Review: Wim Wenders: Once

Another Epinions orphan. Another review of this book appears at Green Man Review.

To be quite honest, I’m not familiar with Wim Wenders’ films. After leafing through Once, I have a feeling I’d like them. Characterized on the jacket flap as “autobiographical sketches,” they seem to me to be more on the order of Ned Rorem’s “high gossip” – familiar, diaristic, a little gossipy, dropping names like crazy – Kurosawa, Francis Ford Coppola, Harry Dean Stanton – the names one might expect. There are also encounters with the anonymous – a little girl in Russia, an unknown actor in Hollywood – that are illuminating of the richness found in the mundane.

Most of the sketches come with photographs, which are usually spare, lean, uninflected – the kind of casual, “dumb” imagery that comes out of Pop Art, the photography of Gary Winogrand, and deconstructionist semantics. I happen to find them quite wonderful, almost magical in many cases – in spite of (or maybe because of) their leanness, they are often tremendously evocative, and to me offer insight into Wenders’ aesthetic stance – some of the series are almost like film, a slow pan through a desolate landscape with surprising and sometimes surreal details. As Wenders says in his introduction,

A photograph is always a double image,
Showing, at first glance, its subject,
But at a second glance – more or less visible,
“hidden behind it,” so to speak,
the “reverse angle”:
the picture of the photographer
in action.

This is a good book to just wander through, touching ground here and there, backtracking, taking another look at a certain view, absorbing the stories (the prose is cast as verse, even though it’s not, really), and finding little treasures here and there (the “Mighty Mouse” sketch is delightful, even though regrettably lacking photographs). It’s a world-wide ramble, with stops in Australia, Russia, Germany, the US, India, Algiers, and some surprizing places as well – Butte, Montana, for example. There are reproductions of unfixed Polaroids that Wenders found in a drawer, which are some of the most haunting images in the book.

How much do I like this book? I bought it. I don’t usually buy art books, because they are an addiction that I finally broke (after learning the hard way that it’s very easy to run out of space and money), but this one is too rare and wonderful to pass up. Be warned, however – liking this book depends on a certain degree of openness and sophistication in both visual art and literature, and, to be quite honest, if you can’t stand photographers like Lewis Baltz or Robert Frank, you will have trouble with this book. On the other hand, if you are one of those who is constantly looking for ideas and images, places to jump off from and go wandering through your own imagination, I think you’ll like it just fine. I know it’s going to have some impact on my own work – I’m looking forward to it.

(Distributed Art Publishers (orig. Shirmer-Mosel, 1993), n.d.)

Culture Break: Banksy in Venice

Offered without comment:

View this post on Instagram

. Setting out my stall at the Venice Biennale. Despite being the largest and most prestigious art event in the world, for some reason I’ve never been invited.

A post shared by Banksy (@banksy) on May 22, 2019 at 8:01am PDT

Paris is Burning

Well, not Paris, just Notre Dame cathedral, but that's bad enough.

Contrary to initial reports, the cathedral is not destroyed, not gutted, and is mostly still standing. The wooden framing is pretty much a loss, as is the wooden roof, but the vaulted ceiling is still intact, most of the stained glass is in good shape.

If you want more information, there are stories on this everywhere.

Review: Jim French: Men

Another from the late, great Epinions. I did several of these sorts of photo books, and some of those will be showing up here. Eventually.

I once said to an art dealer friend of mine, as he was mounting an exhibition of the work of yet another California-based Bruce Weber wannabe, “Honey, if you’re going to show beefcake, show Jim French.” French, the founder of Colt Studios, ranks with Bruce of Los Angeles and Bob Mizer of the Athletic Models Guild as one of the pre-eminent practitioners of modern “male photography.”

None of these people made any pretense about creating great art (which is one reason perhaps that I find them preferable to any number of other photographers who do male nudes). Their purpose was simply titillation, which they approached with honesty, and, in the case of Bruce of Los Angeles and Bob Mizer, with a kind of tongue-in-cheek playfulness that is quite refreshing, given the high drama resident in so much contemporary work in this field. French, perhaps because most of his career has spanned a period in which such images could be made and distributed openly, takes himself more seriously; fortunately, he approaches his subject with respect and sympathy and he is a consummate craftsman.

