Jayson Musson (MFA '11 candidate) interviewed in "Art in America"

Jayson Musson (MFA '11 candidate) was recently interviewed by Brian Boucher in "Art in America". Musson's alter-ego, Hennessey Youngman is the latest phenomenon to sweep the Internet. Musson / Youngman, the creator of "Art Thoughtz", who is black, styles himself in one of his videos as "the pimp of one-liners". He offers screamingly funny and sometimes sharply critical observations on the art world in the form of instructional videos. Topics range from the perils of copying Bruce Nauman ("You into torture? Shit, I'm into torture. Shit, you know what? Too bad. Bruce Nauman, he owns torture!"), to understanding relational esthetics, to how to be a successful artist. Over the last year, 10 videos have been posted, all in the same genre, some purportedly responding to requests and comments from viewers.

To view more of Musson's "Art in America" interview, visit http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2011-03-24/hennessey-youngman-youtube/

Visit http://www.youtube.com/user/HennesyYoungman to catch the latest Hennessey footage.

Jayson Scott Musson (MFA '11 candidate) featured on "ArtBlog Radio"

Jayson Scott Musson (MFA '11 candidate) was recently interviewed by "ArtBlog Radio". Profanity and insults are just distractions in Jayson Scott Musson’s posters, screeds and rants. The real message is the human comedy of rules, categories, identities, stereotypes, pretensions and social classes. In the "ArtBlog Radio" interview, Musson talks about trying to solve his problems as an artist and as an equal opportunity irritant to the politically correct. Jayson Musson currently has a solo show of his work at Marginal Utility February 4th - March 27th, 2011.


To view this feature, visit http://theartblog.org/2011/02/the-real-jayson-scott-musson-speaks-on-artblog-radio/

Marc Blumthal (MFA '10) reviewed in the "Daily Serving Forum", September 21st

Marc Blumthal (MFA '10) has been reviewed by the Daily Serving Forum, an international forum for contemporary visual artists. Blumthal was selected among two artists for the organizations monthly "Fan Mail" submission. "Blumthal’s work is an investigation of individual and collective identity. His images, which reference the artist’s personal experiences as well as America’s history, address the nature of being human and the pressures of the past", writes the Daily Serving. Blumthal states that, “I’m inspired by shame and guilt. My interests lie in Identity…[my] work addresses my personal identity and my national identity.” Blumthal’s work subtely yet effectively sheds light on the shameful hypocrisy that is created when one’s actions are the antithesis of the “love” they preach. He has recently exhibited work at the "International Print Club of New York" and the "Leonard Pearlstein Gallery" in Philadelphia.

To view the Daily Serving Forum review, visit http://dailyserving.com/

To see more of Marc's work, visit http://marcedmundblumthal.blogspot.com/

Jackie Tileston (MFA Professor of Painting) in Review in Philadelphia Inquirer

Jackie Tileston, El Dorado Depot, 2009


Jackie Tileston (MFA Professor of Painting) has a show at Pentimenti Gallery currently on view, and was reviewed by Edith Newhall in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The article is below.

Galleries: Two outstanding pairings, at Pentimenti and at Locks

By Edith Newhall

It's not often that a two-person show catches both of its artists on a perfect wave - or, rarer still, unites two who make each other shine - but Pentimenti Gallery's pairing of Jackie Tileston and Jedediah Morfit does both. While Tileston envisions the landscape as a place of ever-expanding possibility, Morfit uses it to evoke the inevitable passage of human life on Earth as it was viewed a couple of centuries ago, with some odd goings-on along the way.

Tileston's new paintings push her visions of kaleidoscopic worlds to even greater dimensions than her earlier works have done. Where her meditative, floating, dissolving landscapes of a few years ago suggested a hybrid of sci-fi and Japanese Ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") or Chinese scroll painting, her new, glitter-sprinkled paintings describe vaster places, sharper geometries, and explosive phenomena - in outer space and the world we know.

Even in the calmest of these new paintings, El Dorado Depot, a meteorlike shape is headed toward a jagged cliff of exposed, rainbow- hued strata. Opposite that cliff a mountain looms, a nicely forbidding perch for a Wicked Witch, but as drippy as any abstract expressionist painting at its base. It's just a painting, after all, melting as the witch did.

