One more.
I started thinking about other iconic figures. One who has lost some
currency because of the pervasive national amnesia is George
Washington, whose portrait (the unfinished Gilbert Stuart) hung in
every classroom in the country when I was a child.
Like every other recognizable historic figure he's been used for
comic effect (among other places, in TV commercials) and as the
subject for kitsch bricabrac, but he's never become kitsch himself.
Washington makes his appearance as the counterweight to Napoleon in
the last stanza of Byron's great Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, where he
represents the best of humanity:
Where may the wearied eye repose
When gazing on the Great;
Where neither guilty glory glows,
Nor despicable state?
Yes --one--the first--the last--the best--
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom envy dared not hate,
Bequeath`d the name of Washington,
To make man blush there was but one!
Cincinnatus was the Roman general who, after saving the republic,
went back to his farm, though he could have become king. Washington
had done the same, after the revolution and after his presidency.
There's no questioning, I think, Byron's sincerity.
Arnold Schoenberg's setting of the poem, his first setting of
English, composed immediately after he had become a refugee from the
nazis at University of Southern Californa, where he remained til his
death, was one of the great serial compositions of his American
period and also the inauguration of his diatonic American style. The
poem, declaimed in sprechstimme, is set in a particularly tortured
atonality, until the last five lines, which suddenly become entirel,
triumphantly tonal, as if a ray of sunlight had broken through the
clouds in a painting to illuminate the face of the hero. Schoenberg
had decidedly ambivalent feelings about the US--he'd clearly rather
have been back in the no-longer-extant Vienna of his youth that in
Los Angeles--and it's always seemed to me that there's a
tongue-in-cheek quality to the shift (and perhaps a sense of
obligation to his country of refuge). Schenberg's native language had
til that moment been irony.
One of the great kitsch images in American art, rivalled perhaps only
by virtually every depiction of Custer's Last Stand, is Leutze's 1851
Washington Crossing the Delaware, with its centerpiece, Washington,
in the standard pose of heroic grandeur, improbably standing calm
amidst the turbulence, his standard bearer and the flag immediately
behind him, all three rather better lit, in what became a Hollywood
trick, than all the supenumeraries. On the next barge back is
Wahington's white horse. The event itself would have been a messier
affair, and a lot less showy--they were sneaking up in the middle of
the night on a superior force, the remains of whose Christmas meals
was a major prize for the starving Continentals.
http://www-wsl.state.wy.us/slpub/outrider/2007/images/Washington%20on%20delaware.jpg
Robert Colescott replaces all of the figures in Leutze's painting
with representations of cliches about black people in his wonderful
George Washington Carver Crosses the Delaware. Images of minstrels,
mammies, bare-foot fishermen, etc, which have become kitsch
collectibles for middle class blacks of the past few decades (price a
period Aunt Jemima jar to see what I mean) , all of them having a
grand old time, replace the desperately struggling Continentals.
Kitsch, and the kitsch version of American history, has been
appropriated into a reverberant statement about race in America, at
once profoundly serious and hysterically funny.
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.marin.cc.ca.us/art107/images/ColescottGeoWashCarver.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.marin.cc.ca.us/art107/BayAreaFigurationStudyImages.htm&h=271&w=386&sz=18&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=2_cgmkMGfYrG4M:&tbnh=86&tbnw=123&prev=/images%3Fq%3DGeorge%2BWashington%2BCarver%2Bcrossing%2Bthe%2Bdelaware%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN
third image from the bottom.
Mark
At 12:35 PM 10/29/2007, you wrote:
>It actually brought on a further set of reveries about art and its
>subjects. Go into any museum and you'll find hundreds of portraits
>of the once-famous and those who were able to pay to have their
>features rendered in a medium more permanent than flesh. In most
>cases even important historical actors have been significantly
>forgotten. Look at the Mona Lisa or a Raeburn portrait, or a
>Rembrandt, or the parade of Borbon kings and princelings by Goya and
>one is rarely interested in researching their lives. It's the
>painting we value as object. Does it matter to us which king and
>queen stand in the doorway at the rear of Velasquez' Las Meninas?
