Art: "East/West: Visually Speaking” at the Yellowstone Art Museum

It’s Friday, and time for some local cultural color.

The agenda was to go to the Yellowstone Art Museum to see the new exhibition drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, about which more in another post. While there, I went to see “East/West: Visually Speaking,” and ended up spending most of my allotted time with that fascinating visiting exhibition.

The exhibit consists of works by contemporary Chinese artists, who reflect the unique mixture of attitudes that China has today: its pride in her own deep indigenous traditions, its fascination with Western high culture, its ambivalence toward the pervasiveness of Western consumerism and pop culture, and the raw experience of living with both the tyrannical past of Chinese communism and its still authoritarian present.

Perhaps the most visually arresting pieces are Sun Ping’s acupuncture sculptures, in which he reproduces classic Western pieces -- of Laocoön, of Moses, of Alexander... but with Chinese acupuncture needles bristling from them along what appear to be the traditional meridians. Whether these needles are “anatomically correct” from a Chinese traditional medicine standpoint, the art conveys an impression that Chinese traditions have something to offer for the ills of Western culture -- or at least for ill effects it can have on traditional Chinese culture. The impact is visceral and surprisingly positive.

Two imposing works appeared to be large-scale prints of originals, in which the artist reproduces Bruegel’s “Christ Carrying the Cross” and Titian’s “Bacchanalia,” but with rigidly stark, almost automaton-like, Chinese figures taking the place of the characters in those paintings. The huge expanse of “Carrying the Cross” was particularly effective, with the viewer becoming lost in its vastness. It conveys the same frightening feeling of isolation that original does. In both, the tiny Christ figure is bent and broken beneath the weight of the cross, lost and alone though surrounded by crowds. As in the original, the crowds have their own interests and preoccupations. This Chinese version adds an element of modern existential crisis through the studied lack of individuality of the crowd members and soldiers.

A series of large oils with a Chinese man alone in a room, with titles of “See No Evil,” “Hear No Evil,” “Speak No Evil,” and “Don’t Make Inappropriate Gestures to Traffic Cameras,” feel like they could have come straight from a police interrogation room. There is nothing explicitly political, uniquely Chinese, or even uniquely modern about them. They rather touch on universal themes of the loneliness and fear of dealing with arbitrary authority.

Most numerous were pieces in a series by the Luo brothers, entitled "Welcome the Famous Brands to China.” Each incorporates the logos of modern mega-products like Coca-cola, Pepsi, and McDonald’s. In an earlier and larger incarnation of this exhibit at the Frost Art Museum in Miami, a reviewer described these pieces as "delivering corporate America a smack in the snoot.”

Maybe so, but the ceramic sculptures are as much parodies of kitschy Chinese-made knick-knacks as they are of Western corporations -- and anyway, who is choosing to eat the Big Mac’s and drink the Coke’s, I ask? A great deal of craft went into creating these works (a dragon was particularly beautifully done,) but one is hard-pressed to explain just how all of that work was really worth the effort.

More striking to me were the paintings in that series. They were eerily similar to revolutionary propaganda “art" in the Chinese vein. Even the title of the series, “Welcome the Famous Brands to China" sounds like something from a revolutionary propaganda poster. Given that many of the artists grew up in the midst of (or experienced the after-effects of) Mao’s bloody Cultural Revolution, these works seemed as much as anything to be a way of parodying the latter under the guise of being sarcastic about the former.

Art in a society that isn’t completely free takes on an importance that those of us in countries with a tradition of freedom of speech can perhaps barely understand. I remember talking to a Chilean student years ago whose family had fled the country in the wake of Allende’s rise to power. I asked him about the cultural prominence of writers in general, and poets in particular, in South American countries. His reply has always stuck with me -- he essentially said that in a place like America, if you want to say something, you just say it. In countries without those long traditions of free speech, controversial thoughts, whether of protest or of longing, have to be expressed in more indirect ways.

In a sense, oppression -- whether exterior and political or self-imposed and cultural -- has a way of forcing artists into subtleties and nuances of expression. What is a matter of scoring style-points for a Western artist can be a matter of life or death for an artist elsewhere.

Regardless of what the content is, or is intended to be, “East-West: Visually Speaking” is worth seeing. It is on display at the Yellowstone Art Museum through July 29.

Conservatives and art -- just do it

It’s the weekend -- time for something on art and culture.

There was a nice post entitled "Conservatives Can Do Art — As Long As They’re Artists" over at The American Conservative. The upshot of Scott Galupo's piece (responding to a post by James Poulos at the blog Acculturated) is that "artists with a conservative bent should worry a lot less and simply do their jobs.” It should go without saying that only artists should attempt to do art, but conservatives might be forgiven for thinking, in an era of often atrocious politicized art, that the usual rules have been suspended. They haven't been, or at least they shouldn’t be.

