Sherry Chandler

The NYTimes has a report of an art exhibit in at the Wolfsonian museum at Florida International University titled “Thoughts on Democracy” in which artists revisit Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series:

Sixty artists contributed to the show. But their creations bear little resemblance to the Rockwell paintings, which helped raise $133 million for the war effort in 1943 after the government turned them into posters. There is no folksy man standing up to speak his opinion (exemplifying “Freedom of Speech”), no devout group praying (“Freedom of Worship”) no wholesome family sitting down to a Thanksgiving meal (“Freedom From Want”).

And while the fourth freedom, “Freedom From Fear,” does reappear, the message seems ominous. In Guillermo Kuitca’s rendition of Rockwell’s image of parents putting their small children to bed, the family is surrounded by a sea of blackness. In James Victore’s remake, tears burst from the parents’ eyes as they pull an American flag over a wooden coffin.

What all of this suggests is not just a reinterpretation of Rockwell but a meditation on an American crisis of self-confidence: the sense that trust in American ideals is giving way to fear and uncertainty about how they are exploited

The article is accompanied by a slideshow that I suggest you see.

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Must winds that cut like blades of steel

And sunsets swimming in Volnay,

The holiest, cruelest pains I feel,

Die stillborn, because old men squeal

For something new. “Write something new….”

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No, no! My chicken, I shall scrawl

Just what I fancy as I strike it

Fairies and Fusiliers, and all

Old broken knock-kneed thought will crawl

Across my verse in the classic way

And sir, be careful what you say

There are old-fashioned folk still like it.

__Robert Graves, 1918

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Perhaps the greatest obstacle to staging a Shakespeare comedy is the awe in which we have come to hold his work. Max Reinhardt felt obliged to stage a huge spectacle for his stage productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in the 1935 film even though he cast a batch of American Movie Stars in that. While many of the choices he made were inspired–Mickey Rooney as a manic Puck with an obstreperous cackle, Jimmy Cagney as Bottom–he miscast Dick Powell as Lysander. The massive production tended to overwhelm the comedy.

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Comic book and graphic novel adaptations have fared no better–the Classics Illustrated version ignored the verse of the play–and Shakespeare employed far more rhymed couplets in MSD than in any other play. Charles Vess tried to adapt it to graphic novel form but felt overwhelmed–probably because he was so influenced by Arthur Rackham and other Victorian illustrators–and ended up doing an MSD metafiction with Neil Gaiman in his Sandman series.

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In his webcomic Pibgorn Brooke McEldowney adapted the play using characters from his mainstream comic 9 Chickweed Place to supplement his comic fantasy saga cast. He adapted many of his female characters to traditionally male roles; one major conceit is that the play is set in a 1930s “Athens City” theatre district which is a thinly veiled New York. Art Deco skyscrapers abound so that they nearly become supporting cast members. Allusions to the Ashcan School of American Art culminate in a direct copy of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. McEldowney manages to evoke nearly every trope of 20th C. Broadway comedies/musicals and Hollywood adaptations of same along with film noir and pre-code movies and cartoons.

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Much of this adaptation ponders the role of women in 20th C. America–the power they had gained before WWII, before the Depression, before the repression of the ethics code. This fits very well with the concerns of the play with the tension between male power and female resistance–is Pyramus a tyrant or a lover–or both? Hermia and Helena gain power in the Wood they never could have in Athens, and when Chickweed’s Gran is cast as Egea, with the power of life or death over her recalcitrant daughter, it points up just how much power 20th C. American women gained.

But the most dynamic bit of casting is the fairy Pibgorn as the pwca Robin Goodfellow. This allows for a love triangle between Puck, Titania (the succubus Drusilla with short black spitcurls–Betty Boop as Mae West?) and Oberon (Geoff, the mortal pianist as underworld boss–his acetylene-blue eyes burning under the shadow of his fedora). McEldowney also matures the changeling Indian prince into a haughty handsome youth, the perfect boytoy for Titania and fitting rival for Oberon, so there is a second interlocking love triangle in the fairy realm.

There are sly allusions throughout the adaptation to numerous 20th Century comedies, romantic, screwball, fantastic. Solange the Chickweed Siamese colorpoint accompanies Puck so often that Bell, Book and Candle’s Pyewacket rises in the magic circle. The girls who work in Titania’s nightclub The Wood form a Busby Berkely chorus line–clothed only in pink thistledown– to help the Prince sing their mistress asleep. The Prince himself, who could be a cross between the pop star Prince and Cab Calloway, with a dash of Valentino, finishes the number with a bit of slide dancing and a slow striptease. For me, this evoked all three of the Cab Calloway/Betty Boop cartoons. Then he enjoys a Code-flaunting love scene with Titania. They apparently do everything short of kicking that gong around.