Out of the history of French’s work, I have chosen to review Jim French Men because it is an effective mid-career survey, and I happen to think one of his best books. The content is weighted toward black-and-white work, which in many ways is fortunate: although French displays a good command of color, the production values of Colt Studios, which owns State of Man, the publisher, were not geared toward fine-art reproductions. Nevertheless, there are only one or two images in the book that are truly garish, and the overwhelming majority, both color and monochrome, are what they set out to be: sensual and inviting. One major plus in French’s work is that he doesn’t seem to have an agenda: too many photographers in this area weigh their images down with high-sounding philosophical or political baggage that is simply beyond the work’s ability to bear. French just makes very good figure studies, working from his own considerable skill, talent, and sensitivity, and relies on the image to carry whatever message there may be.

A great deal of this effect depends on the model. Although all of these men are very well-equipped for their roles, none are so massive as to be grotesque – these are, for the most part, body-builders with a sense of proportion. And French himself has a sensitivity for those images that could be art: pictures of Bob Benedetti, Adam Hammer, and Kevin Walker leave behind the soft-porn calendar art that is so often the product of these shoots and, in their portrayals of introspection or confrontation, become portraits rather than merely pictures of naked men. (Walker, who has a lush body to begin with, gives the camera a coolly speculative look that boosts the eroticism of the image almost off the scale, while seated in a demure pose that reveals nothing you wouldn’t want your parents to see.) The standouts, to my mind, are French’s numerous pictures of John Pruitt. French worked with Pruitt frequently from at least 1984, the earliest in this book, through the mid-1990s. Pruitt has a quality that every photographer must dream about: while he is massive, particularly in his earlier pictures, he carries his muscle gracefully, and has an on-camera presence that is rarely found in any subject: He is able to project that elemental massiveness outward, and his body becomes truly sculptural, not only occupying space but defining it. And, where other models might be pretty, Pruitt, particularly in the later pictures where his bone structure becomes apparent, has a hauntingly beautiful face. He presents an image at once powerful, sensual, and vulnerable, and French is enough of an artist to have caught that quality in finely rendered black-and-white and carefully modulated color photographs.

Regrettably, even as fine a craftsman as French will come up with images in which the poses are strained or even ludicrous, and pictures that forego the erotic in favor of the blatant. Jim French Men has its share of those. While French is probably the best in this genre because of his craftsmanship and sensitivity to his subjects, when taken in the context of the range of books of similar nature, his efforts suffer from reproductions that are not among the very best. Nonetheless, in a field becoming more crowded by the day, Jim French deserves a place among the legends.

(State of Man, 1990)

(Note: Signs of the times: In doing a search for the cover image, I clicked the page on Amazon. You can now own a used copy of this book for $434.98; new, it's a mere $3,053.01. I did not pay that much for my copy.)

Image du Jour

From commenter Jean-Marc in Canada at Joe.My.God.:

In case you're wondering, it's referencing this story.

Saturday Science: But Is It Art?

Archaeologists have discovered what they're calling the earliest example of human drawing:

A small stone flake marked with intersecting lines of red ochre pigment some 73,000 years ago that was found in a cave on South Africa’s southern coast represents what archaeologists on Wednesday called the oldest-known example of human drawing.

The abstract design, vaguely resembling a hashtag, was drawn by hunter-gatherers who periodically dwelled in Blombos Cave overlooking the Indian Ocean, roughly 190 miles (300 km) east of Cape Town, the researchers said. It predates the previous oldest-known drawings by at least 30,000 years.

This had me scratching my head:

While the design appears rudimentary, the fact that it was sketched so long ago is significant, suggesting the existence of modern cognitive abilities in our species, Homo sapiens, during a time known as the Middle Stone Age, the researchers said.

Um, hello? Same species, same capabilities. Sure, allow time for building a cultural history, but why would anyone be surprised that early modern humans would draw? And, while I don't want to belabor the point, this is the Middle Stone Age, meaning fairly advanced and sophisticated tool-making. Did someone say "cognitive abilities"?

Footnote: I was reminded while viewing a nature/paleoanthropology documentary on Netflix (Nova's Dawn of Humanity) that until recently, scientists pooh-poohed the idea that modern humans -- or humans in general -- could have originated in Africa, which is what all the evidence points to. Just goes to show you -- scientists are not free from prejudice or pre-conceived notions. By the way, the program itself is fairly good -- about finding another missing link.

