the light/tunnel ratio continued

(The end of my last post probably felt a little abrupt--especially given the grandiose title and introductory image.  As has become the case with the reading that I'm doing for this class, I spent a little too much time "chewing" and neglected to leave myself enough time to adequately cull and transcribe the thoughts that formed in the process.  So, with this post, I'll attempt to continue the train of thought where I left it at the same time that I integrate the additional freight picked up from the interceding reading.  [How's that for metaphorical thought? And that last bit rhymes!])

When Serra made that comment about art not being democratic, he was in the midst of a very unpleasant episode in which his work had been rather violently rejected by his audience.  This was before his process of work-making had brought him to the point where curves came to figure heavily in his repertoire of techniques (PING Eisner, p 114).  Though he was perhaps already on his way to that point, because Tilted Arc (PING Dustin)--the much maligned piece in question--was, in fact, a slow, stately gradually described curve.  Unfortunately, it wasn't quite curvy enough and some very loud voices decried it an unsightly gash, spoiling their public ground and their vista.

This response was visceral.  In this respect, Tilted Arc was a success.  It engaged the audience as a sensual, "physical and, in a sense, erotic" (Freedman, p 96) experience.  And on this level, Tilted Arc met the criteria by which Kimmelman declared Serra's work successful.  It reduced the terms of viewing to the point where the audience and their roving, subjective viewfindership became the only point of entry by which to "locate themselves in the fictional realities of artistic forms" (Freedman, p 92).  This idea that narrative ("fictional realities") is the dominant interpretive lens for the average viewer is supported by VTS stage theory and also by Lowenfeld's stage theory in which haptic and descriptive approaches to art production give way to representational schemata (as tends to be the development in the dominant Western tradition anyway).  So, for this average viewer then, the troubling part of Serra's work is the aggressive way that it refuses to be fictionalized.  Its presence is obtrusive and demanding.  Stripped of all other context, the only narrative it offers is the attraction or repulsion of the viewer to its presence.  In Kimmelman's review of the Serra retrospective, this quality is lauded; in the case of Tilted Arc, it proved fatal.

I've already suggested that maybe Tilted Arc wasn't curvy enough to make that achieved effect pleasurable for the audience.  That evaluation is based partly on my familiarity with critical response to Serra's work over time and partly on my own responses to his works.  The early, uncurving, self-supporting slabs of lead and steel have an aggressive quality.  Serra could, theoretically, have made these works out of some other equally rigid but less hefty material (plastics? strong wood?), but the work required to make and sustain the pieces is ultimately part of their effect--they focus the viewer on material and process, at least in part out of a regard for personal safety.  In my kitchen, I keep a postcard of Serra densely suited in protective gear hurtling molten lead into the corner of his studio.  I consider his presence an icon of the visceral culinary approach to which I aspire, an approach that to my mind lines up with the early character of his work.  There's a sort of brutish, take-no-prisoners showmanship in this work and perhaps this is the reason that some people have characterized it as excessively masculine (PING, Kathy).

But this is not the sort of work that has, ultimately, made a popular artist of Serra.  Or, rather, it is--but modulated by finesse and the blessings of institutional savoir fair.  His works still offer the viewer the same stark narrative, but the curving forms no longer push or indicate the presence of an aggressive artist.  As Serra's relationship to his own work has shifted from lifting, pushing, and throwing heavy metals around to massive designs that are turned over for fabrication, the pieces have become more seductive. Great big museums like MoMA have bent over backwards to accomodate them and viewers have been provided with a "safe" space in which to fall under their influence.  No more ugly confrontations; no more unwanted democratic intrusions.

So, Freedman's correct.  No matter how pure the form, context and associations play a role in our experience of it.  It's one thing to be invited to approach and experience Serra's work as art in the traditional institutional settings and it's another to have his work invade your space and to have to live with it on a daily basis.  For me, the irony builds as I apply my own social activist lens to Tilted Arc.  I see the aggressiveness of Tilted Arc as equal to that of the urban landscape into which it was installed.  In that sense, it could have served as a critique or satire of the resignation with which individuals submit  their landscape, their worldview, their point-of-view--to urban developers and the felicities of capital.  Under this lens, Serra subverted the methods and language of the urban landscape to create a non-functional work of art--an object that exists by virtue of its desire to make its audience think and consider.  But that's what I bring to the work, and Serra deliberately avoids burdening his sculpture with politics.  Wisely, I think.  Such considerations would derail his oeuvre.

