People's Republic of Art

David Reid-Marr's "Sleeping Navy Seal"

"I am a man, upon the land,
And I am a silkie in the sea..."
-The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry
  Child ballad #113

Back in the late 1960's, a friend and I were drinking in the Enlisted Men's Club on the Navy base on San Clemente Island. There were maybe a dozen men in the club and the usual grousing about dumbass officers, the lack of women on the island and the general unfairness of life. Walker, a sailor from L.A., and I were discussing a plan to steal a launch and rob the lobster traps out in the channel when a group of dripping-wet, heavily armed men with blackened faces burst though the door. The men were U.S. Navy Seals on an exercise and we were being invaded. Walker and I quickly turned our table on its side and hunkered down behind it, sipping our beers while the Seals "interrogated" terrified enlisted men, hanging one of them by his heels from the ceiling rafters, and empty bottles flew and shattered around the room like grenades in a firefight. At the time, I felt a sense of pity for any poor Vietnamese bastards who might be so unlucky as to fall into the clutches of these remorseless seal-men.

Forty years later, I still feel a supernatural presence when I think of them.

Which is why there is something both deeply moving and profoundly unsettling about David Reid-Marr's Sleeping Navy Seal. The installation was most recently to be seen in the Idyllwild Arts Faculty Show in the Parks Gallery last December.

The sleeping form of a Navy Seal, wrapped in seaweed, lies suspended over his bunk as if in a dream. His dream and ours, too, if we risk it. The tightly made sailor'€™s bed betrays no impression of his body and the pillow soars above his head like a scudding cloud. The effect is compelling. We wonder at what the boy, perhaps so recently a fumbling adolescent, urgently trying to convince his date in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen, now become half-implacable sea creature, might be dreaming. Is it a sea dream or a land dream? Hell, can we even remember the salt world of coral blooms and shark teeth as well as he knows it now? We become impatient to walk softly away, lest he awake, see intruders, and turn furious again.

I know the inspiration for this piece. David'€™s son, Adam, a former student at the Idyllwild Arts Academy where he teaches, had recently enlisted in the Coast Guard. Both David and Adam had taken the move pretty seriously. David is an Englishman, descendant of a proud seafaring people who know both the heady memories of Trafalgar as well as the bitter tragedy of so many sailors who never came home. Adam is a teen-age American, with motives so idealistic and hormonal that those of us north of fifty might have trouble remembering what caused us to do the things we did.

As for me, I found myself wondering at the mystery of sleep.

And I don't know if David Reid-Marr might have been thinking of Shakespeare, too. After all, in his Henry IV, Part 2, Shakespeare's king, robbed of sleep by crushing responsibility, considers how this time of night must be for the simple deck hand.

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep! O gentle sleep!...
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deaf'ning clamour in the slippery clouds,
That with the hurly death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude...?

Forget Henry. I'm thinking of the ship-boy and the sleeping seal-man, dreaming of the land. Dreaming of the sea.

Robert Irwin’s “Primaries and Secondaries”

“I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then”
-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I went with friends to see the Robert Irwin exhibit, “Primaries and Secondaries,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego which, unfortunately, closes today. We went in expecting an interesting exhibit by a renowned contemporary artist and came out having experienced something quite different.

“Primaries and Secondaries” spans 50 years of Irwin’s work, including pieces which helped to define the West Coast “Light and Space Movement” and its concern with how our perceptions of things are altered by consciousness.

      

Light and Space, 2007

The exhibit is housed in a former baggage terminal for the Santa Fe Railroad. To install the show in a location that has served transition for decades could not have been more apt.

In begins chronologically, with paintings from Irwin’s abstract expressionist period in the 50’s and 60’s. Lots of impasto and gestural brushstrokes here. “Load up your brush or knife with several colors, apply this glob to the canvas, scrape ‘em down and see what you get.” Ribbons of blue, black and orange: I think Mr. Irwin was already enchanted by the possibilities.

Things begin to get interesting with one of his illusionistic acrylic discs: a concave shape attached to the wall behind which seems to be a sphere suspended in the air. As with Alice, having just stepped through the looking glass, you know at this point that the world is about to get “curiouser and curiouser .”

