Poussin's Humour

Luis Bunuel 1

reading 'Objects of Desire' [interviews] trans. Paul Lenti. Marsilio, NYC, 1992.

"I don't look to beautify images. If it came out pretty, fine".

p 57.

a propos making a film with Stravinsky:

"I turned him down [the producer] because I didn't want to work with geniuses".

p 21.

 

with coffee, Balzac, H de.

short on oldies

"...'brio' untranslatable, Ital.word, newly adopted in Fr.: is found in early works --

fruit of fervour & fearless impetuosity of young talent - petulance -

when happily sometimes rediscovered later, no longer comes from the artist's heart, instead of hurling it into works, like volcano hurls out flame, he [sic] submits

it to circumstance, to love, to rivalry, often to hatred, even more to sustaining a glorious reputation".

(speedy trans.over coffee today is mine]

Balzac recommends going short on some older artists. 

 

La cousine Bette in complete, nrf Gallimard ed, vol 7, p127.

there is no outside of the [art] market

I posted here 2 days ago about a discussion & exhibition of Eve Armstrong/Gretchen Albrecht - finding yesterday it is now

- automatically? - & without asking me what I think about doing so -

on http://ocula.com/art-news/browse/2011/11/eve-armstrong-and-gretchen-albrecht-at-michael-let/ -

art-collectors-dealers info sheet - compare the news items on Reuters reports on individual stock-prices - with indications of recommendations to buy or sell

forget criticism, forget commentary on the state of the culture, replace with today's price quotes buyers/sellers, last price, yields ... 

in these circumstances, why do I do this for free? even my copyright in this [where's that gone?] is barely an asset for tax or estate purposes 

at the coal-face - in spite of the personal danger of publishing critical views [of just about anything] - explosions, mainly - I don't make 2 sous in return for the annual cost of this blog - & I won't carry ads, same as I won't stuff your private letter-box with them.

 

This here is a complaint, of course, but more than that, a statement to clarify for readers the conditions of writing/publishing.

 

Eve Armstrong & Gretchen Albrecht at Michael Lett's

Eve Armstrong/Gretchen Albrecht at Michael Lett’s.

 

Agreed this was a smart idea for an assemblage, putting them together.

 

 

The discussion with the two artists, led by Te Papa Curator, Heather Galbraith pushed in the direction of recognising the similarities between them. These amounted to formal preferences and behaviours that would happily cluster together most post- 1950s artists.

Albrecht stressed her interest in ‘process’, which she glossed as the changing that goes on between general conception and the actuality of making, the room left for adjustment. And this is also a common proposition that many artists would agree with, evne though it is strikingly incomplete, when it does not address the materials of production and the means and effect of distribution.

Albrecht went along with Galbraith’s notion that form and colour were metaphoric for feelings or for responses to nature. Critics like that proposition, because it allows the discourse to supposed representations of the sensitive feelings through their superior genius [of the ‘lyrical’ artist] towards nature and/or to the human condition. Romantic position for interpretation. That hasn’t work properly since Pop, Minimalism, Earth Art. Or for that matter with Russian formalism, Dada, ‘geometrical’ abstraction., in spite of efforts to maintain it, e.g. in newspaper reviewing in NZ.

Galbraith pressed Armstrong to join the party and tell us about her metaphors. Which, happily, she refused to do, saying her work was material and there were no metaphors of the sort she was being asked for.

The whole discussion was conducted by Galbraith in terms of lovely [significant] form and colour, as if that was what art was about.  And as if the purpose of sculptural material in the space was to be ‘aesthetically pleasing’, as if it were a nice painting.

At no point was it apparent that there were any differences between them, that there was any kind of contestation, not to do with status, age, generations, but with different ways of working to different ends.  If the sculptures are like paintings, they are disruptive of aesthetic norms, with their material build up of rubble and discarded things, strewn about without much evident control. They appear to simulate wrecked cities, seriouly  damaged interior decors, or a Kia store falling apart, an unlikely piece of interior décor, a comic lighting store arrangement, with light shades, one of which echoes [mocks] the signature shape of Albrecht’s nearby painting, a semi-circle.  [They may represent three-dimensional forms of hemispheres, but they are in fact, semi-circles]. Of course, the aim of the paintings, according to Albrecht, is to produce an effect of light --- which is exactly what the electric bulbs in the sculpture do, but literally.

