People's Republic of Art

Movie Magic

There’s scene in Peter Bogdanovich’s film, The Last Picture Show,  that inspired this poem. As the film opens, the camera slowly pans down the dusty, windblown and empty street of a tiny Texas town in the 1950’s. When the movie was released in 1971, I was taken with the heartfelt pathos of Larry McMurtry’s coming-of- age story. Many years later, a second look at the DVD left me with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu and memories of the little Mojave Desert towns of southern California where I was partly raised.

We lived in Lancaster, a one-street town back then, inhabiting a Quonset hut recently vacated by members of the wartime RAF, who were training at nearby Quartz Hill. My father held various jobs, including dynamiter and test driver for the U.S. Rubber Company. Mom had her hands full keeping the dust out.

 My parents were a strikingly handsome couple and looked, I thought,  like movie stars. At five, I was an expert on movie stars. After all, I could be found most days wandering the sagebrush in my six-guns and chaps and riding down rustlers, just like I’d seen John Wayne and Randolph Scott do so many times. I thought I might grow up to be just like them.

 
MOVIE MAGIC

By now, I’ve tossed back my years
like straight shots, glasses
lined up on a polished bar
in a well-loved, deserted saloon
and the memories
burn my belly, a pleasant, spreading pain,
before a hazy “B” picture
of times long past begins to flicker
in my brain. I sit back to enjoy the show.
“Oh.” I think, “They are all alive again.”

 Funny how we can hear the wind blow,
whistling through the screen door,
see the crumpled newspaper bounce
across the lonesome street,
hear cowboy music on the radio,
smell the sage out where coyotes prowl
yet never see an actor
or puzzle about their lines.

 “Maybe this is an establishing shot,” I think,
before dad and mom ride in
from the desert outside the town,
she on a pinto mare and he on a buckskin stud,
both with their hats pushed back,
saddle conchos flashing silver in the sun,
laughing together after a fight,
lovers, always lovers in the end.
But damned if they do and damned
if the wind won’t chase nothing but dust
and yesterday’s paper
on down the street.
It’s then I pull back to see the camera crew,
and the director
trying like hell not to tell any lies
and the screenwriter scribbling changes.

In the Bleak Midwinter: Bruegel’s Massacre of the Innocents.

In the bleak mid-winter
  Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
  Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
  Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
  Long ago.
    -Christina Rossetti

So goes a carol of the season and Christina Rossetti said it as well as any. Winter has come to these mountains, sometimes bleak enough to deepen our gloom over the daily news of war, economic recession, intolerance and the murderous behavior of uncivil men. And cold, deeply cold enough to endanger our hopes of spring.

Lately, a storm will roll in from the Pacific darkening the afternoon, do its work in the night and, snickering, leave a parting coat of snow to cover the morning ground. “Ah, shit,” we say. “The road’s not plowed and I’ll never get out of the driveway in this mess. The propane tank’s down to 10% and it’s too damn expensive to order a refill.” Still, it’s magical to see, the mounds of white cloaking the unsightly wood pile, sheeting over the oil spots on the dirt drive and filling the pot holes we were too lazy to mend last summer.  All that and so beautiful it could make you cry.

God’s a tricky One.

I was teaching this painting to high school students a couple of weeks ago, but I wonder if it’s right for a man with sixty-four years of history, pains in his joints and scared of cancer, to test their joyful spirits so. Sometimes art just hurts too much.

It’s called “The Massacre of the Innocents” painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder around 1567. Before examining the painting, it might be well to recall the New Testament story that inspired the work.

“Then Herod…put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men.” -Matthew 2:16-18 (New King James Version)

Herod, the Roman client king of Judea, had learned that a "King of the Jews" was recently-born in the village of Bethlehem. Worried that this “king” would usurp his throne, he ordered the extermination of all young male children in that place. Forewarned by an angel, the Holy Family had already skipped town.

Perhaps the story is true and maybe its mythology. I don’t think it matters. The history of our species provides enough examples of fearful rulers, protecting their power by any means, to make this picture relevant to any time. Bruegel could well have been referring to the brutal repression of the Protestant Netherlands by King Phillip II of Spain during the 1560’s. The villagers would have been considered heretics by the Catholic Spanish, abandoned by mercy and under a general sentence of death.

