Absent are the subtleties

This scene from Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio highlights the absurdity of one very small corner of Michelle Marder Kamhi’s argument (and it’s only a very small corner because she so breezily dismisses such a broad portion of the art making world).  According to Kamhi, photographers (and I take it, by extension, video artists as well) exercise “some selectivity and control, [but] the image is ultimately formed by an automatic photochemical process, which is not under volitional control in every detail.”  Later, in describing another work--Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait--she enumerates the details that qualify such works as legitimate works of art: “…its “natural” subject matter, its depictive and expressive qualities—such as the sober, intensely serious facial expressions of the young couple, their gesture of joining hands, and the aura of tranquil solemnity of the elegant bedchamber.”

Jarman’s Caravaggio paints from models, just as the historical Caravaggio liked to do, and he (Jarman and the actor playing Caravaggio both) painstakingly produces the scene he’d like to render by nudging the models into their positions—creating such effects as the “sober, intensely serious facial expressions” and the hand gestures as well—and controlling the lighting.  In painting, photography, and video controlling the lighting is, incidentally, the quickest and surest way to achieve the desired “aura.”

I recently had the opportunity to see the Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin in the flesh, so to speak.  It’s presently hanging with the rest of the Italian masters in the Louvre’s Grande Galerie.  Here, I’m sad to say, the lighting was not especially good for such a dramatic and deliberate use of chiaroscuro.  Unfortunately, the sort of bright, noisy, natural light that works perfectly for the brighter palettes of the earlier, Renaissance era Italian masters, doesn’t work as well for the father of the Baroque style.  I’m certain that the great minds running the Louvre are aware of the disservice they’re doing Caravaggio, but they have to use the palace they’ve been given and regional organization is probably the only fair (and least crazy-making) way to display the vast collection that is their charge.

For the student casually strolling down this 100+ yard gallery, such details which distract from the “natural accessibility” (to appropriate a phrase from Kamhi) of a painting are not readily apparent.  Kamhi seems to think that art can exist inside a vacuum and while the absurdity of this is most readily apparent when one considers the history of artistic patronage and the relatively limited range of subjects thus engendered in the accepted Western canon, it also extends to perception: recently cleaned paintings and a paintings properly matched to their intended lighting are easier to appreciate than paintings that have not received the same amount of attention or have been made subject to a museum’s constrictions or broader agendas.

Some quick research on Kamhi points pretty firmly to the conclusion that she is a follower of Ayn Randian Objectivism.  This had me reaching (in near knee-jerk fashion) for a book I read a long time ago by Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Jameson is an unabashed Marxist and in quickly perusing the book again the differences between Kamhi’s approach to an argument about the validity of postmodern culture and Jameson’s becomes readily apparent.  Kamhi seeks to narrow the argument—to disregard works and ways of working that are not useful to her idea of what art (and consequently, art education) should be.  Jameson, in extremely dense prose, attempts to make sense of everything that has come to represent the culture of the modern world: literature, painting, architecture, film, etc, etc.   And while Kamhi seems to think that we can go back to a “great works” approach to understanding art, Jameson positions the Modernist era as the last great stomping ground of Atlasian artistic heroes.  He argues that “in an age of monopolies (and trade unions), of increasing institutionalized collectivization, there is always a lag.  Some parts of the economy are still archaic, handicraft enclaves; some are more modern and futuristic than the future itself.  Modern art, in this respect, drew its power and its possibilities from being a backwater and an archaic holdover within a modernizing economy: it glorified, celebrated, and dramatized older forms of individual production which the new mode of production was elsewhere on the point of displacing and blotting out.”  And while this might at first sound like a bleak prognosis for the contemporary artist, it instead signifies a democratization of artistic practice.  The history of art no longer belongs to the chosen few but instead to the proliferating possibilities of a global culture.