And then there is the crux of the matter, the sculptures edge towards suggestions of cityscapes or interior design, but the hints of representation dissolve into a mess of materials. Vocabulary of building without a syntax. The paintings are landscape oriented, nature substitutes, imitative , illusions, not tangible stuff. [Please do not touch].

The paintings are meant to last, are manufactured for sale in a particular market, which it seems has not been completely saturated, since the biggest newest painting produced for the show is another ‘Hemisphere’, a big and gesturally strenuous affair in red and gold. The ‘process’ is purely that of the artist’s internal adjustments, self-criticisms and bright solutions, during working – the end in view is a satisfaction for the known dealer/buyer nexus.

It was more than a little interesting to see less familiar, non-signature style and format, paintings, selected for the show by Armstrong.  Darker, broodier colours, unexpected asymmetries of the colour blocks. Though they have been exhibited, they are untypical and perhaps represent a kind of image somewhat repressed in favour of the more typical.

When it comes down to process, of course that term is not just one of artist in midst of working in the studio, it is also the term for an opposition with product. The floor sculptures from detritus rubble and junk-shop discards, do not result in any product beyond the temporary exhibition – they cannot be replicated anywhere else. They are exclusive to occasion and site. They are not supported by the buyer/dealer nexus, rather by residencies and teaching, possibly the sale of drawings or collages. They enter therefore into dialogue, including oppositional dialogue, with the prevailing market-dominated styles -- at least initially, though they too can become routinised to get continued attention from critics and institutional patrons  -- until thy are finally recuperated by the ‘culture’ in 40 years time as museum materials.

The paintings began as something unusual was back in the 60s and 70s, but they rapidly became status symbols of the leaders of the consumer culture, whose mode of existence is currently in doubt in the ‘West’.

It is the oldest trick in the book, for the middle of the road [mainstream] established culture, in its late phase of ripeness and complacency, to pretend that the new and oppositional is 'the same’ as what they do, only masking the differences with dismissla as a new gimmick and/or vulgarity and/or poor technique. This way of ‘thinking’ is deeply rooted in NZ culture. It’s to be heard or seen at work nearly everywhere in the arts. Is it the case that Eve Armstrong, who has long been aware of the social repercussions of our built and our commercial consumerist social milieu, can be allowed in to institutions like Te Papa, if she 'aestheticises' her practise?

 

 

 

 

Robertson Gift - Auckland Art Gallery

Promised Gift of Julian and Josie Robertson.

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, 2011.

Text by Curator, Mary Kisler.

------------------------------------------------

No doubt a wonderful gift.

A few words only about the reception of it in the AAG’s booklet.

Nice to have quality colour reproductions – except maybe the colour-saturation in the Cézanne.

I doubt though whether one can expect such a collection of fifteen pictures to carry the weight of a coherent discourse, a history of art, in its pivotal defining moments from the 1870s to 1960.  The effort towards that in the booklet is focussed on broad biographies of the artists. For the most part these are unexceptionable, though also unexceptional, taken, as they seem to be from standard accounts in the literature.

The notes are mainly citation of secondary sources for the quotes, not the original published sources, used in the text.

 

Cézanne – La route.

For instance, Cézanne’s reported and often misunderstood remark about wishing to "redo Poussin from nature" which has now become "re-do Poussin over again according to nature." The authenticity of the statement was questioned about 50 years ago by Theodore Reff (I don’t have the reference at hand).  There is some general similarity perhaps between the trees in La Route and the trees in the Poussin Diogenes or the Arcadian Shepherds in the Louvre.

