Journal Archive About the Journal
Give Me That Old-Time Skepticism
Journal entry for 17 May 2010 | Link
I would like to thank my internet service provider for the 36-hour outage this weekend, causing further delay on rolling out the CMS for this site. Things will start magically converting bit by bit over the course of the coming week, but for now, in the interest of staying on the Monday schedule, here's today's journal entry, here's last week's, and here's the week's before. [Update 29 May - With the new CMS working, those links are no longer working. Please see the Archive. - F.]
Everybody Draw Mohammed Day
I'm investigating atheism with growing interest after a long involvement with a non-theistic religion. It occurred to me recently that math has probably brought more comfort to the world than religion, on the balance, and I ought to know more about it. (Too, regarding the perpetration of wars and other cruelties, math's record is even better than Jainism. I think it is at worst guilty of distressing great numbers of high school students.) Atheism has a lot to offer humanity: clear-headedness, morality for its own sake, reason, and a refreshing disdain for Bronze Age attitudes about women, animals, diet, sex, and justice. Besides, evidence is entirely on its side.
The study of atheism throws religious extremism into sharp relief. Comedy Central recently made a craven decision to censor South Park rather than risk offending some particularly irritable followers of Mohammed (PBUH) (actually, I just wanted to note here that peanut butter underpins happiness). On May 11, Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist, was attacked while giving a lecture about artistic freedom at Uppsala University. Outside, protesters shouting "Allah Ahkbar" attacked police. Previously Vilks was the target of an assassination conspiracy involving the pathetic, credulous Jihad Jane that came to light a couple of months ago.
As jihad finds willing minds—feeble, but willing—here in America, the rest of us ought to resist it while the problem remains confined to unbalanced losers. (I refer to them as Islamogruntled.) So I was looking forward to this week's Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, ostensibly declared by cartoonist Molly Norris on behalf of Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor (CACAH) in the interest of freedom of speech. Its Facebook page confirms twelve thousand guests.
A wee problem has come to light, though. Molly Norris was just making a joke about the South Park censorship, not trying to start a movement. Persons unknown to Norris or anyone else created the Facebook page, which now bears a message sardonically (perhaps) calling the whole thing off. (It just goes to show you that you can't believe everything you read on Jihad Watch, which I guess goes without saying.)
I don't want to take part in a sham, so I will not be drawing Mohammed on Thursday. However, we still have a problem. The Koran does not forbid pictures of Mohammed. Certain Hadith forbid all figurative art. Examples of depictions of Mohammed, created by Muslims, abound. We are not dealing with a core principle of the faith, but with a recent, fundamentalist, convenient interpretation thereof. This interpretation is consistent with the worldwide effort by Muslims to ban the defamation of religion as an exception to freedom of speech. The intentions of both efforts are the same: to silence dissent by force because reason is not available to them. Anyone who claims that the insult of their religion guarantees retaliatory violence is admitting that they have no free will regarding the matter. People behaving accordingly must therefore be treated like any other dangerous animal among humans: captured, caged, then retrained for polite society, confined indefinitely, or put down. We should not be afraid of offending their values. They should be afraid of offending ours.
Reader Mail
A former Artblog.net regular wrote in, on the subject of Linda Yablonsky's Wade Guyton piece discussed last week:
It may well be time (or past time) to stop worrying about the inadequacy of current art criticism, certainly what passes for it in officialist circles. Given the spectacular inadequacy of what passes for art in the same circles (and not only passes, but is praised to the skies by all manner of "correct" and presumably expert people), is it really any surprise? Does it really matter, since the official art game is driven by money and various kinds of posturing, as opposed to real connoisseurship? Is it even respectable to dignify critics who are clearly game players with serious notice?
I replied:
There is always that concern, isn't there. You say something, you dignify absurdity with your attention. You say nothing, you allow absurdity to run unchecked. Being a writer is a kind of curse. But the new format is a way of moving on, and concentrate on the delights of this world while I can enjoy them. And that includes the delight of excoriating some piece of "official" nonsense.
Cue segue to the next topic...
In Which I Take Amy Fung Back Behind the Woodshed
Edmonton, Alberta is living out a strange drama. Clement Greenberg spent time there. He called it his favorite small city, according to a conversation I had with the wonderful Terry Fenton. Edmonton was an outpost for some serious modernism: Peter Hide, for one. It continues as such with (among others) the artists associated with the gallery/workspace Common Sense, where I had a solo show in 2008 and hope one day to have another. The best work being made in town is either explicitly or attitudinally modernist—self-critical, patently visual, and aware of its modernist heritage. Which is, as any modernist will tell you, only a good start. The work remains to actualize quality on modernist terms, which is by no means assured.
