At the Tate, a mammoth tower of twentieth-century radios fritz and skip through stations. Meireles was concerned with the cacophony of the modern world. He built Babel in 2001. I wonder what he would build today. When I encountered the tower, the radios were tuned to Journey’s 1981 hit, an anthem we knew as well as our names—don’t stop believin’ called through the static while we stood in a circle, taking pictures.
There are many reasons Bacon's Figure with Meat bothers the mind. It's a crazed smear of flesh, velvet, and bone, but it lingers because his shrieking popes inhabit a space that cannot be determined, a zone etched only by a few ghostly chalk lines. The ambiguity forces us to supply our own nightmares that pulse in the murk beyond the grasp of language. Which is the whole point of painting, I think. And perhaps horror, too.
He described the crucifixion of Christ as “just an act of man’s behavior,” yet his depiction of it looks more alien and magical than anything the Catholics conceived. Bad weather fills Bacon’s canvases: damp and clammy, the faces of his subjects melting in the rain. But it’s more than body horror. There’s reverence for death here. His ghoulish scenes float before me, demanding to be taken seriously. “I think most artists are very aware of their annihilation,” said Bacon. “It follows them around like their shadow.”
And the mouths. More specifically, the teeth. His detailed grins and snarls provide an entry point into the surreal, for the dissolution of logic into something even more real. My eye struggles to understand the face before me, even though it already makes sense, for it exists deep in the basement beneath words and speech, somewhere among the limbic muck and heat of being a panting, living mess.
Bacon believed in “an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything else.” I think he’s right.
The bodhisattva was so overwhelmed by the suffering in the universe that the deity’s head split into eleven pieces. But then, seeing the deity's plight, the buddha gives Guanyin eleven heads to better hear the cries of those who suffer—and a thousand arms to help them.
Autechre’s “VLetrmx” is the correct song for contemplating the horror and beauty of living in the future.
C. and I spent the day wandering through museums. There’s a game we play whenever we enter a gallery: after spending a few minutes looking at every painting in the room, we guess each other’s favorite. This wager forces us to slow down and consider each image more closely. But sometimes, the game feels risky. After all these years, how well do I know C.’s taste? How well does she know mine?
How do we define favorite? Over the years, we’ve landed on three criteria, which sometimes overlap:
The last question has become the most interesting. I’m more aware of the images that magnetize my eye even if—sometimes especially if—they do not match my sensibilities. An uneasy blotch of color or the shine in some dead countess’s eye will leave me rethinking my default preferences and spiraling into existential terrain: what is taste, anyway, and where does it come from? Do I even know what I like? And so on.
In gallery E203 at the Getty, we both selected Jusepe de Ribera’s stern portrait of Euclid. Two rooms later, C. thought my favorite painting was a tranquil Madonna, but it was a dark picture of a pope. I’m glad I can still surprise her.
As I wandered the Columbus Museum of Art, my brain was gunked up with doubt and bad adjectives. Then I ran into Berenice Abbott’s portrait of a magnetic field. Its cosmic pattern reminded me of fireworks beneath the eyelids and my childhood conception of God, which came from the opening scenes of It’s a Wonderful Life. My thoughts turned to the moment dots become a recognizable pattern, the phenomena of stray bursts of electricity in our heads cohering into shapes, ideas, and loops that can seduce or horrify.
Abbott pulled signals from the air and made them visible. Between 1958 and 1962, she documented magnetic fields and captured the interplay between prisms, water, and beams of light. She photographed wave patterns crashing into a piece of glass. “The artist through history has been the spokesman and conservator of human and spiritual energies and ideas,” Abbott wrote in 1939. “Today science needs its voice.”
A line from John Berger’s analysis of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings has been rattling around my head for days, how it unexpectedly harmonizes with the shocks and indignities of our pixellated age:
“The light which he thought of as devouring the whole visible world was very similar to the new productive energy which was challenging and destroying all previous ideas about wealth, distance, human labour, the city, nature, the will of God, children, time.”
Berger suggests the violent light and calamitous seas of Turner’s landscapes were his way of dealing with “the first apocalyptic phase” of the Industrial Revolution. I wonder how today’s flux might be rendered into something approaching the sublime.
A sunny Wednesday morning with highs in the 50s, the sun goes down at 5:30pm, and I’m recovering from Francis Bacon’s animal paintings at the Royal Academy. The introduction on the wall said his paintings speak to “our current predicament”—an elastic phrase that set my mind wandering through today’s calamities and disasters, wondering how they might connect with Bacon’s figures that flicker between human and beast.