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But Puck has already seduced Oberon after she delivered Cupid’s herb–a passion-flower? — and they wind up in bed for a post-coital tete-a-tete as he outlines his plans to get the changeling away from Titania. Puck’s frustration and jealousy complete the movie-oriented genre which Shakespeare’s plays helped inspire. She is a working class girl to Oberon’s criminal overlord and is fated to win his love, according to the conventions of the best screwball comedies of the 20th Century. All of the dancers, Titania’s fairies, the rude mechanicals/chorus girls and Puck are solidly working class in contrast to the aristocracy–the theater and nightclub owners.
Bottom is also female–probably the only time the ingenue plays that role–and she is another fairy, Oognat,–the musical reference is typical of McEldowney, who is also a professional musician; she may also evoke a certain G. Herriman character. McEldowney even manages to make her transformed ears exude a certain je ne sais quois so that one can understand why Titania could be so taken with her charms. The scene where the succubus’ serpent tongue twines about the delicate tip of a gracefully tapering ear is inspired.

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Pibgorn archives are available through subscription to mycomicspage.com.

Michoacán de Ocampo is one of 32 Mexican states. Its capital is Morelia, where the Kentucky Institute of International Studies bases its Spanish language immersion program. Michoacán was the site of the pre-Columbian Kingdom of the Purhépecha and is known for its pre-Colombian and colonial architecture. Geographically it is dominated by the Sierra Madre del Sur and it is the winter destination of migrating Monarch butterflies.

Cincos Maestros Michoacános is an exhibit of works by Francisco Rodriguez Oñate, Jesús Escalera, Luis Palomares, Filipe Castaneda, and José Luis Soto González. The exhibit has been brought to four Kentucky colleges and universities under the joint sponsorship of KIIS and the Department of Culture of Michoacán. The exhibit was the impetus for New Madrid’s Mexico in the Heartland issue.

This exhibit is currently showing at the University of Kentucky (Tomorrow is the last day unfortunately), so I decided to walk across campus to the Tuska Gallery to take a look. It was a brisk day, nicer for a lunch-hour walk than I would have thought, though the campus was strewn still with debris from the recent storms, and at Maxwell Place, the President’s house, workmen were feeding a downed tree into the chipper, filling the air with the smell of pine.

The works in this exhibit deal with the mythic (as in the Oñate’s “Musica” shown above) and the modern (as in the detail below from José Luis Soto González’s “Memoria del 68,” which has as its subject the violent suppression of a student demonstration in Mexico City). It shows us “peasant” life and the spectacular landscapes and architecture of the region (example below by Luis Palomares).

I am not by any means an art critic but I love the way these paintings use primary colors and abstraction to create work with nearly a visceral emotional power. They make a very sophisticated bow to the primitive, in either subject matter or style.

The work that hit me hardest was Soto’s five-panel painting entitled “11-9-2001,” a work for which I have no example to show you. It depicts the destruction of the World Trade Center from the first spectacular outburst of flames to the search through the rubble for survivors.

After more than six years of exploitation, I thought I had grown a great emotional callus over the spot occupied by the fall of the towers but this series made me feel once again that ice around the heart.

The center panel was the most powerful of all. From the distance, it looked like a series of light and dark vertical stripes with a horizontal wisp of smoke. Moving closer, I realized it was a close-up of the building and the dark stripes were the windows.

Closer still, and I realized that the little smudges of color in the dark stripes were faces, faces at the windows staring out as the smoke began to curl around the building.

This Mexican art has the power to abrade away the calluses that U.S. politics has rubbed on my soul.

There is much that you should see on the blog called No Caption Needed, including this post called Joy and Grief in Kenya. Not fair of me to steal the photos. Go look at them. But it is not only the photos but also the commentary¹ that clutch at my heart with a cold fist:

Instead of the usual backdrop of the demonstration along an otherwise busy city street, here we see real wreakage amidst what otherwise was already a slum. And instead of the stock characters of earnest citizens and bullying cops, or outraged citizens and cautious cops, or mob frenzy and state terror, or any other political scenario, here we see a man exulting in the sheer ecstasy of destruction. An obscene truth is being revealed: what is violence and burning and horror to some is for others an experience of raw freedom as it can be perversely but powerfully known only through violent revenge and ruin. The sound track should be the Ode to Joy.