Why is Greenberg so often loathed by people who didn't know him? I have never heard a satisfactory answer. The Twentieth Century gave us many ambitious intellectuals, the majority of whom we don't bother with anymore. Anyone disagreeing with Greenberg's writings could throw them on the heap where lie those of Vladimir Lenin, for instance. But for some reason, Greenberg and all he is reputed to stand for—a list of sins that grows longer and more absurd over time—must be burned in effigy every so often to keep the art machine going. Edmonton, where the modernist triumph still reverberates, has produced critics who are doing everything in their power to silence it. It's not enough to call these people postmodernists. They are, but they haven't moved on in the way that post would imply. (Most of the artists I know who don't identify with modernism are nonetheless not working to cause problems for anyone else's genre. I also know people who read from the deconstructionist canon and claim, no more or less, to have gotten something out of it. Those postmodernists are my friends. I'm talking about academic postmodernists, who trained on capital-T Theory and abide by it.) It would be more accurate to call them antimodernists. And like the aforementioned mujahids, reason is not available to them.
One of these antimodernists is Amy Fung, who reviewed an exhibition at Harcourt House Gallery by Mitchel Smith and Sheila Luck, entitled "Retro-Active." Her review, passed along by one of my Edmontonian friends, is ripe for a good old-fashioned fisking—it's that bad, all the way through. Even if we allow for differences in taste, the essay is a flimsy chain of intellectually dishonest claims made in bad faith by a critic with retaliation on her mind. She liked the art well enough, but she can't stand the community around it. Peter Hide wrote an essay for "Retro-Active." Fung asserts:
Only in reading curator Peter Hide's exhibition essay, his use of "retro" is curious, if not confused. He writes, "Retro is of course a fashionable word for art that looks back to a previous time." Retro, rather, is a word for art that looks back to a previous time made fashionable. He goes on to describe postmodernism as weak and insecure in its approach to looking back, and in doing so, Hide presents such an entrapped sense of logic that there is no room for debate, an ongoing condition with modernists who only feel nostalgia and entitlement to uphold their lineage in Western art history.
Then, in a hilarious blunder, she continues:
I hark on the misuse of "retro" as, after attending the artist talks by Mitchel Smith and Sheila Luck, I am genuinely flabbergasted, and slightly appalled, that this completely outdated mode of art is not only still being made and sold in contemporary galleries and showing in artist-run centers, but is being self-aggrandized as the only "serious" art still being made in our time.
Yes, in the process of accusing Hide of misusing "retro," Fung misused "hark." Hide's usage is fine, of course, even preferable to Fung's awkward rearrangement. But Fung pretends otherwise, and goes on to commit another act of intellectual dishonesty: accusing modernists of stifling a debate that Fung herself is cutting off. This is a classic maneuver from the academic postmodernist playbook, something I call I Accuse You of That Which I Am Guilty. Intrigued by the unparsable wreckage of "entrapped sense of logic," I searched the passage by Hide for a debate-killing remark:
The idea of looking back to go forward is not new in art; the achievements of the Renaissance are based on the rediscovery of classical art after 2000 years of neglect. Closer to our time is the rebirth of painting in the hands of the Impressionists who looked back to Goya and Velazquez to escape from the prevailing pall of academic salon painting in 19th century France. In both cases the products of this revisiting produced art that was genuinely new and of its time, but without self consciously trying to be so. (The looking back of Post Modernism by contrast seems to be a self conscious process with its claims of irony which only go to reinforce a sense of weakness and insecurity in the work.)
That was Hide's commentary on postmodernism in its entirety as far as that essay was concerned. Do you see what excluded all debate? The merest criticism. According to Fung, further debate had only one condition: the uncritical acceptance of postmodernism. We have a word for the feeling that one's position is owed uncritical acceptance: entitlement. Look at who accuses whom of entitlement in Fung's article.
More distortions, canards, arguments stuck together with chewing gum, and instances of the pot calling the kettle black follow that one. Only two of them merit discussion. The first is a passage that decries women working in the shadow of men (as if this was a failing of modernism, and not a persistent problem of other eras, or other fields of endeavor in the mid-20th Century) and claims:
It is this proliferation of self-important discrimination that has pushed modernism from an important and interesting era into the dark ages.