We inspected these grisly images on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Some of us wore masks, others were bare-faced, and all of us were confused about how to behave while the pandemic zigged-and-zagged. Our screens were wallpapered with headlines about new viruses, military incursions, disrupted gas supplies, and economic sanctions. Or as Bacon observed: “The whole horror of life, one thing living off another.”
He described the crucifixion of Christ as “just an act of man’s behavior,” yet his depiction of it looks more alien and magical than anything the Catholics conceived. Bad weather fills Bacon’s canvases: damp and clammy, the faces of his subjects melting in the rain. But it’s more than body horror. There’s reverence for death here. His ghoulish scenes float before me, demanding to be taken seriously. “I think most artists are very aware of their annihilation,” said Bacon. “It follows them around like their shadow.”
What is it about a Bacon painting that yanks me back into the gallery each time I’m about to leave? The mouths. More specifically, the teeth. His detailed grins and snarls provide an entry point into the surreal, for the dissolution of logic into something even more real. My eye struggles to understand the face before me, even though it already makes sense, for it exists deep in the basement beneath words and speech, somewhere among the limbic muck and heat of being a panting, living mess.
Bacon believed in “an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything else.” I think he’s right.
There are many reasons Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat bothers the mind. It’s a crazed smear of flesh, velvet, and bone, but I think it lingers mostly because the screaming bishop inhabits a zone that cannot be determined, a room etched only by a few ghostly chalk lines. The ambiguity forces us to supply our own nightmares that pulse in the murk just beyond the grasp of language. Which is the whole point of painting, I think. And perhaps horror, too.
A sunny Friday with a high in the 80s: a beautiful June day in the middle of October. I popped into the museum to visit my favorite Jesus: Antonello da Messina‘s Christ Crowned with Thorns, painted in 1470. Depicted at the moment Pontius Pilate presents him to the hostile crowd—behold the man!—he is “a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3). And it’s startling to see Christ looking so human, so plain. Messina has given him the face of a boxer, mashed and pleading, and those eyes are filled with bottomless sorrow—and maybe a sense of shock at what his very human pain will unleash across the centuries, what would be done in his name.
The flesh-and-blood realism of this painting emerged from an ancient belief in visualization as a form of prayer. Maybe it’s limbic and hardwired, this desire to see the divine rather than hear or touch. “And in grieving you should regard yourself as if you had our Lord suffering before your very eyes,” wrote Saint Francis of Assisi in the years before the Renaissance transformed painting into worlds that looked like our own. Inspired by the belief that visualization could lead us to God, these canvases became aids for contemplation. All the better if they left us damp with tears and blood. Seeking to clarify the role of the artist within the church, Cardinal Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones insisted that a painting’s only function was to move viewers towards penance.
I wonder where we find these images today.
For my birthday, C. gave me the most magnificent gift: a small framed reproduction of my favorite painting, Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome in His Study from 1605.
Saint Jerome was often depicted in the desert wilderness, forsaking worldly distraction in exchange for salvation. But in Caravaggio’s hands, he is hushed and desiccated as he completes the first translation of the Bible into Latin. He stares deep into its pages, hunting for revelation, ignoring the skull on his desk, a memento mori that mocks the vanity of our knowledge in the face of the unknowable. The darkness that envelopes him is heavier, more textured than the red cloth he wears, yet he’s determined to write one last word before the night consumes him.
John Berger has said Caravaggio’s darkness “smells of candles, over-ripe melons, damp washing to be hung out the next day.” To me, it feels like the purple-black thoughts that burble within the midnight brain. And in this darkness, Jerome no longer belongs to history or dogma but the silence he sought while crisscrossing the desert in the prime of his life.
I’m reading P.D. James’s Children of Men, and the novel is a remarkably different animal from the film, particularly in how it so richly grapples with faith. In a childless world where humanity quietly fades away, the protagonist tours Europe’s museums. James’s description of the Pietà captured my own brief glimpse of it three years ago:
“His keenest memory was of Rome, standing before the Michelangelo Pietà in St. Peter’s, of the rows of spluttering candles, the kneeling women, rich and poor, young and old, fixing their eyes on the Virgin’s face with an intensity of longing almost too painful to witness. He remembered their outstretched arms, their palms pressed against the glass protective shield, the low continual mutter of their prayers as if this ceaseless anguished moan came from a single throat and carried to that unregarding marble the hopeless longing of all the world.”
