Reality and Desire, Armenians as outsiders and Phillip Morris

Is it just laziness or is it just more honest to find the world lacking than to imagine it fulfilling ones dreams. I follow on Twitter quotes from “Moby Dick” that seem to reinforce the sense of the disconnect between dream and reality, the ephemerality of things coming and going, appearing/disappearing. A sailor on a calm day stationed on the mizzenmast loses balance and falls into the sea never to be seen again. Or the crew of the Pequod losing all sense of self-determination at the hands of Ahab: helping to fulfill Ahab’s dreams, whose own utmost dream that they are embroiled in, is nonetheless left unfulfilled.

The strange interface between desire and reality is worth meditating on. For the nexus to work it seems that one has to dumb down both reality and desire. The reality of Facebook and Twitter probably encapsulate a space where one can imagine a “like” to one’s opinion to be self-reaffirming.

I wonder as I read about the current political currency of Right and Left and having to adjust my opinions based on the latest revelation of who did what to whom or in the case of one candidate just forgot to do period, I don’t know what is fact or fiction, everything seems to be mediated. Are the Russians manipulating the news or is it Soros or the Koch brothers. Can I base my self-worth on having opinions about something that may or may not be real? But it is the tissue that ties me to the world. Do I exist without out it? According to the political theorist Carl Schmitt an intellectual admired by the Right and Left we are pure political animals hungering not so much to be for something as in need of an enemy.

But there are some things that transcend this mediated reality. Before reality’s waxing and waning, its sudden contretemps and pirouettes, comes the personality of the observer and that personality has a history in its ancestry. The mediation of reality comes from a historical predilection to engage or not in the public realm. To know what I can control and what is beyond my control. I am still startled to this day by a comment made in conversation by an Armenian after the funeral of his brother in law, my good friend William A. Henry 111, a journalist and author who died in his early forties. As Armenians, he stated, we will always be outsiders. The principal of a large public school in Rhode Island, he was as far as I could tell successful in his occupation.  The details of what prompted the conversation escape me as the conversation took place more than 20 years ago. I recall relating it to my cousin who, like myself, is half Armenian. She is involved in and founded several charities one directed toward Armenia, another purely directed toward the US, which brings her in contact with the Country Western musicians who perform at her fundraisers. No one would appear more integrated into American culture than her. Yet she was in total agreement and seemed interested in pursuing the topic later but probably as many years have gone by since that conversation as have transpired since I spoke with the Armenian school principal and we have not picked up where we left off. But that notion of estrangement resonated within me and was a sort of confirmation of that estrangement from the dominant culture that was continually reinforced by anecdotes from family history: a sense, in short of an outsider looking in at something at core alien to itself.  Oddly the most poignant one comes from my mother’s side of the family. They were Germans living in the woods of NH and from stories my mother told harshly discriminated against by the Yankee natives. It was assumed that as immigrants they had no right to vote although they were in fact American citizens forcing my grandmother at one point to go to the state capitol to get proof of their citizenship. My father related numerous stories where he observed a sharp line between his cultural upbringing and that of the Yankee aristocracy that lived on the other end of Huron Ave in Cambridge.He enjoyed reminding me that even if they had more money than he did they did not know how to eat properly.

My Mother and Armenian Friends in NH circa 1933

The house's reincarnation in a "chic" neighborhood of Providence RI
Its name came from a Billy who lived there on the pond so as to distinguish him from a relative called Hillbilly

In the recent film “Spotlight” portraying the expose by the “Boston Globe” of the sexual predation by priests of the Catholic church on adolescents, the lawyer an Armenian, pursuing the diocese on behalf of the victims could have followed a path that let the Church deal on its own with its problems internally. As an outsider and from a people who were persecuted by a hegemonic regime, he identified with the victims of this horrific injustice. He felt compelled to bring the perpetrators out from under the shelter of the church into the harsh light of the criminal justice system. Was it a memory of how Armenians were treated by the Turks in the Ottoman Empire that haunted him? Being a stranger in one's own land was brilliantly portrayed in Elia Kazan’s “America America”. Kazan conveys vividly how nothing could be done to right the injustices imposed by the Ottoman Turks on the Armenians and Greeks, so absolute was the control they had on their ethnic minorities, short of outright revolution. When the main character, an Anatolian Greek, inadvertently gets involved in a conflict with the Turkish authorities on the side of a revolutionary Armenian group, his father has to solicit the help of his contacts in the government to get his son freed from prison. It is a kind of slavishness, which was the only way to survive in an oppressive society. This acquiescence was not the route pursued by the Armenian lawyer. As my Armenian grandmother said to the foreign-born husband of a woman she had taken into her apartment to protect her from his abuse:” This is America. Women are free!” The Catholic Church despite many of its still liberating credos and tenets remained Medieval as an institution in its top down control over its followers. It had been a touchstone for Catholic immigrants themselves persecuted by the Protestant majority in America but as it gained acceptance and power within the society as a whole it succumbed to the exploitation of those it was supposed to serve.