An installation of Tileston's photographs from her recent trips to China and India offers insight into the compositions and colors of her paintings. In each one, a dozen coincidental juxtapositions and intersections exist in utter stillness, motionless. In her paintings, the same kinds of coincidences of placement appear, but as in a state of flux: coalescing, breaking apart, attenuating, reuniting.

Morfit's bas-relief sculptures of humans and animals, which compose the smaller of these two shows (he's in the "Project Room"), bring Kara Walker's silhouettes to mind, but his groupings rarely constitute a story or event as Walker's do. Made from cast white plastic, Morfit's exquisitely modeled figures look as if they had escaped from a prim, 18th-century Wedgwood frieze and found themselves unprepared for the perils and excitement of the life of Tom Jones (the foundling, not the singer). Without a narrative to enact, they seem to be trudging along the same path in the same landscape, as if still confined to the contours of the vase they formerly encircled.

Pentimenti Gallery
145 N. Second St.
Philadelphia, PA
215-625-9990
www.pentimenti.com

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment

To see more of Jackie's work, visit www.jackietileston.info

ART REVIEW

A regular sort of marsh, stuffed like a St. Anthony’s day turkey with aluminum, garbled sludge, and feathers. The studio stood shyly among the pines. Birds hung from the rafters on the porch, all kinds. A woodpecker with its wings drawn back presided over a table of magic sand candles. A kingfisher eyed the fire from his rosary nest across the room while two finches huddled in the scraps of a baseball glove. The flames dried his wings, whispering over colored sand. It was delightful. Caterpillars ranged over melted sheets of plastic. We toasted them with mugs, coffee sediment cemented to the bottom.

Acadian music leaked from the radio. It was so off-tune it might have been the city distorted by the marsh, all of its sounds, whatever that meant. Either way it was a fascinating sort of noise, unpredictable and alive like an eerie Morandi or the eyes in a portrait of Jeanne. He compared the sound to art, then to his own work, a comparison as garbled and fleetingly sublime as anything. I was in no mood. He said painting was like this, like transmuting noise into Acadian folk fables about the Lusitania. We moved on. I moved on.

He worked in the vanitas tradition, he insisted, not still-life. But either way an ars moriendi, mining vitality in decay, fishing out constants from subjects whose chests sunk by the hour. Though their bodies faded their feathers retained such color I suspected plasticine or tar. They outshone the rainbow sand on the table, mixed as it was with ash.

He fleshed out the rest of the canvas with marsh salvage. Only the birds were constant, in his painting as well as in the tradition. A dead thrush’s wings break almost by the weight of their own feathers, separating quickly even in the sluggish currents of the marsh, but they persist across the centuries and not the powder horns or ivory radios which surround them in the paintings and in the dunes.

But if Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Ecclesiastes; vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas, I asked him, why such precision, such delicate colors, such care? For that too has remained constant, the pursuit of aesthetic perfection even in a tradition which aggressively renounces the pursuit of aesthetic perfection, if it would ever even concede the possibility of such perfection. But something perfect, he said, exhausts all its possibilities, and since there is nothing left for it to be it shines forth only in its inadequacies and limitations. So be it.

He wanted to say, with Wallace Stevens

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations….
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

and from this affirm the vanity of thought, act, and desire, condemning the entire complex of the soul for its lack of reasonable heating or adequate shelter. There were neither illusions in his work nor anywhere to escape. We returned to the dock after looking at his paintings. Piers sloped to the west, light died on the water. Fireflies settled sometimes three to a can. We watched.

ART REVIEW: 11 th S t ree t

Nothing yet. None of it will disclose itself in a series. Or if it did the terms are still discrete, not even a shadow between them. And after all this waiting. As for the painting, mauve dunes, power lines above a black road, silver where the night wears thin, sinuous little else. What next? More sculptures, more installations. Discontinuous to the end.

The month of April, a tunnel on 11th street, a nearby gallery. No way to bring them together.

Beneath the streets they pass, back and forth on bikes. Lights dangle from the cement roof. Silver to the tungsten coil like to the seams of the grass, gone by the moon. They pass back and forth. A state-sanctioned tunnel where the invisible collect their thoughts. Too weak to cast a shadow, the light merely vibrates, creating a field like to the empyrean. But this is underground. Water unravels like a tapestry, coiling in ripples on the ground.

There is a wind outside the tunnel, moving past the city. So much space. There will only be more.