Pontoise is not a ‘coastal town’. That was where Camille Pissaro painted for many years. If Derain was also there, it was not at the same time as Cézanne, though that is the impression that one gets from the text. & the only ‘route’ in or near Pontoise [as distinct from ‘rue’] is the Route d’Auvers.  There is an earlier painting of a similar scene by Cézanne (National Gallery of Art.,Washington) with only 2 much slighter trees. I guess Cézanne did what Poussin would have done, in the Robertson painting, taken them from some other place, or simply made them up. It might have been useful, since the ‘development’ of Cézanne’s style is in question, to note the different colouring and drawing of the earlier painting. But when it comes to critical precisions of style,  Mary Kisler tends to use some variant of a phrase, like: ‘the way he has treated the buildings’, without actually saying what that way is.

As for the road: [ “there isn’t one to see” ], surely that is it, that dark area in front of the wall. 19^th century paintings, and there are hundreds of them, by Pissaro & others, show the roads around Pontoise and Auvers as no more than large cart tracks – one lane highways.

I am not to sure that the ‘repoussoir’ is anything more than a frame for the middle and distant grounds. And I’m nervous in case it really ‘pushes your eye through the central space to the village'.

Pontoise is not a ‘coastal town’. That was where Camille Pissaro painted for many years. If Derain was also there, it was not at the same time as Cézanne, though that is the impression that one gets from the text.

 

Picasso – Mère aux enfants à l’orange.

Checking on the orange as symbol. Not, it appears, “a symbol of fertility”. In Christian symbolism it usually stands for purity, chastity & generosity.  More to the point for Madonna paintings is the pomegranate, which, because of its abundance of seeds, is commonly a symbol of fertility and of the Resurrection and eternal life. It is reasonable to suspect that Picasso had, if not a specific, at least a generic, Madonna & child with the young Sty John in mind.

Braque – La Tasse

I have already noted that there is no apparent cup in the painting. The prominent white rectangle centre left , since it has a ‘handle’ and spout and open oval for the top, a coffee –pot. I should add that there appears to be a woman’s head with hat, upper right centre, and suggestions of a pyramidal figure. Next to this putative head there is something that could be feathers of a hat. In th left foreground, a repoussoir figure with one eye, a waiter?  In the central area a table. Like many of the other figurative suggestions, this is seemingly transparent to alternative versions of itself and knobbly rounded edges. In this as in the other large Braque painting, there is little fragmentation of coherent objects, but plenty of effects in the little still-life of transparency.

Braque

It is strange to read in the bio-piece about Georges Braque that ‘Works particularly those of the early period defined as Analytical Cubism…. may incorporate found materials such as newspaper or sheet music’. Apart from there being no agreement, let alone definition, of ‘analytical Cubism’, the collage comes in only in 1912, & is not present in the ‘early period’.  Also strange to read that Braque’s statement that he & Picasso were like mountaineers roped together, becomes in this text “a kind of artist’s duel". Duelling mountaineers, how ineffectual that would have been?

PETER ROCHE/LINDA BUIS performances 1981/2 -- descriptions

among my unpublished mss there are 3 descriptions of their performances -- for the record, here they are with minimal editing  --- so far I've only keyboarded 1 --  the others will follow:

 

 

PETER ROCHE/LINDA BUIS PERFORMANCES   -  3   D E S C R I P T I O N S   B Y   T O N Y   G R E E N  - 1981 & 1982  - PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED  

 

1

PETER ROCHE AND LINDA BUIS     PERFORMANCE    Grafton Rd Arts Centre  4/11/81

 