It’s a brutal scene. Snow covers the ground, the pond is hard with ice and the sickly green sky promises no better. Worse yet, a detachment of the enemy army have just arrived to interrupt the morning coffee and eggs. 

In the center-rear a troop of armored lancers, led by a black captain, wait with their weapons raised; blocking the exits in case any should try to escape.

The foreground is all heartbreaking slaughter.

Armed soldiers kick in the doors and batter the window shutters of the houses. Villagers are dragged into the square. Some of the women are weeping while others beg the soldiers for mercy.

Then there are the children. 

Although a “massacre of the innocents” is the point of the painting, not many of the victims are in evidence. Strange. A modern audience would know that if Steven Spielberg had directed this work, the bloody corpses of butchered babies would litter the snow. The answer to this riddle may lie in historical anecdote, for it is said that an early owner of the painting was so shocked by the violence that he had the slaughtered bodies of the infants concealed by packages and animals.

But, if we take a closer look, we can see that not all the victims are hidden.

In front of the lancers and framed by screaming women, soldiers spear a cluster of infants as if they were harp seals caught out on the ice. One holds a knife, ready to murder a baby held tightly in his mothers’ arms.

It is a cruel truth that though the story depicted in Bruegel’s painting may be mythical, the actions of the soldiers are not. We need only look back as far as Warsaw, Rwanda or this morning’s newspaper to find the same. In explanation of this, there are studies that suggest a tendency towards violence may be hardwired in humans, but surely infanticide is not. The soldiers, then as now, would say they were only following orders, but it betrays us all to slay our chances of salvation. For although the Christian Messiah of Matthew’s gospel escapes, many more messiahs’ do not. There are crimes that even a new fallen snow cannot hide.

Perhaps it is the winter itself that is partly to blame. My friend Mike Rider recently observed that it is precisely this sort of darkness that we light a Christmas candle against. It’s a noble thought and I think the very struggle that makes our species heroic. But Bruegel’s painting is always there to remind us that while we hang the holly, light the lights and speak the words of Jesus daily, we are left to wander the midnight forests still, with William Blake’s tyger stalking at our heels.

Portrait of Grandpa with Christmas Tree: A Review

At the height of his performance piece, Ripping Open Wrapped Packages, given during the annual Christmas morning gift-fest at the home of Michael and Skye Zambrana, an exultant Zack Zambrana, my 6 year old grandson and the current enfant terrible of the elementary school art scene, tore open a Christmas present and cried, “Spiderman! Aaarrrgghh!” Surely this reference to Peter Parker, mythically assailed by the expectations of an adult world that frustrate both the pimply teenager and heroic webslinger, and followed by a wild cry of freude und angst, was lost on no one.

As he the tossed the Spiderman action figure onto an ever-growing pile of toys and assaulted a new present, even while shreds of Santa Claus and snowman images drifted lazily to the floor, I was reminded of Ahab, another questor from an uncertain time when he wailed, "I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself!"

But if Zambrana pushes the limits in his performance art, he can also reverence the artistic past.

A case in point is his recent work, Portrait of Grandpa with Christmas Tree, presented to me by the artist himself. The medium is crayon on paper, a modern stand-in for the tempera on wood employed by Dominico Ghirlandaio for his Renaissance masterpiece An Old Man and His Grandson, the painting to which Zambrana’s work is an obvious homage.

He employs a palette of green, purple, brown and blue to color his iconic forms. The simplified grandfather figure, for instance, evokes ancient African petroglyphs (note how the tree bends to his primitive power) while the squarish shapes seem to reference Mary Heilmann’s 2005 painting, Surfing on Acid.

But it is the three purple hearts emanating from Grandpas head chakra that shout for our attention. Do these hearts mirror the cleverly arranged text which spells out Zambrana’s archetypal themes: Grandpa, love and Zack? Although it could be argued that the artist is referring to Poul Anderson’s classic fantasy, Three Hearts and Three Lions, my money is on the Jungian interpretation since I doubt that Poul Anderson is read in the 2^nd grade.

When I asked the artist about this, he replied, “I’m going to play Mortal Kombat.”

So, as when we grapple with the works of so many postmodern artists, we are left to question with Shakespeare’s Celia in As You Like It, “Whither?”