Hide's essay concludes with a beautiful recognition of the artists' equality:
Mitchel and Sheila have worked together sharing the same studio for many years and because of this I feel they have evolved together to their mutual benefit.
Fung has avoided mentioning that statement because it contradicts her thesis that modernism is guilty of sexism, and therefore anyone associated with it at present has "no right to dismiss all other forms of art as non-serious endeavors." How one follows the other I have no idea. Given Fung's unreliability as a narrator, I question whether Smith or Luck made any such dismissal. More likely, she listened to their talk with as much fairness as she read Hide's essay. But this perceived slight was all that was necessary to cause her to vent appalled feelings that their art was being made, sold, or exhibited. She repeated this sentiment, that the modernist herd ought to be thinned, a couple of paragraphs later.
...if the appetite and demand for modernist works has significantly shifted down, then the supply and production of modernism needs to keep on par with its demand.
You would think that modernists were standing shoulder to shoulder on the prairie, littering Alberta with welded sculptures and color-field paintings, but they're a minority just like they are everywhere else.
Fung has a tin ear for the English language and she evinces all the failings of a tendentious education. I have pointed this out to her before, but I could say the same of a lot of writers. Particular to the Edmontonian antimodernists is the attitude that debate with modernists is impossible, and therefore their work should not be seen and their opinions should not be heard. Its scholarly trappings notwithstanding, academic postmodernism operates like a religion, with tenets enforced through guilt, sanctified texts, a preference for belief over evidence, and a dim view of doubt. It rails at dissenters with the fury that the flock reserves for infidels. Despite its appearance in an entertainment weekly in western Canada, this essay is noteworthy because Fung has written an art review with the rhetorical structure of a religious tract, warning the heathens to forsake their erroneous customs and stop scorning the Good News.
Iron-y
If you saw Iron Man 2 (which is chock-full of asplodey good times), you may have noted a scene in which Tony Stark rudely shoves aside a Barnett Newman so that he can hang an Iron Man poster done in the style of artist, poseur, and liar Shepard Fairey. Fairey has acknowledged that IM2's production designer contacted him for friendly permission to do the homage. Thus they revealed Stark's egomania and philistinism in a pithy, believable manner. Cheers!
Passings
This has been a sad time for the world of metal, having recently lost Frank Frazetta and Ronnie James Dio. I had a formative experience as a young teenager when my boss at the bookstore I was working at showed me books by Frazetta and Boris Vallejo side by side. My boss was an artist, and he pointed out that while Vallejo was competent, Frazetta blew him away. Vallejo's warriors look like bodybuilders. Frazetta's look like killers of men. I've been making those kinds of comparisons ever since. My interest in metal has waned, but I saw Dio in concert back when he could fill a stadium and I'm not ashamed to admit that the music gave me many happy hours of listening. Dio's vocal power and Ritchie Blackmore's musical gifts are captured in this video of Rainbow performing Gates of Babylon.
I just heard that Avigdor Arikha died in late April, which is a disappointment as someone who admires his "post-abstract naturalism," as he called it.
Readings
No, all too often Tate Modern’s take on visual culture has been all about novelty, shock value, celebrity status, scan-and-move-on, headlines in the red-tops, unreadable exegesis-cum-advertising-copy from Freize-frequenting academics and the sort of critics who never actually criticise anything. Which is to say, Tate Modern is not really about art at all — it’s about all the things around art, like money, entertainment and fame. Or to put it in yet another way, I don’t really buy the line that Tate Modern somehow made stodgy, insular philistine old Britain love modern art. I think what Tate Modern did was to package modern art in such a thoroughly persuasive way that Britain quite rightly threw the toy itself aside and has been playing happily with the wrapping-paper ever since.
Susan Stamberg (via Artsjournal)
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government took action at home. People of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to desolate inland areas of the U.S. Some 120,000 men, women and children were placed in internment camps for the duration of World War II.
In Washington, D.C, the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery is exhibiting art and other objects created in those camps — a grim yet handsome reminder of a dark chapter of American history.
Many hours later, after the police station and the Jandarma office, following much tumult, phone calls, and nothing to eat but some black tea and crackers, after a translator was found and the paperwork was finished and the officers had whisked Mr. Freakoid to the hospital for a perfunctory breathalyzer test, then, in that first moment I was alone, in the very minute that quiet descended, I grabbed a pen and searched my bag for a scrap of paper-anything would do-and began to write. Truly, no exaggerating, I haven't stopped since.