The motives were less clear at the gallery. They created a landscape from parts of Scotland and England, a deer to wander in the twilight. The forest only shimmered. Green, blue, and gray, then antlers poached the frame. A luminescent deer strays in a phosphorescent forest. He’s still there, grazing.

Waves wash on the shore. Paul Klee disembarks. He has been at sea. He finds the tunnel, sees the deer. They displace his dreams of ghostly pyramids, shimmering fish, haunted fathers and the tables they set. He starts from the tunnel like a doe. He walks west, soon to join the Theatre of Oklahoma.

Who else will bring us together? He sets the table. Just walking through the desert, dream-figures, dream-fathers. Moses in the desert figures every pilgrimage. Still nothing but himself, he nonetheless embodies all that is to come. There was never anything but wandering.

The paintings, the film, and the installation figure something as well. They must. We have no idea what it is. This is the best place to be. Paul Klee takes it with him to his tomb. Another artist walks up a mountain, arranging stones in a line behind him, Nazca-like.

Only a dream-father can unite the disparate. We walk with him, and he with us. At last the paintings come together. A series, however unsatisfying. Still it is unstable, impossible to deduce anything solid. Art-prophets wander the desert. They might scatter the tribe, or unite the remnant. Max Ernst picks through the glacial scree, seeking in stone the marks of a different sculpture.

Such a topic is old, everyone’s favorite: no father to bring us together, forgotten in the desert, discontinuous, without future or memory, alas! we say, quietly rejoicing in our penance, its marvelous open-endedness. If the wailing was sincere we would have our tablet. Instead we have a philosopher’s stone. Passing it back and forth through memory.

http://www.pluralmedium.com/QE_JC_small.mov

Lecture Review: Pasolini

Atmospheres

Fear of an answer, that it crouches in the lecturer’s mouth. The Cinema Studies Colloquium opened only gaps. Every explanation couched itself in these terms. Nothing was settled in locus Pasolini. By moving him to inhospitable plains, in driving the poles further apart, much was accomplished. Turns out there are more than seven hills to roam, more space. Possibly we can all have a mansion here. The winds that are coming are great, the moon the only warmth.

The focus was Teorema, originally a novel. Pasolini turned it into a film with less than a thousand words, a mostly silent drift through bourgeois Milan, centered on a single family. Not much can be done to explain it. The book took these expository steps, even though it precedes the film, and it was abandoned. Can this be said, that a beginning explains its end? Not even Aquinas has an answer.

Teorema the book dissolved into Teorema the film, bringing to the screen a subsistence economy of gaps, cuts, and inexplicable gulfs. The method is reductive, erosive, destructive. Juan Rulfo, in explaining the similar atmosphere of his book Pedro Paroma, said he had to carry the narrative around in his head for years until it was shattered and shuffled enough to fit his sense of its form. But what shattered it? Why was the form different?

In its title the lecture hinted that it might follow Pasolini in his method: “The Obliteration of the Children of the Bourgeoisie in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Vision (Part 1).” Destruction stimulated Pasolini, any violence aimed at generation. Indeed, no “Part 2” is scheduled.

She discussed another film, Porcile, a diptych contrasting a Nazi’s son with a starving cannibal who occasionally assails a victim in a medieval wasteland. The title refers to pork, more specifically capitalist societies which consume, defecate, consume. Such films, even divorced from any theoretical underpinning (any attempts to connect them with sterile Marxist concepts only emphasized this), still speak of irresistible corrosion, of some weight. Who knows what drives it. Medieval cannibalism might not be too far. We can’t account for it any more than we can account for the way books die from exposure. George Oppen, of the poets, forever:

……they feel themselves
The end of a chain

Of lives, single lives
And we know that lives
Are single

And cannot defend
The metaphysic
On which rest

The boundaries
Of our distances.
We want to say

(Of Being Numerous, 26)

Whether or not Marxism is still with us, whether it has acceded to its spectral status or persists as a presence which talks and talks and talks of anything anything anything- (who knows anymore?)- or whether another concept has succeeded it, itself frail and fading, does not seem to matter for Pasolini, the colloquium, or ourselves. What does matter is this visceral sense of some insistent gnawing at the present foundations. It was illumined in the scenes of Teorema which juxtapose the clenched fist of an eerily traumatized beautiful young Milanese girl with small drifting tufts of cottony smoke upon the black sands of Mt. Etna.