We’re not supposed to see that truth, and many others appear once that Pandora’s box is opened. Violence persists not only because so many are denied so much by so few, but also because it remains the best shot some have at feeling powerful.

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The joy in the first photo comes from hate. Hate is something harder, deeper, less changeable, and far more dangerous than other emotions. It also has no place in politics. Hate is in fact one border of the political: You can struggle to live with others, even to dominate them, or you can hate and kill them. Likewise, hate is felt toward groups, while anger is felt toward individuals (see Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 1382a). By seeing the senseless loss created by an individual laying dead on the street, the second photo returns us to a world of persons who deserve justice or protection but not violence.

Grief may be a deeply political emotion. Even though no one can reach the depths of pain felt by the individual stricken with grief, it calls forth empathy and can move us all to cross the borders of our estrangement from one another. It was grief, not killing or victory or glory that finally brought Achilles out of his rage against the Trojans to a moment of decency. Perhaps the recognition of grief can remind us that violence is not just another means for political expression. It is how we end up dancing in Hell.

We really must find ways to get around the big media, the packaged messages, the political campaigns, and to look directly at what is happening to our brothers in the world. We must find grief, even anger, but not blind hatred.

See also Kissing War and Tasting Victory, the slideshow Artists Against the War, and also the slideshow On the Road.

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¹Pictures are not necessarily worth a thousand words and can be manipulated and manipulative, perhaps because they hit us at a pre-verbal level. See this No-Caption-Needed comment from one who calls himself farmer :

The whole idea of “No Caption Needed” is a lie.
Barthes, to Sontag, to Virilio… before and beyond.
All images conjure words and vice versa… whether we want it or not.
Interpretation is all too cheap and easy…
Rather it is the reflexive production of production…
read: Cameras are guns.
But then, what the hell do I know?

Watch it at YoutTube.

From the NYTimes:

Controversy has erupted from the sleepy third-floor hallway galleries at the New York Public Library, where a modest exhibition of contemporary prints called “Multiple Interpretations” is on view.

The work that has prompted protests from some library patrons, attracted coverage by The Daily News, Fox News and USA Today and has stirred the blogosphere is called “Line Up,” a series of politically inflammatory prints by the team of Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese. Each black-and-white digital print is a mug shot-style diptych in which a member of the Bush administration appears in profile and face forward, holding a police identification sign and the date on which he or she made a statement of questionable veracity relating to Iraq.

A video accompanying the prints allows you to hear an actual recording through headphones as you view each speaker’s fake mug shot reproduced on screen. President Bush announces the discovery of Saddam Hussein’s effort to purchase uranium in Africa. Dick Cheney says, “Nobody has produced a single shred of evidence that there’s anything wrong or inappropriate here,” presumably a reference to Halliburton. (The entire video is available on YouTube.)

It is at first mildly shocking to come upon such bluntly partisan artwork on a New York Public Library wall.Biting political satire is deeply a part of printmaking history — see Goya, James Gillray and Daumier — but handmade prints are no longer a significant form of political communication, and we don’t expect anything so brazenly tendentious in the public library context.

H/T The Bag

More thoughts on this installation at No Caption Needed.

Buy postcards of the mug shots here. Get the t-shirt here.

Update: Here’s a link to all the images in the exhibition.

It’s a morning for sound.

I See Invisible People gives us the sound of a Croatian Sea Organ. This giant pipe organ played by the lapping of the waves in Zadar, Croatia, is the creation of architect Nikola Basic. National Geographic has a video.

Heraclitean Fire provides a link to the Bitish Library recordings of English Accents and Dialects, in this case a man from Somerset talking about making cider.

David Caddy, of course, provides a sampling of a contemporary Dorset accent doing poetic commentary at So Here We Are. His latest deals with the Scots poet Thomas A. Clark.

David also participates in Middle Ditch, the ongoing saga of English village life.

And the Lipstick of Noise is all about poetry as an aural experience.

Oh! and this has nothing to do with sound by Pocahontas County Fare provides a neat link to a reading list of British Women’s Novels, 1775-1818 . If you like old Gothic novels, like Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, this site will lead you to more of the same, often with a link to full text.

What did I notice in my week of close regard for W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”? (Full text here)

The poem has a modified sonnet structure. This fact has been pointed out. Although it’s an important nicety that a number of online reproductions of the poem skip, it’s printed in two verse paragraphs in both my old Norton’s Anthology and my copy of Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden (Modern Library, 1959). (Sold for $2.95 according to the dust cover.) You can see from the accompanying autograph from the Library of Congress, Auden himself meant the poem to have two paragraphs. (Click image for full-sized version.)