Almost too painful to witness. This phrase hammers the scene home and sparks absolute recognition. But where is the pain located? Is it a knee-jerk empathy response to another person’s weeping? Or does it stem from jealousy, a craving for my own focal point of devotion and a world made sensible through myth? The image of the Pietà occupies such a distinct place in memory that I often forget it translates to “the pity.”
I always find solace in the depictions of Venus mourning the death of Adonis, the way she cradles her lover’s body while gazing into the heavens for answers, her face flickering between longing and defiance, depending on my mood.
No matter how many times I see them, I am captivated by Louise Nevelson’s monuments built from furniture scrap painted black. They remind me of childhood, conjuring dim memories of playing among the legs of tables and dressers, of my first intimations of death. It’s a specific feeling I cannot quite connect to words, and this is why her work moves and reassures me. More and more, I admire this quote from her: “I have made my world, and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside.”
Part of me still believes grief has an ending. I’m still caught off-guard by haunted dreams or disorienting moments of longing for the ones I’ve lost.
Sometimes I find comfort in a two-thousand-year-old myth about a Chinese emperor. Unable to bear the death of his beloved, Emperor Wu offered a reward to anyone who could bring her back to him. A wise man carefully cut out a silhouette of the departed woman from a piece of paper and displayed it behind a white cloth for the grieving emperor, who found comfort in the sight of her standing behind a curtain before a shining moon. This story from the Han dynasty not only describes the origin of shadow puppets, it’s a reminder that art can mitigate grief and perhaps even deny death.
The coronavirus continues to spread. Classes have been canceled and events are postponed. One thousand cases in America now and our government doesn’t seem to care. I wash my hands, keep my distance, and show up where I’m supposed to be. The subway seems a little emptier each time I ride it. Taking the train home tonight, I close my eyes and try my best not to imagine worst-case scenarios. I think about art and god.
The zips and color fields of abstract painting have never moved me beyond a chilly appreciation for their role in pushing art towards its vanishing point. Walking into Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the Cross, however, felt almost spiritual. The title does most of the lifting here, juxtaposing the mythic weight of violence and supernatural suffering against fifteen canvases of brittle monochrome. My eyes tried to map these stern lines and rectangles against the bloodshed and trembling on that day at Golgotha. But I could find no correlation, and I was left alone with that heavy title, those dispassionate shapes, and a woman sitting on a bench with her pencil paused in the air, hanging somewhere between contemplation and frustration. A security guard rocked on his heels at the edge of the room, occasionally emitting a rubber squeak that emphasized the hush of the gallery, a place with the secret air of an empty gymnasium after hours.
When the series was first displayed in 1966, Newman said these images were based not on the flagellation and martyrdom of the crucifixion but Jesus’s cry of lama sabachthani: Why hast thou forsaken me? “This is the passion,” he said. “Not the terrible walk up the Via Dolorosa, but the question that has no answer.”
And for a moment, I understood this sensation, a sense of utter vacancy, a hollowing of thought that left space for something greater. In my notebook, I scribbled this sentence: The denial of beauty leaves one greedy for any thread of hope, no matter how thin. This felt like a profound insight at the time, one of those camera-flash thoughts that comes bright and quick before fading forever. Artists like Newman and Mark Rothko insisted their blank fields of color were not academic exercises but spiritual statements. Although I feel lucky to have caught the briefest sense of this, I also left the room wondering if you can nail any damned thing to the wall as long as you attach it to the bloodshed and drama of myth.
Further reading: Barnett Newman; Valerie Hellstein, “Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani,” Object Narrative, in Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2014); the Stations of the Cross; Barnett Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross’ draws pilgrims to the National Gallery
New York. Cold today, the kind of cold that has people cursing in the streets. It’s the first day in weeks that’s felt like winter. Ducked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art to visit one of my favorite sculptures on Valentine’s Day: Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space from 1913. A vaguely human-shaped slab of bronze staggers into a ferocious wind, its body on fire, determined to walk. Thigh stretched, calf flexed as it lunges into the future, sheared and massive.
In 1909 a manifesto appeared in the pages of a French newspaper like a flamethrower ready to reduce history to ashes:
We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents—
Such overheated language, the cadence of a fist punching through the sky. The Futurist manifesto crackles with juvenile ego and spite, naively celebrating destruction and dogma five years before the world’s first mechanized war made these things a reality.
—factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
There’s something infectious about this purple writing, and it tints my thoughts as I circle Boccioni’s bronze figure. A body warped and wefted like a terrible dream dredged from the sea. Its face is an anvil, maybe a crucifix. The end of religion. A new faith in the electric storms of the modern world. The Futurists believed museums were cemeteries yet here’s this statue a century later, captured and displayed beneath timid gallery spotlights. Sheared planes and a knight’s helmet, venturing into a final crusade. A portrait of humanity marching into the heat of tomorrow.
Fifty years ago, Kraftwerk more or less invented heavy metal during a live performance on a radio station. Further reading: the Futurist manifesto; Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. See also: Futurism and Italian Fascism and When Futurism Let to Fascism—and Why It Could Happen Again.
I was shaken by Helene Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits at the Finnish National Gallery. Taken as a series, these paintings grapple with mortality, isolation, and disappearance. They do not flinch. In the last two years of her life, Schjerfbeck painted twenty pictures of herself, each one progressively warped and blurred until she begins to appear alien. The final image comes just before her death at the age of 83: a simple charcoal sketch of her face, half illuminated and half in shadow.
Our art and literature are fueled by the desire to capture and archive the self, to untangle the mess of dealing with being a person who knows they will disappear someday. Do these same impulses drive today’s culture of the selfie? Can a series of Instagram snapshots be viewed as an extension of Schjerfbeck’s inquiry? Today’s social media inherently coats any image with the gloss of performance rather than something earnest, curious, and raw. I wonder if these spaces can ever be rewired into something beyond approval-seeking or developing a personal brand (such a chilling phrase). But perhaps the screen itself has become too tainted by the nervy energy of distraction and craving to allow for moments of contemplation.
Meanwhile in America, impeachment and pandemic anxiety fills the airwaves. An entire political party has been infected with cult logic, refusing to acknowledge the evidence we can see and hear. “I feel so sorry for what is happening in your country,” an elderly Swedish man told me in the sauna. “The whole thing started out with such good intentions.” In China, forty people have died from a new virus that emerged on New Year’s Eve. The headlines are more apocalyptic than usual: The next pandemic will come. Here’s how to prepare, etc. And perhaps more reflective of our times: Stocks close lower on news of deadly virus spreading to USA.
Helene Schjerfbeck; exhibition at the Ateneum; A Neglected Finnish Modernist is Rediscovered, The New York Times
Published in Moscow in 1918, this short manifesto first thrilled me as an undergraduate student when I began drifting from my studies in film towards graphic design:
Comrades and citizens, we, the leaders of Russian futurism–the revolutionary art of youth–declare:
1. From this day forward, with the abolition of tsardom, the domicile of art in the closets and sheds of human genius – palaces, galleries, salons, libraries, theaters—is abrogated.
2. In the name of the great march of equality for all, as far as culture is concerned, let the Free Word of creative personality be written on the corners of walls, fences, roofs, the streets of our cities and villages, on the backs of automobiles, carriages, streetcars, and on the clothes of all citizens.
3. Let pictures (colors) be thrown, like colored rainbows, across streets and squares, from house to house, delighting, ennobling the eye (taste) of the passer-by. Artists and writers have the immediate duty to get hold of their pots of paint and, with their masterly brushes, to illuminate, to paint all the sides, foreheads, and chests of cities, railway stations, and the ever-galloping herds of railway carriages.
From now on, let the citizen walking down the street enjoy at every moment the depths of thought of his great contemporaries, let him absorb the flowery gaudiness of this day’s beautiful joy, let him listen to music—the melody, the roar, the buzz—of excellent composers everywhere. Let the streets be a feast of art for all.
And if all this comes to pass, in accordance with our word, everyone who goes out into the street will grow to be a giant and in wisdom, contemplating beauty instead of the present-day streets with their iron books (signboards), where every page has been written on their signs by greed, the lust for mammon, calculated meanness and low obtuseness, all of which soil the soul and offend the eye.
Written by Vladimir Mayakovsky along with other members of the nascent Russian futurist movement, its optimism is infectious—and utterly heartbreaking, considering the shadows gathering in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution that would turn this vision of democratic expression into a dark joke. A century later, Mayakovsky’s salvo continues to circulate through the veins of nearly every idealistic design manifesto, from Ken Garland’s First Things First to the proclamations of Adbusters to the contemporary writing of Mike Monteiro.