By such means Pasolini evokes his idea of the “eruption of the sacred,” that something which strains against the dead walls of the Milanese home, which rages within or against the closed fist of the young girl as she lay in bed surrounded by her sated, clinical family. This is familiar, and it hardly accounts for the effect of those drifting clouds, so close to the rare black ground.

What of the film if its ideas are lost? Would it become nothing? What of Teorema the book if Teorema the film is thus? What of Juan Rulfo’s original narrative if Pedro Paroma is thus? Why did they erode, cut? The lecture too worked in this valence.

If Teorema retains value, it will not be by its sources and referents, whether imaginative, societal, conceptual, or biographical. A work is none of these. They fade, and still some substance persists. Every investigation, the lecture included, works wittingly or unwittingly to exclude itself as a possible explanation. Something becomes fixed and evident only when it is wrong. A film, a book, a lecture can fight this, or use it. They float freely, though still bounded. By the end of the colloquium some hideous interval had been cleared, leaving the desert a little north.

Critical thought, taken in this sense, seems but a cutting of the ropes. Marxism excluded itself by exhausting itself. But something substantive still weighs on us, this thing it indicated. It erupts sometimes from Teorema or the rattling of a trolley at night. It floats freely in the smoke-filled air, shadowing the silver ashes, a makeshift balloon in medieval Russia. The lecture demonstrated the value of an erosive method; “rain also is part of the process” (Pound, Canto LXXIV). The film, turning its back on the book, only accumulates treasure. Those who do not seek the world shall gain it. Those who seek the world shall lose it.

Lecture Review: Christopher Wood, Temporalities of the Cult Image

Christopher Wood’s Lenten lecture, “Temporalities of the Cult Image,” began with a tomb. He did not go there to rest but to sing something to the surface, a beloved perhaps, however weary. His words made the stones to weep, the skies to darken. So rise she did, threatening to harrow the art-hell around us, not that it needs it.

Ideas about Augsburg and the 15th century never remain in Augsburg or the 15th century. They cross the sea, sinking impasse after impasse. Dr. Wood’s thoughts passed through Belgium and an infinite Calais to our own darkened streets, flirting, pollinating.

The Gothic cathedrals stand at the edge of the Renaissance, something anonymous and endlessly vexing, unseemly in their vitality. If we can resurrect enough of their conceptual underpinning, we think, something vigorous might rise in our own time. As Dr. Wood acknowledged, however, the tools to excavate a different age are art-historical, themselves products of the Renaissance. Perhaps our assumptions merely press upon their own, obscuring more than illuminating.

Such an imposition, nonetheless, may be kin to their spirit. So he began the lecture with an early Renaissance tomb in Augsburg. St. Simpert, a local saint, died in the 9th century; his bones soon vanished. When they unearthed an unknown sarcophagus a half-millennium later they quickly attributed the remains to St. Simpert. Order was reestablished; pilgrimages could begin. They commissioned a new tomb, with a sculpture on top bearing the “likeness” of the lost saint, a likeness based on no portrait or description. But the justification for such an obvious lie might have been more than economic. Here Dr. Wood extended his claws.

Few believed the bones were St. Simpert’s, he claimed, or that the sculpture resembled him. Such facts were beside the point. Resemblance and authenticity are contingencies of the world. It little mattered to them whose bones they were or how his face actually looked. The new saint was simply St. Simpert, although it wasn’t. Truth to them was eternal, non-temporal; the world was fallen, whatever obtained in it deceitful and erroneous.

The sculpture reflected a certain conception of arts and the artist. Creation was not mimesis, a place to mirror nature and reproduce her forms, but rather an opportunity to improve upon an error, to return life to lost saints. Art was another avenue by which grace conveyed itself into the world.

The artist was a creator. As a creator he could mimic the Creator and not bother with the particulars of a broken creation. He can resurrect kings and overcome the fallen order, reestablish that which has passed into oblivion, restore something of beauty and good, in this case the face of a worn saint. The medieval craftsman’s artistic vitality, still unfathomable, attests to the force of such a method. Pilgrims arrived, miracles shone in the cornice, visions descended on the town; the kindness of god was never-ending.

Contemporary art strays somewhat into this field, however accidentally, often seeking to restore inarticulate truths by adhering neither to fact nor account- by this indicating, however weakly, the substance of something else. Something better left unsaid, in fact, to evade manipulation. Icons of medieval art never reflected natural reality. Memories of this erupt in the abstract movements of the twentieth century, passing through Malevich and others. Nothing seems lost, only complicated.