The weird thing is, Irwin performs his magic without any help from fancy computer generated effects or other trickery. His materials are just paint, plastic, wire and wood, no big deal, you’d think.

Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, 2006

Irwin’s 5 x 5, is a set of huge floor-to-ceiling scrims, one set of five white and the other set black, which invite the viewer to travel in between them and view the constantly changing environment from within. Light and Space features a room with one wall covered with 115 fluorescent lights arranged in geometric patterns, inviting the viewer to contemplate the lights or groove on the shadows.

But the star of the show is undoubtedly his 2006 installation, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue,” a reference to Barnett Newman’s painting. Three huge acrylic panels, one in each color, are suspended over a matching panel on the floor. The resulting illusion brought on by gazing into the panels can cause a sensation of vertigo, as if one were staring into a clear, watery abyss, with your fellow viewers swimming in the depths. Although you can experience something of this effect on the surface of any window, believe me when I say that Irwin’s is much, much cooler.

After a while, you get it: “the look of reality depends on how you look at it.” Especially when you’ve fallen down Irwin’s rabbit hole.

For most art shows as rewarding as this one, I usually stop by the museum bookshop to pick up the guide so I can relive the exhibit long after I’ve returned home. Not this time. To apply the lessons of Irwin’s show, all my friends and I had to do was leave the exhibit and marvel at the other one beyond the doors.

Jacques-Louis David and Madame Seriziat

In 1794, Jacques-Louis David, superstar painter of the Old Regime as well as the new French Republic, found himself in prison. It wasn’t that his work was in disfavor. Indeed, he had been riding a heady wave of popular approval ever since The Oath of the Horatii, his first blockbuster painting in 1784. The problem was that David, the prototype of the artiste engagé, had been an enthusiastic revolutionary, follower of the recently executed Robespierre, a member of the feared Committee of Public Safety, and had signed the death warrant of Louis XVI. Now, with his political allies either dead or out of power, the karmic wheel had turned full circle and David found himself facing a possible sentence of death.

As frightening as his situation was, David’s accommodations were hardly Bastille-like. Arrested in May, released, then rearrested in August, he was taken to the House of Detention at the Hotel des Fermes on the rue de Grenelle. Instead of a cell, he was given a small studio belonging to a student of his who was serving in the army. His wife, from whom he had been divorced since March, took their children to visit. Another of his students brought him painting materials and the mirror in front of which he executed this self-portrait.

In it, he appears the handsome, fiercely passionate and intensely focused artist who had been the toast of the nation, that is until reaction to the excesses of the Revolution set in and the radical’s heads began to fall. Although it’s a strong and beautifully-executed self-portrait in the tradition of Rembrandt and Titian, the image is not altogether a true one. Missing is a prominent facial deformity caused by fencing scar on his right cheek suffered in his youth. Worse, a tumor had developed over the years, causing the cheek to swell even more. To his credit, it remains the only portrait detail he ever touched up.

If David may have been painting his epitaph, it transpired that he had many more miles to go than he realized at the time.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries who died beneath the blade of the guillotine, David was lucky in his relations. His brother-in-law, Charles Seriziat, was well-connected and intervened on David’s behalf, securing his release. The grateful painter immediately repaired to the Seriziat estate at Saint-Ouen. It was here he painted the fresh and tender portrait of his sister-in-law Emilie, Madame Seriziat.

Was ever a portrait more affectionate?

One can almost feel the artist’s relief and his reengagement with life in this image of a woman in springtime. We can guess that she has just come in from a walk in the garden. Her cheeks are flushed from the weather and she holds a bouquet of gathered flowers in one hand and the hand of her child in the other. The tones are red, green and pink, skillfully harmonized in a way that appears completely natural. Emilie rests on the edge of a table, shyly asking perhaps, what pose she should assume. The child stares at the painter with a child’s questions. “What is uncle Jacques doing? Is he finished? Can I play now?”

Jacques-Louis David was to live another thirty years, shine anew during the reign of Bonaparte and die in exile in Brussels in 1825. Although his considerable skills were to diminish at the end and over two centuries have passed since these portraits were painted, we are yet moved in our own time as if terrors were memories, spring was in our cheeks and loved ones were all young and alive again.