Entering in the first room Peter was on the eighth rung of a ladder with wide-spaced rings that reached to the beams of the ceiling, not in the centre but over to the far side of the room a bit, but with him right at the top, his head up against the ceiling. It was dark except for the lights coming in from the vestibule through the open door. He was chanting ng in long breaths with short pauses between. He kept this up all the time for about an hour and a half, through or over the sounds of traffic outside, which gradually diminished as the performance went on, beginning at 11 p.m. and finishing at a bout 12.3o. He was up the ladder, uncomfortably perched, chanting. She was in the lower room on a mattress, under a single blanket, apparently asleep, throughout, with the big side door open, so that the streetlights illuminated the room, casting shadows on the wall opposite the door. His chanting was still quite audible. An audience of  perhaps twenty people walked in and through the spaces and sat on the stairs between the two rooms or leaned against the walls. They were mostly silent, though there were occasional whispered conversations. The chanting went on and one wondered whether there was to be anything else, a second part to the performance, as there had been several times in their pieces, e.g. Real Pictures, Barry Lett Galleries. Would he come down the ladder and need space in the room or rooms. Would she wake up and get up and they perform something else so to speak. The chanting itself wobbled in pitch and it seemed he kept it steady only when he could hear the pitch of the voice coinciding with the pitch of the resonance of the space, when at least one overtone was quite audible. Then the room resonated and his voice was, as it were, tuned to it, and the audience could relax from the tension felt when he strayed from the pitch, or was searching for it, couldn’t find it. The performance went on with him straining away at his chanting, and she sleeping, until his position up the ladder and compression of his abdomen, as he folded up more and more on his perch, took him to the point where he was retching, stopping for a while then continuing for a little longer. Finally, he stopped and began the difficult descent. His circulation was badly affected by his position and he had to struggle to get his legs going again so that he could pull himself through the rungs at the top to get down. In the middle of his very slow and tense efforts to do that, Martin Cane cam in with two lively dogs, greeted a friend and broke the tense attention on Peter’s rather dangerous descent. He came down and that was that.  The dogs woke Linda, licked her face and so on.

 

2.

PETER & LINDA AT THE MUSEUM   3/3/82

At 3.15 we went up to the Museum to see what Peter & Linda were doing. I took a bend too fast & Judi felt sick. It was a hot day & bright. Walk down enfilade of square-headed doorways into darkening spaces from main hall  -- through a Maori carved doorway mounted over the doorway of the building  --  arrive at very dark space. Just visible shapes of people in white overalls one sitting propped against a pillar the other lying, feet by a pillar – diagonally opposite across the space. There’s a metronome ticking in the light falling on the floor through a crack between black screens – shining reflection off polished floor. Windows are covered with white boards over yellow curtains and not much light gets in just a glimmer. The cover of the metronome lies on the floor – hard to see, Wystan & I both go over to look. Judi’s going round the room making notes. Suddenly the light goes on. Is this a switch we’ve turned on or a time-switch? And Linda sits up. Peter moves about. ‘Sorry’ says voice of attendant switches it off again. Soon after Peter & Linda get up, the piece is over, ruined by the light going on. We talk with them getting information about what’s been going on. He’s had to rewind the metronome & replace it on the end of the light beam several times. They don’t know what time it is. Linda thinks it’s 2 and it’s actually 4. They’re both feeling stiff, she talks about forgetting her body and drifting into ½ asleep stats – hypnagogic I say. The light spoiled it, broke concentration. Phil Dadson has been in, others? The room was meant to be free for their use but the attendants & others working there kept coming through in spite of a notice put up at either entrance.

 

Peter Roche, Linda Buis at RKS ART 23/6/82   Performance Work

[lightly edited transcription of my 1982 notes]

Judi and I hurried to get there on time. On our invitation there was a clockface stamped in blue. The hands were put in in orange marker. There must be some reason for not putting the time in print, doing each invitation by hand. They are probably not identical then, we guessed. We even thought of a performance with everyone arriving at different times and no more than that, the audience’s performance in  response to the invitations.

We made it with about a minute to spare. We had the choice of any of the black plastic seats. We put our cushions on the two at the left end of the front row. The seats were arranged on a diagonal in the room, facing th broad single doorway from the little front gallery into the large space of the inner gallery. This had recently been arranged by Billy Apple with Rodney Kirk Smith and Anne Livingstone, the dealers. I had forgotten that Peter had asked me about chairs at RKS ART, and I had brought a cushion, preparing to sit on the floor as on other performance nights there.

Peter and Linda came out of the loo, at the very back of the gallery, and passing us Peter spoke briefly to us, something he doesn’t usually go in  for until after a piece is done.