Even museums preserve the medieval ideal. The modern wings attest to its presence. Alongside the conception of art as something which bases its meaning in an accessible historical moment, there is a lingering appeal to an eternal world of forms. Most works include a placard with the artist’s name, nationality, and life-span. These help us to fix a piece in time, to savor its historical associations. Wagons circle Paul Klee on the prairie: he was in the Bauhaus in 1922? Art history is most comfortable with a meaning that comes of such temporal designations. There is work to be done here, not metaphysics. Since the Renaissance, paintings signify in time. Dr. Wood’s work on anachronism has sought to loosen the discipline from its historical basis, or at least engage it.

An oak is how it grew, how it fell, all its days, but much else as well. In Tim Hyde’s Video panorama of New York during which the camera fails to distinguish the city from a snowstorm, the city, a floating geometry of lost outlines, abandons its natural reality in a chaos of snow, assisted also by the peculiar whims of the camera. Six monitors hang side by side in a white room, each relaying an asynchronous loop of an aspect of New York in a blizzard. The buildings dissolve to some indissoluble essence, gray and powerful, occasionally crossed by a dark gull.

El Lissitzky assembles similar economies of floating geometry. His paintings and collages turn too against the world but in the service of a Revolution which hopes to found a workman’s Platonic paradise. And what of Kurt Schwitters, his merz-assemblages and merz-barns, cathedrals built of physical trash and intellectual ephemera?

One more anecdote. The Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso, commissioned to sculpt the likeness of a boy, found instead a face that eluded him, drifting wrong in every stone he touched. Only when Rosso had a vision of the boy peering through a silk curtain could he complete the bust. He saw in this moment a likeness which more closely resembled the boy’s features than a mimetic reproduction of actual appearance ever could. In Ecce Puer the child undulates in a supple current of red stone. And so the eternal persists, if just in the corner of a still, on a joint in a wooden frame or amongst other residua.

ART REVIEW: Wanderer, Shadow, Cezanne

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
-Tennyson, Ulysses

Shipwrecked, stalked by notions of harmony and clarity, seeking in exile something truthful, he wanders. Strange land, known to none, with its disjointed towns and broken kingdoms, his home somewhere beyond the sea. He seeks certain essences, forms he knew before coming to this shore. Nothing will suffice. With color, line, and shape he starts on a pilgrimage for an uncertain end.

He is in the south of France. Everything here defies him, confounds his vision. All vantages are lacking. There is much that is lovely. Glimpses of what he needs persist here and there: the window of a house, two walls out-folded, the color of a shadow at noon, pines of an unrepeatable dusk- but they are alone and without form: insufficient. He needs more than isolated fragments, more than the hills and the towns, more than even the cypress. He builds a new land, one made of different perceptions and different times. It fails as well- as it must- but still approaches something of the harmony he dimly recollects.

Cezanne drifts through his paintings. Pilgrims come from the hills to see a martyr’s tooth, the leaves of an oak above a spring, or a tomb. Even pilgrimage has an end. A man walks through the night, pausing before a maple alike any other. She went west for years, returning without even a story. Others joined Cezanne on his walk, hearing:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the specters in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

-Song of Myself, 2

Most striking are the small studies. Pure blue drifts from a ridge, orange from a corner of the sky. Uncluttered and largely white, black takes to the edges of things. Unlike the larger, finished paintings they register but one perspective. A promise of simplicity and purity hangs over them like a pall. They are abandoned, almost melancholic.

The exhibit includes artists like Charles Demuth, who saw in them a distillation of Cezanne’s excellence, and more importantly a way forward. Small, crystalline instances, the studies spoke to him as different parts of Mont Sainte-Victoire spoke to Cezanne. And just as he built of his impressions a world governed by the laws of harmony and beauty, so Demuth built of scraps his own cathedral.

Cezanne’s mountains are broken, his cities beyond repair. Transience shakes the paintings: skies bleed into walls, trees twist into homes, different dawns wash side by side over the same ridge. Nonetheless he sunk the most solid pier, stranded as he was ahead of us. Colors and shapes sink to the frame, almost to the shelf- yet this was the only place to anchor.

