone. We are just nice folks with an opportunity to celebrate Mother’s Day. It is not about making a profit except for FB. I didn’t bring up the book again. I flipped to my Amazon stats page and there was no sign of anything sold. Just some page views that have little monetary value.

It was the philosopher Rene Girard who talked about the magic of the “like” button. It offers us the illusion that we are all on the same (FB) page. It engenders a kind of harmony an often false sense of agreement. I think it is the power of the retweet that makes Twitter different in that our power on Twitter is based on your number of followers and to be retweeted by someone with numerous followers is inherently valuable as it gets you out of the bubble of your limited followers. I notice the editor of Hyperallergic is parsimonious with his retweets. I got one once when he retweeted an article he pretended to show interest in publishing and when I threw in the towel and put it on my blog he felt he could at least give me the imprimatur of his retweet. Never again, even though be follows me.

That brings up the existence of the comments section provided by many online magazines where I first interacted with the Hyperallergic editor who leaves the comment section open to anyone. Comment is often allowed only to buyers of a subscription. The monetization of the web is continuing apace. More and more sites not only now limit comments but open access to certain articles only to subscribers. If it doesn’t slowdown the number of readers and in fact increases them then there is nothing to stop it. But the comment sections have been my bread and butter starting with Hyperallergic. It was there that I made my first impact on the web commentariat. I read an article by John Yau, a well-known critic/poet from the days of hard copy. It described a phenomenon of a certain bland imitative abstraction that was being shown in NYC.  It was going for big bucks and he was not a fan. Based on the images he supplied I got on a tangential rant that became a blogpost with a label for the work: “Zombie Abstraction”. I linked it to the comment section for the Yau article and that was that. Four months later an article by Walter Robinson appeared in another online magazine referring to the same sort of painting as Zombie Formalism. Its publication must have appeared on the comment section of Hyperallergic. I pointed out in a back and forth exchange with Hrag Vartanian the publisher in  the comment section that it was I who first used Zombie to describe work of that ilk. Vartanian at Hyperallergic came to my defense although somewhat dismissively saying that zombie was in the air and that it was inevitable someone would use the moniker. At a later date Raphael Rubinstein in an article in “Art in America” mentioned me as the first to use the term. I heard from a blogger who is closer to the NY art scene that Robinson and Rubinstein are friends and that Robinson at the time was furious at the unwillingness of his friend to give him credit for first inventing the term. I must admit that if someone with the notoriety of Robinson had not written about the New York abstraction that I referred to, then my article would have remained insignificant. Such is the case with my article on “shake and bake” abstraction. I think the label is a clever one and the points I made are valuable but it will never achieve the same notoriety. As for ZF I did make the tour of online art writers who wrote about ZF. If they had a comment section or email I tried to convince them to include my name as the inventor of the moniker. Most agreed seeing the evidence from Hyperallergic to make the change. Saltz who was a major disseminator of the term with his “Zombies on the Walls” that appeared on the online version of New York Magazine noticeably did not. Noah Dillon of artcritical.com did make the change. My blog comes up on the first page of a google search for Zombie Formalism.

There is a pleasurable sense of isolation of being alone on the mountain top associated with blogging that can get one into trouble at times. It is probably a pleasure in getting things right in so far as you are not a gun for hire and write for yourself. Something as well about the facility of word processing that allows for one to get carried away by precision to such a degree one becomes oblivious to one’s audience. I write on my computer in solitude. One paints that way. It is the nature of the profession. I have had a knack for reinventing myself or at least respecting the issues that my painting represents to me and following their lead. In retrospect a lot of issues that I struggled with were not shared by collectors. I find critics have always been ready to chime in on the ideas that motivated my work. But that only reinforced my solitude and willingness to follow my intuition. Recently, this introspection backfired when I wrote about a hurtful experience I had with a New Yok coop gallery that with one hand accepted my work for a Summer group show and with the other upon the delivery of the work asked me to remove it from the show. No one ever gave me a reason for it. There was a smugness from the people I talked with on the phone that such a work would not be allowed to hang in the show. I could understand how it got in the show. The curator was a color field painter. In a desperate attempt to find some logic to it I made the farfetched claim that it was due to the gallery members who based on my research were fairly traditional artists sharing the views of a conservative(not politically) art critic whose work I actually admire. When the critic and his friends failed to show any interest in my drawing and painting book it dawned on me at the height of obtuseness I had probably rubbed him the wrong way. And even more appalling it took me a whole year to delete the presumably offending blog post. I was most likely so in love with my own words alone there at the computer at 6am when I do most of my writing that I let it stand published on my blog for this long.  To use an oft used expression: I cut off my nose to spite my face.