>
>Or restrict it to entertainers. Toulouse-Lautrec painted and drew
>figures as iconic at the time, as immediately recognizable as
>Marilyn Monroe. A few of them are remembered for a particular song
>that's remained popular in France, though nowhere else, but their
>faces would have been forgotten if not for their presence in T-L's
>posters. And the posters remain so compelling that even in the
>cheapest mass-produced versions they sell like hotcakes. T-L was
>among those (and the best of the lot) transforming the industrial
>process of lithography into a dominant medium, bringing a
>post-impressionist bel epoque sensibility, and an amazing hand, to
>bear on japonisme in depicting his own floating world.
>
>Great art adds value that lasts when the subject no longer has
>iconic value. Eventually we remember the subjects because the artist
>chose or was hired to depict them. Somebody probably remembers the
>name of the courtesan who posed for Botticelli's Birth of Venus and
>several of the figures in La Primavera, but her name is now only
>that and a footnote to the social history of Florence.
>
>So what about Andy Warhol's various Marilyns, a photographic image
>transferred by assistants to a silkscreen and reproduced under his
>direction in various ways? How dependent are they on her iconic
>status, which probably won't last more than another 30 years at the
>outside? Would they be considered kitsch or camp if the subject were
>as unheroic in the popular imagination as Michael Jackson? Is there
>the added value of great art to sustain them?
>
>How much, to cite a different artist, would we value Duchamp's
>urinal if he hadn't also been a great and seminal (no pun intended)
>artist in media other than shopping?
>
>I don't know if Warhol would have cared. I was at his estate
>auction--the good one, the one of his art collection--through the
>good offices of a curator friend. The detritus of the rest of his
>collecting--mostly the silliest junk, which seemed as random as the
>tshotshkes most of us gather and then only occasionally remember why
>we bought them. In his case there was a warehouse full of them at
>his death. Some of the art was wonderful, but a lot of it was hard
>to distinguish from the tag sale junk.
>
>The audience was well-heeled to say the least. This was a major
>event to be seen at, apparently. Much of the crowd could have
>endowed a third world orphanage for the cost of the clothes on their
>backs. I remember one very well-maintained young woman whose pumps
>were mosaics of small pieces of differently-colored leathers.
>Well-heeled in both a non-metaphoric and a metaphoric sense. The
>crowd bought every scrap, at above-estimate prices, value added,
>presumably, for what's called in the trade "association," which
>meant "Andy touched it." Which is supposed to confer some grace,
>like the relics of saints.
>
>But even that sense depends more on the housing than the object.
>Remove the bone from the reliquary and it's anonymous. Remove the
>piece of moon rock from behind the label, likewise. At a point in
>the not-too-distant future, even if Warhol's work remains more than
>a footnote, his own iconic status will have diminished to the point
>that a urinal from his collection (he did collect them, but of the
>bed-pan variety) with the best of provenance will only be worth a
>few bucks more than any other old urinal. If the current owners
>aren't careful about labelling and housing their children will sell
>it at a garage sale along with the cracked teacups. Even if they
>keep it it's unlikely to maintain its pride of place on the mantel.
>
>Mark
>
>At 11:26 AM 10/29/2007, you wrote:
>>Wow. That's some piece of work! One of its ironies is that as a simultaneous
>>commentary and meta-commentary, the work's aesthetic content remains beyond
>>the natural lifecycle of its subject's career. I doubt that the original
>>purchaser bought it simply on account of being Jackson fan, though who
>>knows?
>>
>>The ghastly smiles shared between monkey and Michael, rendered in a medium
>>with decided enlightenment/evolutionary associations (Josiah Wedgwood being
>>grandfather of Charles Darwin) invite the pointed question, did we evolve
>>for THIS? (Answers on the usual postcard.)