 

Stavros and Hovanness in "America America" 1963

I remember being startled in a conversation with a Navajo at a craft store in Arizona that indicated he felt that we were not standing on the same cultural platform.  The interlocutor showed his disdain for me not in words but by ending our conversation, which seemed to be going quite smoothly, rather abruptly. In so doing, he seemed to say or so it seemed, that although we were both American citizens there was a difference in our American experience. I am sure it was nothing in particular that I said but a feeling that he was sharing too much with me as an outsider about his life. Would it be any different if I were chatting with a Turk about both coming from Anatolia until we realized that the experience of my ancestors at the hands of his ancestors was nothing he wanted to acknowledge. And most likely he would have been indoctrinated to see me as an age-old archenemy.

I had a friend of pure WASP ancestry, descended from a world of country clubs, tennis whites and a notion of where to live and how to properly behave in society (a domain where I was always falling short to his chagrin). Whenever the stock market would collapse, he would admonish me to invest in Phillip Morris. He confessed that this was the stock of preference of the aristocracy. If you look at this chart you will see it has almost doubled since 2014 and even now offers a dividend yield close to 4%. In this yield starved economy where the pensioner, who put his money in treasuries is getting close to zero percent this is extraordinary. Why bother with hot tech stocks when you can invest in the exploration of new markets for nicotine in the Third World. Of course I never took his advice because it was hard for me to understand that some things are absolutely true and incontrovertible. For me reality is only in the end doom and gloom and genocide. But if there are enough people with money out there to say something is safe it is naïve to think otherwise.

It is also naive to think we all judge others from some universal point of view. Nietzsche talked about the creation of human types over millennia. Max Weber felt that Capitalism was the outcome of the Protestant work ethic and Melville sees it at work in the Quaker Ahab for whom the metaphysics of good and evil underlie his capitalist quest to such a degree so as to usurp the tallying of good and evil solely in terms of money. And now I understand that country club membership and the facades of beautiful homes in enclaves like Annisquam, Massachusetts ,where reality and desire meet, are paid for from dividends from Phillip Morris.

Thinking back on more than twenty years of art criticism by Jed Perl on the occasion of the publication of his most recent collection of essays by the Eakins Press Foundation

 Phil Press, fellow Boston artist and founder of Cambridge Adult Ed's Studio School, first introduced me to Jed Perl and his writing in the early 90’s. They had met as young painters at Skowhegan in the early 70’s and remained in contact during the intervening years. Occasionally, Phil would invite Jed to Cambridge to lecture to his students on some topic related to the New York art scene. I would always make a point of attending these talks, as his insights into the vacuity and hype of whatever scene was current, were an inspiration to persevere in my solitary struggle to make paint and painting a vital language of self-expression.

We are all three products of the figurative revival of the late sixties and early 70’s that gave credence to the language of painting from observation, a method that had been brutally sidelined by Abstraction, Conceptualism, Minimalism and Pop Art. Phil had studied at the Studio School in New York City, which was a stopping off place for many painters who wanted to work in a representational visual language, when it was hard to find such instruction elsewhere in the academic world. Phil went on to get his MFA at Queens where Louis Finkelstein, a luminary of the figurative movement taught . Phil seems to think that Jed studied painting for a while at Brooklyn College, where Philip Pearlstein and Gabriel Laderman were instructors. Laderman was known as much for his polemics on behalf of figuration as for his painting. I studied at Yale, whose identity as a center of the avant-garde was tempered by the arrival of Bill Bailey, who succeeded in bringing in as visitng artists many of the above-mentioned artists of the figurative movement.

To understand Perl’s philosophical stance, that he has steadfastly held for more than twenty years, it is necessary to see his thinking as formed in the context of that figurative revival. For a moment and in retrospect a very brief moment there was the hope of an alternative direction for art, or at least that figuration could continue on a track parallel to the avant-garde. I have written elsewhere that figuration wanted to revive the particular experience of being in the here and now, in contradistinction to an art object totally Greenbergian: on the one hand with its obsession with absolute forms, and mediatized on the other with its need to place the individual in an absolute socially defined identity. I recall vividly wandering the museums and galleries of New York and Boston and feeling a deep sense of alienation from the minimalsim, the conceptual sculpture, the media based Warhols, all issuing from an extreme rational analysis of modern life. A language that jumped out of the physical space that our bodies moved in replaced the magic of  art that could make real and tactile the present. There was never the smell of grass, the wind in your face nor the vibrancy of the seasons. The paintings of Gretna Campbell or Stanley Lewis that Perl admired were  literally a breathe of fresh air. The human existential reality of being in the world had found a place to stand. For one brief moment the grey clouds of rationalism opened up to a vivid blue sky where the senses of the body pulsated.