As anyone knows who has encountered works of art that have a sledge-hammer ideological subtlety, only a true believer can enjoy such a thing, whether the axe being ground (to mix metaphors) is of the left or of the right. I recall traveling on business a few years ago, and finding that the 1965 Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton film, "The Sandpiper" was on television. Even though the film was from long before my movie-watching days, somehow its existence had made its way into my awareness, rightly or wrongly, as some sort of "important film" of the 1960's, and I've long loved the Big Sur, where the film was made, so I settled in to watch.

I guess you had to be there -- in the 60's, I mean. Richard Burton as a straitlaced Episcopalian priest and boarding school headmaster was just too hard to believe, and Elizabeth Taylor as the heroic unwed mom raising a wild-child in Bohemian purity was painted in, shall we say, less than nuanced tones. Particularly hilarious was how times have changed. You see, Taylor's character was doing this very countercultural thing called "home-schooling” in order to keep Junior out of the clutches of the forces of darkness. The authorities did not approve, but when the kid ends up being forced into the strait-jacket of "real school," he demonstrates to the astonished teachers (in a scene straight out of the Gospel of St. Luke where Christ astonishes the Jewish elders in the temple with his knowledge and wisdom) that he already knows more than they do, rattling off the prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Take that, you oppressive bourgeois tools of the system! Victory to the proletariat!

Today, of course, the leftism that was then the ideology of the counterculture is now the creed of the official school headmasters, and the countercultural parents doing the home-schooling are now more likely to be conservative Christians -- but don't expect Hollywood to make films lionizing them. The types whose hearts were thrilling at the braveness of Taylor's character in 1965 are likely now making the case that home-schooling is tantamount to child abuse.

While there are times when one soldiers on through a movie just to say that one has given it a chance, there are other times when one knows it is better just to flip over to ESPN, which I did after about 20 minutes of enduring the pretentious preachiness of it all. Besides, did I really need to keep watching to know that Burton and Taylor were going to end up in bed (probably with the morally advanced and enlightened wild-child nonchalantly treating the idea of a married priest shacking up with his mom as completely normal?)

The point here is that when artists grind an ideological axe, it rarely ends up as anything of aesthetic worth, and the passage of years makes such dated exercises in pretentiousness stick out like the proverbial sore-thumb. I averted my eyes from the film not because I was shocked, but because I was cringing with embarrassment for the performers.

Getting back to the original post, Galupo has this advice:

A conservative artist whose uppermost goal in producing art is to mount a Breitbartian counterattack on liberals is likely to produce a lot of garbage.

Indeed, and yet, one still hears calls to produce ideologically based art. In a recent piece in the London Telegraph, Geoffrey Lean reports on the lamentations of global-warming types that the arts community in Britain has been insufficiently mobilized in the fight to avert the impending apocalypse. Lean writes:

But there is remarkably little ferment going on. And much of what is produced is poor. “Greenland," the National Theatre’s attempt last summer to explore “the big questions around climate change”, was widely derided as dire, especially compared to the Royal Court’s more sceptical "The Heretic." Roland Emmerich’s equally awful "The Day After Tomorrow" grossly exaggerated the scientific evidence.

Again, art made out of explicitly ideological and polemical motives tends more often than not to be bad art, whether it is of the left or the right. Granted, mediocre art of the left gets some obligatory exposure, but that doesn’t mean that anyone will be moved by it who doesn’t already agree with the ideology being spouted.

Ed Driscoll, in another piece at Acculturated in the same series on conservatives and pop-culture creativity, points out that once it was a conservative mindset that reigned in Hollywood, and filmmakers of a leftish bent had to bury their ideas in the subtext of movies. They had to make their films exciting or funny or touching -- or whatever the genre required. In other words, they understood that rule one was making a great movie, and anything ideological that spilled out of their conscious or subconscious onto the screen in the process was incidental gravy.

Yes, Hollywood is dominated by a liberal mindset, but most of the slavishly ideological output tends to bomb at the box-office. What Hollywood worships more than liberalism is still the almighty dollar. Again, to echo what was said above, a mediocre film with lefty content is far more likely to be funded and produced than is a mediocre film with rightward-leaning content. But if the movie is a good one, it has a good shot at being made, and people will vote with their feet, even if conservative themes happen to be incidentally touched upon.

There have been any number of movies with conservative-friendly subtexts -- think of the Pixar film "The Incredibles," with its indictment of an equality-of-outcome society obsessed with saying that "everyone is special," at the cost of refusing to recognize -- let alone reward -- those who truly are. Or "The Hunger Games," which has caused millions of youngsters to read the books, where they learn about a future dystopian world where only the agents of an oppressive government are allowed to have weapons. Is either a "conservative movie?" Perish the thought. If they had tried to be, they would have been just as rotten as if the makers had tried to make them into explicitly leftist movies.

All that any of us can do is to study and hone our crafts (even the craft of a lowly blog-writer,) using whatever talent we happen to have been born with, applying a work ethic whereby we aren't mooning around, waiting for the muse to strike. What then happens, happens -- and if anyone notices, it's a bonus.