Many words on the web about the poem’s thematic content and it’s relationship to Auden’s conversion to Christianity. How, for example, the “forsaken” cry of Icarus is like Christ’s cry from the cross “Why has thou forsaken me?”

Little is written, online at least, about the poem’s form. Nevertheless, it is noticed that, even though it is in free verse and runs over 14 lines and cannot be a sonnet, it has a sonnet-like structure with a turn at line 14.

I love that turn because it really wants you to notice that it’s a turn. It tells you. Like the torturer’s horse, it seems like a little joke in this otherwise somewhat ponderous poem:

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance, how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster;

This turn, however, is toward the disaster, at least as it is realized by “The Fall of Icarus.”

Note please how that “quite leisurely” slows you down. You cannot say that complicated combination of sounds without rolling it a bit on your tongue.

It seems to me that a poem that goes this far to remind you of a sonnet must have very conscious intentions on the sonnet form. So I decided to look at its numerology. The octet of this poem is 13 lines long, the sestet is 8. Twenty-one lines altogether, and of course 21, like 14, is a multiple of seven. But more interesting, 13 and 8 are consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence and thus are proportionately satisfying just as a sonnet is.

So I think I’m going to call it a free verse sonnet.

What else? Well, it’s peppered with adverbs: dully, reverently, passionately, specially, leisurely, calmly, and the oddballs just and quite. Adverbs are stacked twice: just walking dully along and reverently, passionately waiting.

I suppose you might say that it’s thus salted with adjectives: its human position, the miraculous birth, the dreadful martyrdom, some untidy spot, the forsaken cry, an important failure, and the best of all, the expensive, delicate ship. The adjectives in these phrases seem more important than the nouns to me.

And prepositional phrases: skating / on a pond at the edge of the wood and the sun shone / As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green / Water.

The effect of all this, and the liberal use of long open vowels, is to slow the mouth down so that we walk a somewhat ponderous Promenade through these Pictures at an Exhibition.

And yet I think the poem has its fair amount of whimsy. That use of specially in Children who did not specially want it to happen, the doggy life of the dogs, innocent behind of the torturer’s horse, that self-named turn, and even the expensive delicacy of the ship all seem playful, even humorous to me.

I think this is not often considered a funny poem. I don’t think it’s a funny poem. But poets are always playing, I think, even at their most serious. Even on the verge of religious conversion.

Oh one other small thing. Two phrases I find very hard to say: just walking dully along and the torturer’s horse. I find myself wanting to redact that torturer to an executioner just because I find it hard to get my tongue and teeth straightened out saying it.

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The upcoming week is set to be a distracting one and I have not yet completely mastered the Auden, so I thought I might turn to Dickinson for my next poem. Her work tends to the short and some breathelessness might be fun after Auden’s long periods. So I opened my Final Harvest (Little, Brown 1961) at random and found one of my favorites (#640 in the complete poems):

I cannot live with You —
It would be Life —
And Life is over there —
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Keys to —

Alas! It is not short but it is one of my favorites and I need to get beyond that opening crescendo. Or is Dickinson all crescendo? More next week.

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Be sure to check out 32 Poems blog where this idea originated.

Thanks to MW.

In Liverpool, England, theater director Robert sculptor Richard Wilson has created a new temporary public artwork called “Turning the Place Over.” On a building to be demolished, Wilson has caused an 8-meter section of exterior wall to rotate in and out of the façade. The geometry of the rotation is complex and therefore the video is the only way for the virtual traveler to know a little of the work.

Link from Donna Marder.

I’ve been intending to let you all know that my husband, the wood carver T R Williams, now has a portfolio listing on the Southern Artistry register.

Southern Artistry is “a multidisciplinary showcase of outstanding southern artists” from nine southeastern states.

I’m very proud of this achievement. Other Kentucky artists listed include Jonathan Greene, Gwen Heffner, Leatha Kendrick, Pale, Stout and Amber, Arturo Alonzo Sandoval, Rebekka Seigel, Joe Survant, and Jim Tomlinson. And these just among the ones whose work I know.

I’ve hesitated to mention this because T R’s portfolio is just sort of a placeholder at the moment. It needs some work. And also because, for some glitchy reason, he isn’t yet showing up in the search engine on the site.

But I really am very proud of him and so I’ve decided to go ahead and brag on him a little bit.