The Gallery of the Mind - 2

In which a breakfast conversation between my friend Jack and I has turned to the value of making and looking at art. Jack appears more interested in his hotcakes.

 

After a time, I pitched in again. “You must be pretty stuffed by this time, Jack, and all that cholesterol can’t be good for you. How about another painting?”

“I’d prefer a cinnamon roll. You don’t give up easy.”

“You asked for this, remember? We'll have to look up to see this one. We’re in the Sistine Chapel, in the
Vatican, Rome.”

“Listening to this is like going to Disneyland and finding out it has a hell. You know, Eternal Torment Land.”

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, 1510.

I realize that most people would have bailed out at this point, but when I’m in full teacher mode I’m unstoppable. “We’re standing near the center of this sanctuary amid an overwhelming array of images painted by the great Michelangelo.”

“Wasn’t he gay?”

“These are frescoes, painted in rich pastel colors, of scenes from the Old Testament, and broken up by seated prophets and nude youths.”

“Like I said…”

“Come on, now. Go to your gallery. Those painted pilasters, molding and cornices look dimensional and real, but most of them aren’t. The painting we're going to look at is near the center of the ceiling. It depicts the creation of Adam, the first man, by God the Father, the first artist.”

“Maybe you should have been a preacher.”

“I’d need to be religious and I can’t handle cults. Maybe art is my religion. You could do worse. Speaking of which, look at the Creator. God appears as a vigorous older gentleman, with flowing white hair and a beard. He’s flying free and unsupported because this painting is about the air and the intellect, I think.”

“I know this picture and I think Michelangelo’s God looks like he works out.”

“Michelangelo’s women look like that, too. But check out His rose-colored cape. It’s billowed out in the shape of a womb. Or a brain, maybe. Inside the cape are the unborn children of the future. Eve nestles under the protective crook of God's left arm, peeking worriedly, yet hopefully at Adam, like a schoolgirl catching her first sight of a blind date.”

“I’ve never had any luck with blind dates. Remember Janey Nelson? We met on a blind date and…”

“Focus, you idiot. Look at Adam. He’s reclining on a mossy bank, his left arm lazily extended toward the right forefinger of God. He looks a lot like his dad. And in the space between their fingertips, unseen, is the cosmic lightning. God is actually willing him into being. It is the instant of Adam's birth and he’s not one second old.”

“You’ve got a thing about nativity, don’t you?”

“Have you entered into the world of the picture yet? Have you allowed it to move? In my picture, Adam's look has turned to one of befuddlement. ‘Who am I,’ he seems to say. ‘What am I doing here?’ ‘Perhaps I should invent beer?’”

“Damn straight!”

I think that this picture represents a turning point in the history of thought and of art. What I mean is, we’re seeing man created in the image and likeness of God. In the true spirit of the Renaissance, he is conceived as of God, not blindly subservient to His power, but sharing in it.”

“This is draining.”

Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, Eiffel Tower; Paris, 1887-89.

“One more. After all, we need to go and see what manner of world this Adam has created. It’s not a painting this time, but architecture on a grand scale. It soars to over 900 feet; twice the height of the dome of St. Peter's in

Rome or the Great pyramid at

Giza and occupies over 300 square feet at the base. It’s the

Eiffel

Tower. An engineer named Gustave Eiffel designed it for the Paris World's Fair of 1889 and, until 1932, it was the tallest structure in the world. Today, it leaps from the center of

Paris like an iron flame, for it represents the final element: fire.”

“Cute.”

“Thank you. The Eiffel Tower, you see, was quite literally born in the furnaces of the iron works of France. Intended to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution, the tower was meant to embody the fiery spirits of Danton, Marat and Charlotte Corday.”

“Didn’t those folks get their heads chopped off?’

“Two of them did. But this tower is also a monument to another and even more transforming event, the industrial revolution. The bones of men are in this iron. Wage workers made this tower. Many suffered and some died.”

“The Eiffel Tower is a big radio and TV antennae and a tourist attraction. Are you saying it’s art?”