the light/tunnel ratio

"As minimalist artists have taught us, form is never pure; it can always stimulate associations." (Freedman, p 42)


"In Mr. Serra’s case you can also call it democratic art because it sticks to pure form that requires no previous expertise to grasp." (Kimmelman's New York Times review of MoMA's Serra retrospective)


First of all (or rather, second of all--see how I snuck those two quotations up there to set up a dichotomy for my arguments before I even began to address the reader directly?), let me apologize because I never got around to finishing the argument that I'd worked up in my previous post.  What it boiled down to is pretty neatly captured by the jotted note that I made while reading those first two chapters: "Freedman's approach, with its broad narrative and exhaustive citations, strives for subjectivity, while her tone works against it," the overall effect of which serves to make her argument less coherent and her history less convincing.  I suspect that her goal is to provide us with a catalog of the ideas that have influenced her thinking, some of which she has assimilated or built on and some of which she has reacted against.  This approach makes sense if she aligns herself with post-structuralist theory (and, to my mind, the quote from her that I used up top confirms that alignment), but it comes off as a history with a not-so-well-hidden argument as a subtext.  Her book would gain substantial clarity, credibility, and readability if she would take the first sentence of chapter four (which comes, tellingly, with a citation from Eisner attached) to heart and foreground her own sensibilities, tell some stories, and generally let the reader see how she evolved into the voice that is presently speaking to them through her book instead of burying her head in the forest of erudition and Lacanian quadruple speak.


My own intention in taking so very long to work my way up to that conclusion in that past post was to provide an example of the kind of writing that I prefer: writing that demonstrates a sense of personhood and brings the reader along a path with definite landmarks that can be retraced like bread crumbs.  Eisner, I feel, represents this type of writing as well.  When I finish reading Eisner, I can remember various descriptions that he's incorporated into the chapter and, whether I agree with him or not, I have a pretty strong sense that I've followed the thrust of his argument.  By contrast, when I finish reading a chapter of Freedman, I have to look back at the notes I've made in the margins and do my darnedest to form a picture of the chapter as a whole--and if I don't do this, I leave the reading almost completely blank.

Ironically (or does it become meta-irony, since irony is one of the favorite languages of the type of "post-Pop Surrealism" that Serra dismisses and that Freedman would adamantly defend?), the aesthetic choices that Freedman has made as a writer do not follow the standards that she advocates for both art and learning.  Instead of creating a context-rich environment in which metacognitively-activated learning will be scaffolded by the materials that she presents, she has created a hermetic world in which her research and thought is presented unmediated by familiar (or uncanny) structures.  And just as ironically, that great stalwart structuralist, Richard Serra, whose works appeals unmediated to each and every viewer regardless the wealth of their "imagic stores," once made the comment that "Art is not democratic."

TLC 8740 post in progress

First of all, it looks like the link that I posted to Laurie Anderson's Only An Expert has gone kaput, so here's another:

Only An Expert

And while we're cruising YouTube, how 'bout this one too:

The Shining Elevator Scene analysis

Ok, ok, I know, I already demonstrated my ability to derail a reading response with a tenuous analogy connecting the readings to a movie I've recently watched, but bear with me because this so totally relates to Eisner, Freedman, and Barrett...

As I read Eisner's reproduction of a student's response to the red dye creepily saturating a glass of water (p 60), I couldn't help but think of this scene from The Shining because the day prior I received reassurance that I wasn't the only Kubrick nut rattling on semi-coherently of late. Check out this article.

Now, being a proper fanboy, I was already aware that The Shining has been interpreted as a comment on the destruction of the Native American peoples. But since it's not one of my favorite readings of the film(PING Barrett: some interpretations are better than others), I doubt it would have came to mind if I hadn't just recently been reminded of it by this article. But far and away, my favorite thing about this article and the YouTube clip is that they provide more linguistic snd conceptual fodder for my thoughts on Kubricks's films because "the ability to transform qualities of experience into speech and text" (Eisner, p 86) is important and film, which includes a temporal element, is so nearly experiential that without those intermediaries the experience can slip away. Also, it's good to know that someone else out there is watching closely enough to have called out the Times article's author on his tuxedo/top hat mix up (see article correction) and to see that Lichanos' comment on the bottom echos the observation I made in my last post about the homicidal apes in 2001 (because that helps me as I seek to balance personal and communal interpretations; PING Barrett again).