He and Linda stood side by side in the broad doorway, Peter on the left, as we looked at it, Linda on the right. He faced into the room, she faced the other way looking into the little gallery and the head of the stairs and the way in from the street. At 7.27 we were the first to arrive and Anne came in too, and sat down, as part of the audience. Peter and Linda were dressed in white shirts and white trousers. His white sneakers were rather yellowish. He wore a dark tie, perhaps black, with light spots on it, hanging to just below his waist. She had her hair in a  pony-tail, a thick shortish braid. He had his hands in his pockets. His sleeves were buttoned at the wrists. Hers were rolled up to just below the elbow and the tail of her shirt hung out.

They did not move, except for Linda’s occasional cough, and shifting her left leg. He stared at a point on the carpet it seemed some way ahead of him. It seemed a long time that the three of us sat there, while the two of them stood.

About 7.45 some more people arrived and slowly the place filled for about an hour with single arrivals or people in twos and sometimes more. Everyone that came in had to pass Peter and Linda. This meant looking past them to see the audience round to the left, with a spotlight in their eyes. And then sidling past Peter, usually. Christine Hellyar, unusually, went past Linda’s side. They were not about to give away their position, largely blocking, blockading the way in and the way out. You could not very well ask them to move so that, you audience could get into the audience space, defined by the chairs. You had to turn and sidle past. When you had done that Peter would call out “How are you”. Some responded with a turn back to him and a “Good” or “Fine” or somesuch. Others didn’t answer, and then Linda did, though not very loud, as if the question had been put to her anyway. He always did get some reasonable response then. And the difficulty was were you supposed to talk with the static silent performers in their strategic position in the doorway, with the light on them, standing not sitting. Rob Giles tried to talk with Peter, answering when it was someone else asked how he was. And going out saying something to Peter, like “thanks” or something and getting no reply. So those of us inside watched this ceremony of entry and greeting and response. Then all around there was a clear desire of anyone there to talk with their neighbour, or the friend or lover that had come with them. This was all in whispers, much of it comment, for Judi and Wystan and me of asking what was going on, what they were doing, what we were doing, as Wystan said later, their performance had got the audience looking at its own behaviour. As usual there was a lot of tension, of expectation, and a long wait with little action, certainly no entertainment, only the fascination of becoming an insider in the audience, going the]rough the door and becoming initiates watching other initiates being initiated like themselves. Once in you were in, and to go out had to make up some appropriate behaviour to cope with the fact of being so close, so much in someone else’s space. Wystan arrived nearly last, about 8.10, as far as I can remember. Judi and I were the only ones to attend the whole performance. Ours was the longest wait, and we did it quite well, though Judi went out ot the loo in Victoria Street carpark and came back. I was alone in not experiencing, but only watching the others. We enjoyed it. We chattered and felt happy.

 

 

 

Robertson collection at Auckland Art Gallery

curious titling -- maybe the title is 'traditional' --  a  Braque called 'La Tasse' --

the central whitish object in this little still-life is not a cup but a coffee-pot 

Art theft [?] & Sir Joshua Reynolds, 3

This is the last of these notes. They end with the arrival in London of Poussin's Sacraments and the eighth picture [St John Bapotising the People]. There are numerous references to the art-trade carried on by Byres and Reynolds - art auctions in Europe, art-works on the market, prints, sculpture by Canova, paintings by Battoni, &  paintings by Gavin Hamilton [of which there is also information in the Gazette de l"Europe] 

 

Download Art Byres Reynolds  

Art theft [?] & Sir Joshua Reynolds, 3

This is the last of these notes. They end with the arrival in London of Poussin's Sacraments and the eighth picture [St John Bapotising the People]. There are numerous references to the art-trade carried on by Byres and Reynolds - art auctions in Europe, art-works on the market, prints, sculpture by Canova, paintings by Battoni, &  paintings by Gavin Hamilton [of which there is also information in the Gazette de l"Europe] 

 

Download Art Byres Reynolds  

Art theft [?] & Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2

The next few letters - in 1785 regard the secret plan to copy Nicolas Poussin's Seven Sacraments and put copies in place of the originals. Reynolds agency as art-collector/agent becomes clear. The condition of the Sacraments is noted by Byres. There are some more letters noted in my notebook & I will transcribe them soon. The artistic merit of the paintings, much vaunted in the eighteenth century, is still not widely understood, except by a few art historians.

 

Download Art theft[?] & Reynolds.2