>>
>>P
>>
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
>> > Behalf Of Mark Weiss
>> > Sent: 28 October 2007 00:05
>> > To: [log in to unmask]
>> > Subject: Re: sentimentality & 'classism' Re: New at Sharp Sand
>> >
>> > Somebody somewhere is living with a lifesize painted ceramic of
>> > Michael Jackson and his dog, for which privilege said someone paid
>> > over $5.5 million a few years ago at auction. Check it out:
>> > http://server1.fandm.edu/departments/English/d_steward/koons.jpg
>> > Jackson's sun having set that's a lot of low-cost porcelain now. One
>> > has to have been incredibly stupid.
>> >
>> > I'll confess to a deep affection for select garden gnomes. Among the
>> > more harmless creatures. Not that I live with any.
>> >
>> > Otherwise I pretty much agree, except that you've left out a
>> > category, kitsch that's deliberately produced as kitsch, without
>> > irony, to appeal to its primary audience, people who collect kitsch
>> > without irony (for whom kitsch is not kitsch?).
>> >
>> > Mark
>> >
>> > At 02:16 PM 10/27/2007, you wrote:
>> > >(Apologies if you receive this more than once: the original went AWOL
>>some
>> > >hours back. CW)
>> > >
>> > ><snip>
>> > >I don't think it's any truer that kitsch is the commodification of
>> > >high culture. [MW]
>> > ><snip>
>> > >
>> > >Perhaps _dominant_ would have been better, with less sense of
>>consecration:
>> > >kitsch as the impression of democracy without the underlying reality,
>> > >sneered at from the sidelines. I wouldn't underrate its dangers BTW.
>> > >
>> > >During what were (perhaps) its 19th C origins somewhere in Germany you
>> > >bought (having made a little money) the trappings of advancement off the
>> > >peg; but what you actually got were very bad paintings, almost a sort of
>> > >Giffen good, because you couldn't afford the good ones or couldn't tell
>>the
>> > >difference. And then, of course, all those miniatures of the Eiffel
>>Tower,
>> > >those fake furs, faux wood, all those cocktail cabinets...
>> > >
>> > >The sneer that's often used for kitsch was also used for fish knives
>> > >incidentally; Cf Betjeman. Here the point was, presumably, that fish
>>knives
>> > >were owned only by someone who had also 'bought his own furniture'.
>> > >
>> > >But I have left out garden gnomes. Though that's maybe not their loss. Or
>> > >indeed yours necessarily.
>> > >
>> > ><snip>
>> > >Jeff Koons achieves kitsch, for instance, equally by appropriating
>>already
>> > >kitsch children's toys and greek sculpture. [MW]
>> > ><snip>
>> > >
>> > >Just as *irony* and *sentimentality* come to blows over feigned emotion,
>> > >over who is swindling whom exactly, so *kitsch* and *camp* are a sort of
>> > >argument over subjectivity. On the one hand, the _creation_ of kitsch is
>> > >objectifying, commodifying and all those boo! hiss! things. Whereas, on
>>the
>> > >other, the _recognition_ of kitsch is (at least potentially) a form of
>>camp,
>> > >a sort of emperor's clothes moment which returns the subject back to the
>> > >thick of things, where it belongs.
>> > >
>> > >Koons (whom I also abhor) is certainly making use of *camp*, as indeed
>>you
>> > >go on to suggest. However, the stuff used by the great commodity broker
>> > >isn't employed to promote some sort of helpful break but to
>>_anaesthetise_
>> > >instead. Thus the gap between *kitsch* and *camp* becomes so narrow that
>> > >they almost coalesce. (The analogy might be with Warhol's *Marilyns*,
>>where
>> > >the gap between the set comprising these works and some notional set of
>> > >monetary tokens likewise reduces to zero.)
>> > >
>> > >CW
>> > >_______________________________________________
>> > >
>> > >'The possibility now arises that art will no longer find time to
>> > > adapt somehow to technological processes.'
>> > >(Walter Benjamin)
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