More on Hilton Kramer

The May issue of The New Criterion was in large part dedicated to the memory of the recently departed Hilton Kramer, founder and visionary behind that influential journal of culture and the arts. Particularly worth reading are editor Roger Kimball's lead essay and the reminiscences of the legendary Joseph Epstein, long-time editor of The American Scholar, but a browse through all of the tributes is well worth the time spent.

An interesting tidbit that I hadn't read before was that when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn finally decided to allow his reclusive privacy in Vermont to be violated long enough to allow the New York Times to interview him, one of his stipulations was that he would only speak to Hilton Kramer, then art critic for The Gray Lady. It was a request that must have seemed unusual at the time, since there were any number of literary or political editors or reporters who would have been more logical choices from the perspective of the Times. Kramer's reputation for honesty had apparently preceded him, making him someone Solzhenitsyn could depend on to tell the truth -- something Solzhenitsyn valued above all other qualities. Kramer's review of The Gulag Archipelago couldn't have hurt, in all fairness to the competition.

On another note, long-time readers of The New Criterion are so used to the fact of that periodical's unstinting championing of things like abstract expressionism in painting and the honesty of certain kinds of modernist architecture that it is easy to forget what an unusual sell this combination of modernist art and conservative culture and politics must have seemed at the time when seeking start-up funding from largely conservative foundations.

The combination made perfect sense to Kramer, for whom the two were organically woven together in his critical life. Those who may have been skeptical (present company included) but who read the journal through the years came to understand modernism in a new light, seeing its many currents,learning to separate the pretentious from the profound, the trendy from the potentially timeless. Most importantly, we discovered the that while engagement with a "canon" of proven artistic worth is an irreplaceable anchor to one's aesthetic life, life without contemporary artistic engagement with the human condition is an impoverished one, even when it involves sifting through dusty sands of trendy post-modernism to find that occasional jewel...

This issue has some interesting comments and anecdotes about Kramer making that sale (in part through the good offices of Irving Kristol.) He of course did, and the rest, as they say, is history.

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Afterthought (what would MH be without digressions and afterthoughts? -- or parenthetical filiations, for that matter): While working yesterday with one of the progeny at the ancestral homestead, planting trees for the next generation to enjoy, that phrase came up in the course of conversation. He, shovel in hand, asked the following question -- since the saying has long been "and the rest, as they say, is history," wouldn't it today be more proper to say "and as they say, 'the rest, as they say, is history?'" My reply felt feeble but I tried: besides its obvious infelicities, eventually a third "as they say" would have to be added to the phrase, and so on. True?

Musings for a weekend...

Hilton Kramer, RIP

Profound gratitude. There’s not much else to be said about the MH attitude toward the newly departed Hilton Kramer, founder of the favorite periodical of the MH household. Even the youngsters are caught reading it from time to time when they are home.

Unlike the daily Billings Gazette, which is easily divvied up each morning at breakfast (sports section for MH -- liking to start the day with the part with the highest percentage of factual truth; front section for the beloved,) the monthly New Criterion cannot be read simultaneously, not least because we would turn first to different essays (Jay Nordlinger’s music criticism for MH; lead article for the beloved.)

Fortunately, there is usually an easy solution -- the previous few issues are usually lying close to hand, and one has rarely read every word of those. So the first to the prize gets the literary Beaujolais Nouveau, while the loser gets a more aged vintage -- hardly a loss.

Readers are encouraged to browse through some initial laudatory pieces about Kramer.

And this old post from some years ago touches in passing on the deep MH respect for the New Criterion and specifically on the admiration due to Hilton Kramer. With deepest gratitude for his gift to those who care deeply about the arts and about our civilization -- rest in peace... memory eternal.

A new director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

And the editors of The New Criterion are ecstatic. Readers have been listening to them fretting over the impending retirement of Philippe de Montebello -- someone who in their eyes had managed to be "a unique moral and aesthetic force in a museum world besotted by the meretricious glitter of a preposterously overvalued and trash-addicted art market." (Tell us what you really think, will you?)

In looking ahead to the next directorship, they didn't exactly use the traditional conserative lament of "we are doomed, doomed, doomed..." But the subtext, as they say, was clearly in that vein -- they were bracing for the worst.

Since most Montanans read little about what goes on at the Met, and visit it even less, why should anyone care about the appointment of Thomas P. Campbell? The answer is simple -- institutions like the Met influence art museums in every corner of the country through their example, just as what happens at the Chicago Symphony influences the approach that smaller regional orchestras take toward their programming, their choices of new music to commission, and their interpretations of classic works. If Campbell bears out the promise that TNC's editors see in him, the visual arts will benefit everywhere.

The editors tell us that Campbell was on no-one's "short-list," and that the trustees of the Met had seen fit to reach out and tap a man on the shoulder who hadn't sought the job. The new guy in charge is a scholar, has a keen aesthetic sense, and seems to lack hubris besides -- what's not to like about that?