“I think so. The Eiffel Tower is beautiful to see. The wrought iron interlace is as delicate as embroidery and its final skyward statement is as clear, direct and optimistic as a shouted ‘yes!’ Like the circle of giant stones, where we started this exercise, this too is an homage to basic shapes; this time the triangle and pyramid.”

“I can feel the labor pains coming on.”

“Yup. As at Stonehenge, this monument, too, contains a doorway. It’s framed in a Romanesque arch and expansive, as if built to allow for something as huge as an entire century to pass through. If we enter the doorway of the Eiffel Tower, we will be reborn into our own time.”

“And about damn time, too. I asked a simple question and got a hellacious long answer. You’re paying, buddy.” I left the money for the check on the table as we got up to go. A pretty good tip, too.

The Gallery of the Mind

It’s turning cold up here in the mountains and I was huddled with my friend Jack in the Red Kettle the other morning. We were enjoying the steamy warmth of the place and the companionable smells of hotcakes, hash browns and fried eggs when my friend leaned over his coffee and asked me a question I’d never been asked before.

“You teach Art History, right? You paint. No offense, ol’ buddy, but why? Why spend all those hours making pictures few people are going to see? Hell, why do we even look at art?”

He sat back with one of those “gotcha” smirks and I looked at him like he’d just grown a lizard head. But I can evade with the best of them.

“Uh, yeah…But what do you think of Roger Clemens and all those steroid shots? I mean, all we can think about now is the guy’s butt!”

“I asked you about art.” I knew he had me as sure as Hemingway’s fisherman hooked that big sailfish and he wasn’t going to let up until my shark-eaten carcass was hauled up on the beach.

“Well, I guess I make art because I have to. I’d go crazy if I didn’t. It’s a search for the self, I think. An effort to be whole.”

“You’ve already got a hole. It’s in your head.”

“No, I’m serious. I believe that for the artist, it’s a lifetime process of death and rebirth. Think about it. When you make art you create original patterns and connections. The old self dies and you reemerge as a new and somehow more 'discovered' self.”

“Is that your teacher voice?” 

“Yes.” I was having to think now and it hurt.

“Well, ok. Freud meets Christopher freakin’ Columbus. But, what about me? I don’t make art, I fix cars.” In truth, Jack doesn’t merely “fix” cars, but makes a pretty good living as a private physician for the rides of the rich. If your 1961 Austin-Healey 3000 develops a tic in its electric cooling fan, he’s the man you call. I think of him as a sort of art restorer.

“Look, Jack. That goes for the viewer, too. Anyone can be remade by art, even you.” 

The waitress brought our breakfast. Jack had ordered hotcakes.  I got the oatmeal, doctor’s orders.

“I’d love to be remade,” my friend continued, “especially by you, because you’re so cute. But there’s not much art in here. So good luck, Dr. Frankenstein.”

I looked at the walls of the Red Kettle and the décor was definitely road café nostalgia. All around were black and white photos of people in woolen coats, standing in the snow, posed in front of old Packards and Oldsmobile 88’s: Idyllwild in the bygone days. Not a Monet in sight. 

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll use the gallery in your head. Everybody has one, even if it has only half a dozen images in it.” 

“Huh?” 

Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England. c. 2750 - 1500 BCE.

“Picture Stonehenge. You’ve seen pictures of it a thousand times. I’ll bet everyone on the planet knows what Stonehenge looks like.”

Jack looked at me quizzically, a forkful of hotcake poised halfway to his mouth. “Is this some kind of New Age deal? Am I going to be transported to an alien world? Will there be naked women there?”

“Look, picture Stonehenge from inside the ring of stones. This place was built to resonate in our bones. Those gigantic liths you’re looking at form square and rectangular shapes set within the circular design.” I was well into it now, eyes closed, imagining it for myself.

"Stonehenge is a ‘cromlech,’ Celtic for ‘circle place.’ The circle, as everyone knows, is the shape of the sun and the moon and our home planet; a sacred shape, within which all things setting out eventually return home.”

“You didn’t answer me about the naked women.”

“The earth is covered with big stones, but the square and rectangular ones were made by artists, for only makers can fashion shapes that exist in the mind and heart more than in nature. These stone arrangements are huge and of the earth, yet commingled with a distinctly human spirit, although a little alien to us now.”

“Please don’t use words like ‘commingled’ while I’m eating. You’ll get me all excited and I might choke.”