Another key to understanding Jed Perl can be found in his admiration for the great critics and artists of early modernism. Confronted, with now several generations of American artists that see art as  providing a wonderful playground for experimentation with lifestyles, Jed, whose understanding of the tradition of Western Art allows him to talk intelligently about Chardin, Poussin and Vuillard sets up camp in the tradition of the art critics and shapers of early Modernism, such as Edmund Wilson, Meyer Schapiro, Lincoln Kirstein, (all of whom are dedicated individual essays in the “Magicians and Charlatans”). When the Bourgeois world of the 19th c fell apart under the weight of science, there was in part a dancing on the grave of the past by the new guard but there was also the awareness that something had been lost as well as gained.The representational language that had held the real in its thrall for over 500 years had broken open, and that deconstruction liberated incredible energy. Perl sees that energy in Picasso’s semantizing of Cezanne in the “Les Demoiselles ‘d’Avignon” or in his appreciation of Edmund Wilson’s understanding of Stravinsky’s musical energy. These were makers and shapers (the title of his essay on Lincoln Kirstein) who would pick up the pieces like Eliot and Pound and make new realities. They knew and cherished the pieces of the past and ruefully accepted that the Europe they loved had suffered a catastrophe and like Humpty Dumpty no one could put the pieces back together again.  There still was the will to recreate a whole in the face of the wholesale destruction of the first World War. In the laissez-faire aesthetics of the contemporary art scene (the title of the introductory essay in this new collection of his essays) that is hell bent on chopping up bourgeois reality into smaller and smaller pieces, Perl sees no love of history. And when the past is referenced by contemporary figurative artist like Currin it is distorted to appear to be as ironic and cynical as their own work. It is brought down to their level.

I still have several photocopies of Perl’s essay from the October, 1992 issue of “The New Republic”, entitled ”The Art Nobody Knows” . It spells out the way in which the art scene, in its ever anxious need to promote the “new”, makes it impossible for those artists, who see art as a coherent language, deserving a lifetime of study, from having the air, space and money to pursue that goal. I would hand the article out to my painting students at the Art Institute of Boston in order to give them some perspective on where the tenets of my classroom came from and hopefully encouraging them to avoid being sucked into the latest fad at Yale and New York. The essay referenced the English artists Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff as paragons of figuration. From a pedagogical point of view, they were valuable as stopping off points on the road from figuration to abstraction, which was the essential goal of my teaching experience. Unfortunately, few of my students, despite intelligence and talent, heeded Perl’s message. Their talent got them to Yale and to New York, but the human all to human need to belong to a status quo got the better of them, and they imprinted on whatever was then the current scene.

Many of the issues in the essays in “Magicians and Charlatans”, culled from his writing of the last decade, are already present in the essay I have from 1992:  The Whitney Biennials, commercialism, the art industry, the importance of the slow making of art over time, the need for patterns and form and the way the structure and culture of the New York scene make this slow growth impossible. His interests represent the effort of someone ,who cares not only about New York artists, but always tries to put his finger on the pulse of a larger meaning or zeitgeist in which they all participate. I recall a more recent essay that appeared in the “The New Republic” on the Cindy Sherman retrospective at t MOMA, that was sent to me by Mark Gottsegen, the author of the “Painters Handbook.” This one pulled out all the verbal weaponry and pearls of wisdom that he is capable of. It was a full-fledged frontal assault on Sherman, deconstructor of female myths mythologized in a major retrospective. After the smoke had cleared she still remained intact. Cindy as Perl points out is an industry supported by dealers, curators and collectors. When you unleash an assault on her you are only one person fighting an army.

The worlds of Rome and Bernini are so well fathomed as to appear as fresh and new as the early 20thc in New York, that he exquisitely depicts through essays on the writing of Meyer Schapiro, Edmund Wilson and Lincoln Kirstein. The contemporary scene of Oursler, Viola, Gober and Currin leave him for the most part without a label. Except for Gober they are dismissed as lacking the seriousness that he would like to see in their work but he does not dismiss them out of hand. He gives them their day, tries to understand why they have achieved their notoriety. Why this refusal to give them and others such as Yuskavage, Heilmann and Peytona a positive value? Those artists, who were reviewed in the earlier part of our new millennium are probably past their shelf life and for all I know aren’t even taken seriously today by even the hipster critics. I have to agree with Perl there is something missing. But what?