I Knew It!

Believe it or not, I do think about other things than being snarky about right-wingers.

Northwest Coast totems

I spend a lot of time at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, which is no surprise, given my life-long fascination with the natural world and the way it works, which in my mature years has also become a fascination with human cultures and their origins. (Sometimes the processes can be remarkably similar, if mostly metaphorical.) On a couple of recent trips, I noticed the strong resemblance between the iconography of the Northwest Coast peoples of America, the high cultures of Meso-America, and the Polynesian peoples of the Pacific, and in fact an affinity between the art of those groups and certain motifs in Chinese and Japanese depictions of, for example, gods and demons -- common motifs, such as large, staring eyes and protruding tongues as a sign of power. I considered the possibility that there was a common origin somewhere back in the mists of time, especially since evidence points to origins of at least some of the American Indians and the peoples of the Pacific island in close proximity --possibly in Southeast Asia and/or the area of Indonesia and New Guinea.

Well, lo and behold! While reading Joseph Campbell's The Flight of the Wild Gander, a group of his essays that deal with the origins of myth and religion, I ran across a passage in "Bios and Mythos" (pp.30-31 of the New World Library edition of the collected works) in which Campbell notes the work of a number of anthropologists who have entertained similar ideas, specifically the work of Robert Heine-Gedern, who, he says, "showed that late Chou Dynasty art motifs had been somehow diffused from China to Indonesia and Middle America."

Maori totems

And searching through that rag-bag memory of mine, I remember references to the Lapita people of Taiwan, coastal Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago, who are generally considered to be the ancestors of the peoples of the Pacific Islands. This ties in with another memory of a reference to the origins of some Amerindian languages in Southeast Asia, but I don't remember the specific locality that was mentioned. (This is kind of a sketchy association, since there are a number of languages spoken in that region, some of which are relatively recent results of movements of peoples from mainland China and possibly India. I really can't confess to be up to snuff on that particular area.)

The bottom line is that there is some validity to my idea of a common artistic tradition between America, East Asia, and the Pacific Islands.

(A side note: at the beginning of the exhibition "Ancient Americas," the Field has a video outlining the two main theories of how people arrived in the Americas from Asia: either via the Bering land bridge during the most recent glaciation, or by boat. These are always presented as two theories in opposition, but it occurs to me that they're not mutually exclusive. Another booby-trap engendered by either/or thinking.)

Polynesian panel

Image of the Week

This is an old one, but it's what the trees looked like a few days ago after our last snow.

Today in Creeping Fascism

William Donohue, d/b/a "The Catholic League," has gotten his knickers twisted over a play. Via press release:

On January 23, “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” a New Group production, will preview at the Pershing Square Signature Center, an off-Broadway venue. That morning, at 9:30 a.m., I will hold a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., raising objections to the play and the source of funding for the New Group. Regarding the latter, the New Group receives most of its funding from public sources, led by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

The press conference has two objectives: to call attention to this frontal assault on Christian sensibilities; and to request that President Trump nominate a new chairman of the NEA, one who will discontinue funding of anti-Christian grantees, exhibitions, and performances. The current chairman’s tenure ends in April; the president is expected to announce his nominee in the near future.

First off, the NEA, I'm told, does not directly fund theatrical productions, but then, when you've got a good snit going, who cares about facts? Here's a route into the arcana of NEA grant-making. And do keep in mind that the NEA (and the NEH) have been favorite targets of the right since they made the mistake of funding projects that the "good Christians" don't approve of.

And in that vein, commenter 2guysnamedjoe at Joe.My.God. provided this link and this quote:

"It is not the mission of art," the Führer proclaimed to the assembled crowd in September 1935, "to wallow in filth for filth's sake, to paint the human being only in a state of putrefaction, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, or to present deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength."

I think the thing that most riles Republicans about the NEA is that it doesn't hold to the idea that politicians should be determining which art is acceptable. It wisely has left that to audiences.

Oh, and one further observation: The Catholic Church does not accept the idea of separation of church and state. Which makes the Church, as far as I can tell, officially anti-American.

Via Joe.My.God.

And just in case you're curious as to what all the fuss is about:

Be warned: it's two hours long.

Art? Culture? History? Who Needs 'Em?

Interesting article from TPM on the threat to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It's another budget cut that will impact smaller towns and rural communities the most, of course -- another kick in the teeth to The Hairpiece's base.