I wasn’t listening. 

“That's why we know that we are in the presence of something mystical. These massive post and lintel doorways have been waiting on this spot for 5,000 years. But doorways to what? Waiting for what? I think that Stonehenge must certainly be the work of shamanic artists, magicians, like those who painted game animals on the cave walls of Altimira and Lascaux. But why?”

“Because they hadn’t invented doorknobs yet?”  

“You have the insightfulness of a salamander. Look, I think that these doorways are waiting for us. Artists are like midwives. In giving birth to their new selves they’ve provided us with an opportunity to be reborn into worlds once unimaginable.”

“Marijuana is illegal, you know.”

“Shut up and stay with me. Let’s just accept the invitation and pass through this doorway and into the world of things that artists have made.”

“Is this what you do to your students?”

“Only when they don’t turn in their homework.”

“Ok, but I hope this is better than the last place. I was getting tired of big rocks.”

“Here is a painting, tempera on canvas. It is Sandro Botticelli's ‘Birth of Venus.’ You know the one.”

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, c. 1485.

“Naked women, finally.” 

“It’s large for a painting, roughly 5 1/2 feet high by 9 feet wide. And on it is depicted an amazing thing. A woman is in the center of the picture, perched on the front edge of a giant scallop shell. Look at her. She’s young, flaxen-haired and languidly beautiful.”

“There you go again. I don’t hold with words like ‘languidly’ and I doubt that Jesus would, either.”

“Yeah? Well, you’ll love this next part. She is completely nude and that is the way she should be. She’s the goddess Venus, patroness of love and fertility, and she is being born. And everybody knows that all babies come into the world in their birthday suits.”

“I can see her just as good as you and that woman’s no baby.”

“She’s a goddess, you cretin. That’s the way they’re born. Now look at the rest of the image. This picture is covered in water, the most feminine and powerful of forces; the mother of us all. But the scene is dreamy and the sea is curiously flat. Botticelli has provided us with little pointy chevrons for waves, directing our eyes to the spot where the goddess has only recently landed. Maybe it’s the first surrealist painting.” 

“Ok, but I seem to remember some other folks floating around.” Jack had put down his fork and his eyes were closed in concentration. How did I get so lucky in my friends? 

“Right, those are zephyrs, soft breezes, the male and the female intertwined, blowing the newborn Venus across the sea to this island of Crete. Flowers fall from their breath as fresh blossoms strewn before the progress of a queen.”

“Ancient mouthwash?”

“Exactly. Look to the right and see that mortal woman rush from a dream-like grove of trees. She’s holding a floral cloak which bellies out in the breeze. The cloak is an emblem of Venus’ royalty.”

“This is amusing, but I’m not feeling remade yet.”  

“Be patient. There’s more we can do in this gallery. I like to enter into the world of pictures. One of my ways of doing this is to step inside and put them into motion. Try entering Botticelli's world and letting it become your ‘real’ world. Let the images come alive. Imagine that these images move over a period of, say, three seconds. Does Venus turn her head to notice the mortal woman? Is the rose cloak around her shoulders now? Do the zephyrs continue to puff and hover close? Or do they begin to peel off and do whatever out-of-work zephyrs do when they're between jobs? I think this way of looking at a picture is fun and a good way to discover our personal ‘meaning’ of it.”

“Venus is making out with the mortal woman and the zephyrs are eating pizza.”

“Ok, they’re Italian. But there’s another way of looking at the meaning of this picture” 

“I was afraid of that.”

“We can think of it as both pagan and Christian. Botticelli's audience probably saw the zephyrs as nature-spirits as well as angels, and Venus as both goddess and the Virgin Mary. Or Eve, maybe. It’s no accident that Botticelli alludes to the classical past as well as to the Christian future. After all, we are witnessing no less an event than the birth of the Renaissance itself and Botticelli invites us all to be reborn with him.”

“All this being reborn has got me fatigued. Besides, the guards in my gallery are getting surly and starting to drink on the job. I need to eat.” Jack attacked his hotcakes and I bent to my oatmeal, getting a little cold by now. Outside, a car backfired and a puff of black smoke rose from the tailpipe into the pure winter sky.

        (To be continued)