All of this serves to reinforce the notion I already held that Kubrick's work serves as what we called in my days as a lit student a Rich Text. Rich texts are works that reward repeated readings/viewings; works that grow and change as we do. The reason I've got Kubrick on the brain right now is that I got his collected works on blu ray for Christmas. I already had them all on DVD since they were among the first DVDs I bought back in high school when I got my first DVD player and some of them I had on VHS before that, so I can testify to their quality in this respect, but I don't really need to since a wealth of literature has grown and continues to grow around them. Which is the only quantitative means of determining a rich text: how many other works exist that draw on or discuss the work in question. The Bible and Shakespeare are among the richest texts extant, but, as Barrett mentions in passing, volumes of work on Magritte were likely consulted and whittled down into the encyclopedia entry that he reprints, so Magritte's work constitutes a rich text as well.

But how does that happen? How does one text become richer than another? Freedman uses two Kubrick films as examples of the type of "popular films that have postmodern forms [and] are edited in a pastiche that focuses the audience on structure and process" (p 34) and that, I suspect, is one means by which a work achieves such status--by leaving ample room for interpretation. In this sense, it is partly the medium and its handling that creates the condition. For Shakespeare, it's not only the breadth of his vocabulary and the quantity of material he left behind, but that his works are plays and lean upon the reader or theater professional or film maker to complete them. The Bible's variety of cultures, time periods, authors and styles make it an extraordinarily malleable reference point for a variety of ideological and creative ends (though, I would argue, it's a bit of a mixed bag in therms of Richness).

I'm misusing Freedman a bit though because in that passage, she's actually suggesting that these films are an examples of a new phenomenon and the two examples I've just given are very old. But I think she's misusing Kubrick, so turnabout is fair play. Freedman asserts that "no audience in a postindustrial democracy can be considered visually naive" and makes use of Kubrick as evidence for that statement but of Kubrick's and the other films listed in those parentheses, I would count none--with the possible exception of Pulp Fiction--as solid examples of popular culture in a postindustrial democracy. The reality is that the most mainstream of films in our postindustrial culture still adhere quite faithfully to the machinations of the invisible narrator. Which is not to say that she does not have a point, just that she should have narrowed her argument: given the proliferation and dominance of visual information in our culture, audiences are only as naive as they would like to be--alternatives are available. What she touches on, though, in suggesting that these are "popular" films, is the other means by which a text becomes rich--popularity--and that popularity may have little to do with any inherent quality in the material, it's just that a bigger audience results in a bigger audience response. And that bigger audience can be as much from luck as anything else. One of my favorite examples of blind popularity enriching a text is the phenomenon of film/album synchronicity, as exemplified by the pairing of the films version of The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (there's a whole culture of looking for such pairings on the Internet if you care to search for it). These are wholly unrelated works of art being used by their audiences to build new communal meanings.

What has really happened with visual culture over the past century is not that it has become more sophisticated, as Freedman suggests, but that it has become more popular. Any perceived increase in sophistication is likely a residual effect of that popularity. Freedman goes on to elaborate on the new need to reassess aesthetic study of visual culture because of this proliferation with reference to Theodore Adorno's "lament" at "the collapse of the boundaries between fine art and popular culture" and she later (p 41) brings Adorno back up as a contrast with Dewey's "neopragmatist" approach, at which point she works a bit of her own aesthetic magic by using what I believe is the only first-person singular pronoun in the entire chapter. "I have always been uncomfortable with the apparently elitist perspective of Adorno's aesthetic..." she confesses. This is in spite of the fact that the very first marginal note that I wrote in this chapter was right next to the very first sentence: "active-ist."

From her first sentence, it is clear that Freedman has an agenda; that she is making an argument.  Yet, her writing style has the peculiar habit of hiding her voice.  In other words, right up until the imaginary fourth wall is broken by her confessed discomfort, Freedman has been hiding the narrator.