I found this telling:

Advocates feel they have a good chance of lobbying Congress to save funding for the endowments, which they say fund programs that offer crucial support to the public education system, help veterans readjust to civilian life and bring arts and culture to small communities.

“What we have here is an attack upon global citizenship and national civic culture," Jim Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, told TPM of the potential elimination of the NEH.

(Emphasis added.)

That's the point. Digby pointed out that Trump's proposed budget is authoritarian. I'll go a step further: it's a dictator's budget. The devil's in the details, as they say, and that comment about global citizenship and civic culture underscores it: that's the point.

Dictators start off by controlling the media, or trying to, and Trump's got the media chasing its tail 24/7.

And next they rewrite history. And the best way to accomplish that is to be sure that there are no other sources available, no other viewpoints to be had.

I wonder how successful he's going to be. He makes a big deal about how social media enables him to go directly to his supporters, but, as we've seen, that cuts both ways. And the cuts can be really sharp.

Today's Must-Read: Define "Great"

This article by David Rothkopf in Foreign Policy, which tom Sullivan quotes extensively in this post at Hullabaloo. Rothkopf's thesis:

The shallow state is in many respects the antithesis of the deep state. The power of the deep state comes from experience, knowledge, relationships, insight, craft, special skills, traditions, and shared values. Together, these purported attributes make nameless bureaucrats into a supergovernment that is accountable to no one. That is a scary prospect. But the nature of bureaucracies, human nature, inertia, checks and balances, and respect for the chain of command makes it seem a bit far-fetched to me. (The bureaucracy will drive Trump, like many presidents, mad, and some within it will challenge him, but that’s not the same thing.)

The shallow state, on the other hand, is unsettling because not only are the signs of it ever more visible but because its influence is clearly growing. It is made scarier still because it not only actively eschews experience, knowledge, relationships, insight, craft, special skills, tradition, and shared values but because it celebrates its ignorance of and disdain for those things. Donald Trump, champion and avatar of the shallow state, has won power because his supporters are threatened by what they don’t understand, and what they don’t understand is almost everything. Indeed, from evolution to data about our economy to the science of vaccines to the threats we face in the world, they reject vast subjects rooted in fact in order to have reality conform to their worldviews. They don’t dig for truth; they skim the media for anything that makes them feel better about themselves. To many of them, knowledge is not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman. The same is true for experience, skills, and know-how. These things require time and work and study and often challenge our systems of belief. Truth is hard; shallowness is easy.

(Emphasis added.)

Read them both. (Yes, I know, another twofer. You can handle it.)

Image of the Week

I haven't done one of these in a while, but since the news these days is so cheerful (All Trump, All the Time!), I decided to dig through the archives.

Here's one from a series I worked on for a while way back when, called "Combinations". I may go back to it. Someday.

Image of the Week

Doesn't this look nice and cool and shady?

It's an old one -- I'm not even sure where I shot it: could be North Carolina, could be Michigan. Have to start labeling these things better.

Image of the Week

Digging through the files and ran across this. See? Even Chicago can be a little mysterious.

Image of the Week

I meant to do this yesterday and was so fed up with the news that I just left.

At any rate, the juvenile black-crowned night herons are up and about, gathered around the Waterfowl Lagoon staring into the water, so I thought this one from Bernice would be appropriate:

Another Reviews Update

It's "What's New" day at Green Man Review, and I have a lot of stuff up, so go on over and take a look -- there's fantasy, art, comics, anime, and music.

Image of the Week

From my friend Bernice, since I've stated seeing butterflies already:

Image of the Week

I haven't done this for a while, but I am trying to get back in the swing of things after being so hit-or-miss over the winter.

Let's see what's in my files. . . .

Here's one from last spring -- pretty urban, actually:

Believe it or not, it's about edges. Pretty much.

Image of the Week

I meant to do this yesterday. Truly, I did.

It's that time of year: the trees are mostly bare (although a whole group of trees in Millennium Park are just turning) and we're getting foggy spells:

Image of the Week

I meant to post these yesterday, but being a major airhead lately, forgot.

At any rate, a couple of recent images from my friend Bernice. This one, if I have it right, was chosen as the "Photo of the Day" on her photo group's web site:

And this one is a nice variation on that theme. (See what you can do if you get up early? Or was this one done late?)