Casting a net into the net does bring in some interesting catches from well-known artists and critics who stumble across my writing, that would only happen off the web if I were published in respected journals. They have enjoyed my invective and in the case of one artist/critic shared some choice gossip about a contemporary artist that I had written about and I went on to repeat it on blog and then was asked by the source to delete as being too personal. What do I hope to achieve by all this blogging and interacting with the denizens of the web? On the one hand one creates a narcissistic self-referential bubble that only serves to reinforce a kind of clarity about one’s inner life but adds only to further isolation. On the other hand, there is a clear sense of chumming for fish. Throw something out on the water to attract some activity in the hope of catching a bigger fish. Meantime the ground of all this ranting and raving (there is some cogent thinking I hope) is my painting. It is still premised on being in the “white cube” the stage where the viewer and the work can interact and where both can be transformed. It is still primitive and is reminiscent of a believer in a church(a religious metaphor I used once on twitter that brought out the ire in an atheistic art critic with lots of followers) yet  miles away from the tumult on the net where everybody and their uncle pretends to know the status quo of the art world and the future. We all pretend to be omniscient. It was an early thinker of the internet Clay Shirky, who referred to this mass internet phenomena in his book “Here Comes Everybody”. But as I have pointed out (and my son Gabriel wrote his PhD thesis on this topic) there is still a power structure that those who have achieved notoriety outside the internet can enforce via a hierarchy of power built into websites on the internet. Trying to break into that hierarchy probably is the goal of my blogging. But as I have pointed out above there are always those who will with pleasure remind you of your irrelevance, where exactly you are situated in the pecking order.

I just got (Feb 20, 2021)blocked on twitter by the above mentioned Hraj of Hyperallergic for grousing about the newly imposed cost of commenting on his site. I used the word paywall that he said was the wrong word to use for paying for comments. It was the use of the wrong word that upset him. This obsession with language usage bespeaks a sort of priestly class that loves to control the meaning of words and penalizes misuse. He did not comment on my complaint about paying for commenting but using "paywall"  that he insisted only applies to content. So much gratitude for following his site for 8 years. But it did get a lot of hits, although due to his blockage I cannot any longer access his comments.  I thought of Freud's statement about the narcissism of minor distinctions but realize that if you play with it a bit you come up with a narcissist of minor distinction that describes Mr Vartanian. In regards to the distinction between the homespun folkiness of FB v.s. Twitter, Vartanian belied his understanding of the power-laden nature of Twitter when in his final au revoir he told me to go back to FB.

This mean spirited type seems to thrive on the internet. I recently posted one of my older blogs on the above mentioned Academia.edu, that many readers had enjoyed over the years. Not a great philosophical text but at heart a tender reminiscence of friends and conversation. It brought out a "scholar" who dismissed it as unworthy of comment. No dialog. What could have been a nice exchange was stopped in its tracks. He has continued to accuse me of trying to get the de Kooning I wrote about to submit to labels. It made me reread what I wrote and I am reassured that is was not an easy task and that I kept the concepts  grounded in the painting I chose to write about. 

I will never forget the anecdote Addison Parks told me about the day he introduced his wife to his mentor Leon Polk Smith. Throughout the meeting, Leon ignored her. As the meeting came to an end, Addison pointed out his rudeness. He told him "if you are not nice you are nothing".  It seems that everyone would rather be the lawyer pouncing on  your slipups in word usage. My demeanor is just show appreciation for what comes your way and spread the word. 

Recently, Jerry Saltz commented on a comment I made on a tweet where he posted a photo of himself kneeling in awe in front of a Rembrandt self-portrait at the Madison/Frick. It was a mixed "???!!!" but seemed to concur with what I said as did numerous followers. Here is what I said: "He does not lose the veneer of infinite detail as you move closer. It never becomes just paint." It had more than 5000 impressions. Now that is when Twitter works.

Now my access to a larger audience has been excised by Saltz when he blocked me after I complained about being blocked by Vartanian. I thought he would see himself as inclusive and less petty.But it is all the same club. It is the pleasure of excluding. The exclusion principle. They know you only get seen except on their backs. So I limp back to FB.

Twitter