The narrative of the exhibit runs from an initial perception of an insufficient world to the fruitful dissembling of Cezanne’s corpus by successive generations. In pursuit of pure, stable forms everyone retreats. Ellsworth Kelly, in his own study of Mt. Sainte-Victoire, has set his hopes on a single, brittle line cutting across two crudely-joined pieces of paper. It resembles a ridge. I love it. References to the world have almost entirely vanished. Cezanne too pronounced it insufficient, though he assembled his otherworldly landscapes from the land. We have almost completely renounced it. Our hopes are elsewhere, maybe. And so it is.

I am a sojourner on the earth, and a pilgrim like all my fathers;
Woe is me that my sojourning is prolonged;
I have dwelt with the inhabitants of Cedar.
My soul has long been a sojourner.

Perhaps future generations will fill the slopes with grass, ring the peaks with cedar, throw shadow on the streams, maybe even add veins and moss to the outcroppings of rock. They could do less. They will wander the hills seeking the same, leaping toward fulfillment, despairing of possibility, falling short. The mountain might come to resemble our own. This will signal that something has returned to the world. Until then our bewildered minds make little of all the beauty we misperceive.

Waiting in the Mountain, Waiting in the Night

By coming so close to fulfilling our truest, most errant desire- the desire to stop time- photography encourages despair, leaving us to a world we can only fitfully love, it passing so fast. Such frustration! Nonetheless light is beautiful, and color and shape somehow console us. Even after the most affecting image nothing can be done except to continue on in confusion, wearied of our accompanying pictures. But here is one of a heron through a glass, another of a girl beneath a sail. What wonders, what purity.

All we have is change, nothing of what we need. Why hold up a sieve to the light? Why force images, memories, and emotions into artistic forms? Even thought and theory try to stabilize what is unstable, to shape what is passing and beautiful. They pretend to know better. We can’t help it. Photography’s failure is often the most poignant: as in, here is a face before everything changed.

Near Los Angeles, itself an ephemeral mirage, someone went into the hills with a camera. They exposed the film for half a minute or more. These photographs are different. Not that they alleviate our confusion or clarify our thoughts, far from it, but they lead us again to wonder about the strangeness of the world, which is the only good anything can do. At the very least we find this ­at the beginning of philosophy. Why not return again to the beginning, not knowing it for what it is?

The pictures were taken at night, when a camera is almost useless. The borders are stable but tense. Dreams, prophecies, and other winds seem to press upon the edge, an angel ready to break into the image, threatening blindness. Fortunately he restrains himself. A flashlight illuminates the hills erratically. Sometimes the land moves, as when someone sends a stone crashing down the hill. They were still for years, possibly since the harrowing of hell, and are still again.

A lot can pass in thirty seconds, not much of it seen. The clouds gather, the grass waits, night moves as if in a mass. Mostly such processes are absent. Time is of the process, and wind and rain. An otherworldly quality pervades the valley. In the pictures a gray shallow stream wanders over the stones, small in the dry endless hills. Its torrents blur into sensuous curves, more opaque where the current is strong. The sound is almost audible. So small are these pictures, no larger than the least stone of the hills.

Light changes in intensity, shade faints by degrees. Everything is unmoored even as it appears still. We see objects as they pass through time, nothing remarkable. And so the artists evade the vain accumulation of details. Nothing is wearier than the world of things. This is unjust, and our own problem.

Because of the duration of the exposure even distant stones are incredibly distinct, as in a van Eyck. The philosophers of his time believed that if someone fell for an instant from God’s sight he would cease to exist. The Recognitions claimed that this informed Flemish painting’s obsession with detail. All the objects assert their individuality for fear that God did not exist. What would happen to them if they were vague or imprecise? I forget if this has been refuted.

Different planes are present in the frames. Some of the stones shift in shadow, some never change. A lone light, guided by someone’s hand (such forms could not be random), wanders into the distance. There is nothing to indicate if these lines are more controlled or less controlled than a sculptor’s. The pictures seem full of symbols from an unknown culture, as if they document the unintelligible figures of its literary tradition. They are powerfully intact but only suggestive, a religion without a signifier, a people without an end. They affect us like the iceberg in Elizabeth Bishop’s The Imaginary Iceberg:

This is a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for.
The ship’s ignored. The iceberg rises
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
is light enough to rise on finest ropes
that airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.

The iceberg cuts its facets from within.

No home can be made here; the mind gasps as if in a prison.

Some details disorient. Nothing seems of this world. The setting of the pictures encourages this- night in a barren waste. Even Ecclesiastes would appreciate it. Varied and hopeful are the hills.