To shed some light on this, it is interesting to try to sift out Perl’s politics. I am sure he often gets backed into a corner where someone says: if you are so conservative in your tastes in art you must be right wing in your politics. He never hesitates to say he is for Obama or that Reagan destroyed the economy by cutting taxes, which in turn inflated the art market of the 80’s. In art he is an elitist but in politics he is an egalitarian. This distinction is current in some circles of New York Intelligentsia and was said of William A Henry 3rd’s book “In Defense of Elitism” in the early 90’s, that he bemoaned the weakening of the hierarchy of excellence over popular culture but was still egalitarian in his politics.  Maybe this is why Perl uses the economic expression laissez –faire culture (the title of the introductory essay of this collection) to point blame to the conflation of commerce and art culture, as seen in his attack on the multi-millionaire Eli Broad’s museum in LA, where the endower and the endowed see no separation of interest. The collector who purchases Jeff Koons gilded pop items then builds a museum/supermarket to promote his purchases.  Castelli is depicted as no more than a crass opportunist. The guilty parties are the capitalists, that need something to sell the public and choose art that pretends to challenge the commercial enterprise they are involved in.  I beg to differ: I think a different reading of history would point to egalitarianism as the cause of the vacuity in the art of today as much as unfettered capitalism.

I think what haunts Perl’s work is that the generation that came of age after the Abstract Expressionists, in particular, the boomers let themselves be defined by the media. It was a cultural narcissism in extremis, where the inner world becomes "colonized" by the outer world. But what if all these successions of styles and cultural moods only reflect a slow unraveling or winding down of the unmediated self. The Abstract Expressionists had found some latent strength in the systems of Jung and Freud to map out an inner landscape. There were drives to be defined that could push out against the world and psyches rooted in a collective consciousness that would surprise us about our true selves. These systems were a modern religion for those who were no longer capable or willing to embrace traditional religion.They created a map of an inner life that has  been replaced by several generations now that are medicated and mediated on all levels. If the inner and outer are the same, can we even talk about the self.The hipsters don't care.

”Postcards from Nowhere” points out that the art collectors and the artist are on the same page. This state of things could be seen as the result of the loss of a mandarin class, of an elite that could differentiate the good and the bad, but it must follow that this demise of an intellectual aristocracy will end in an egalitarianism that validates any and every attempt of the masses at self- expressions. I think the modern art scene is the result of "here comes everybody". The skill necessary for painting is abandoned for installation that appeals to the practical craft of the ordinary citizen as renovator of her own space. Painting was always based on the metaphysical power of the artist’s gaze to take their momentary observation and turn it into the eternal moment. Marxist critics felt that stability came from having money to buy the time to stop the visual clock and impose their vision on the world. Now that the metaphysical base has been undercut, there is no direct contact between man and nature, man and the cosmos that one finds in Cezanne and Van Gogh or the raw imposition of the Freudian id on form that you find in Picasso or Pollock. Warhol, our John Singer Sargent, best embodies this shift of private consciousness to a totally mediated self. Now the parts are reduced to miniscule grains that are too small to piece together. To quote Nietzsche:

“Are we not well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small soft round, unending sand.” The ability to put things back together has long past? The reduction ad infinitum has become a reduction ad absurdum/. Perl is the chronicler of this never-ending train wreck.


I find it telling that the frontispiece of “Magicians and Charlatans” is dedicated to Leon (presumably Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of “The New Republic”) with a quote from Po Chu-i (a Tang poet):

To Leon:

"Till day broke we sat in the moon’s clear light
 Laughing and singing, and yet never grew tired.
 In Ch’ing-an, the place of profit and fame,
 Such moods as this, how many men know?"

If Po chu-i, who was exiled for having violated Confucian precepts in his role as an assistant to the Emperor, had been born during the Maoist cultural revolution, such private moods would have made him a candidate for a good rinse of brainwashing. What Perl could explore more thoroughly is that the Marxist notion of how the bourgeoisie suffers from “false consciousness” has so permeated our culture that, although we don’t send our artists off to a gulag for not toeing the party line, there is a shunning that is prevalent in academia for those who are not always current in their tastes. The real heroes for Perl are those artists that didn’t win the jackpot. Whether they rose to the stature of those artists like Matisse that they emulated is not the issue as Updike and Plagens insist it is in their reading of Perl. Artists such as Leland Bell, Nell Blaine, and Stanley Lewis embody and embodied a tradition of artists, who understood painting as being as subtle and structured as the language we speak. You can’t judge them badly for not rising to the same level as their predecessors. They thought it more valuable to codify the magic of the language of seeing and like the monks of Ireland in the Dark Ages, who preserved the wisdom of Greek and Latin culture in their codexes, to save it from the barbaric hordes.The invasions have already begun: to quote Perl:"For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince and now Cai-Guo qiang, having a retrospective at the Guggenheim is like being a Visigoth, who has been given the keys to Rome."

Perl’s essays are a lamentation for a paradise lost, for what little we have gained on this modern train to nowhere. Like the old man on the train who bemoans the fact that he missed his stop but won’t get off at the next stop to take the next train back, he understands the arrow of time points  forward. But maybe we have the wrong metaphor. Maybe we are just going around in circles.