ART REVIEW: All of the Dream, None of the Penance

All of the Dream, None of the Penance

It might as well have been a dream. I walked to the house alone. The gate was broad, the door unlocked. Night crept along the wall, rippling among the stones. I went in. There was no scaffolding to crawl around in, only the cellar.

An empty hallway with no welcome: it led to the stairs which led to the basement. An impressive array of colored glass hid high on the wall. Blue and yellow panes crept onto the ceiling, turning with the last of the twilight. The sound downstairs was social/casual.

They congregated in loose groups on the cement. Their voices, elegant for the harshness of the room, passed like strands of a drying river. What little light there was collapsed in yellow plumes along the wall. Some fled down the halls which opened around us, vanishing before they could reach the end. The room was nauseously formless. It seems unfair to ask for harmony, teleology, or resolution, but only so much as it seems unjust to ask for spring or the consummation of a feeling in another’s eyes.

With such demands I turned to the paintings. If these were a part of the show, or the rooms a part of the paintings, or both or neither, I have no idea. A poem answers a poem, a painting waits in another. I could find nothing here, at least yet. A future may come in which these are bright pillars. A worker at Lascaux finds Klee’s Angelus Novelus beneath a creek, Brancusi’s Sleep in a new passage.

I kept looking up the stairs for something to lead us from the dark, a lion or a bear. We were lost. None of it made sense. But the world around us was different, changing in subtle, wonderful ways. A new carnival raised its tent over the night, taking up residence for an entire week. Although everything failed, or failed to even make clear its criterion for failure, the room refracted in the frames, casting shifting evanescent colors.

Cracks and accretions bent to the paintings on the wall. They were portraits of generalized acquaintances with sunken Egyptian eyes. A pall of stone passed into the cellar. We were trapped, thieves in the pyramid. They made this clear. The faces could be anyone in such dim light, a gallery of lost frontier families or a galley of the first sailors, tossed between rock and rock.

It was hard to determine anything more about the paintings, whether they were a part of the opening or not. So strange how their gaze spread across the room- more alive than any of our own, older, wiser- and fled through a window onto the street, ancient and more permanent. No one paid them any attention. Their travels will end at a mountain. They have a different time and a longer memory than us.

And so they absorbed the room, refracted the street, the city, the oceans and glaciers- all of it loomed. Centuries-old words crackled across the frames, pooling on the wall or flickering like coals in the corner. I caught a bit of Alexander Pope, which I confirmed later:

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall:
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;

These words meant something different in the cellar. The cracks and deformities of the wall altered the stanzas and sentences, changing the argument. The same with the lines from Wyatt. The room was indeed growing. Everything was quiet until a dog scampered across the floor above us, scattering several small animals, or so it seemed. The slats blinked as they passed. I had seen his eyes earlier; they indicated nothing.

Someone spoke of the paintings, suggesting that they were allegorical but allegories detached from any underlying doctrine, like saints of an unfathomable religion. “Like us this evening,” he calmly explained. This may have been joke. No one knew. Someone else cited Georges Didi-Huberman, who I also tracked down. After marveling that the abstract art of his own time had enabled him to see, and be struck by, certain colorful, constellated panels of Fra Angelico which his discipline had not only ignored but consigned to nonexistence, meaninglessness, he asks:

What, in the discipline or “order of discourse” of art history, has been able to maintain such a condition of blindness, such a “willingness not to see” and not to know? What are the epistemological reasons for such a denial- the denial that consists of knowing how to identify the slightest iconographic attribute in a Holy Conversation while at the same time not paying the slightest attention to the astounding three-meter by one-and-one-half-meter blaze of color situation just below it?

I wasn’t sure who the speaker was, whether it was Wisdom, Folly, Pestilence, or Beauty that registered shock at the blindness of men. No one led us out. There were no insights in the quarry. We quit the basement of the arts of our own will. Thought holds to a different ridge.

The night outside was different. Not better or more manageable, quite the opposite. A dense thicket lined the street. We walked beneath the bare trees. Shadows formed on the windows, wherever there were lamps really. The rose-like figure of woman appeared on the shade of a world less solid. There is so much to see. I would trade none of it for understanding. Some forgetful few crossed the river, the others waited on the bank.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism.” Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

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John Paetsch is Associate Editor for the Penn Art Review. Paetsch is a Master of Liberal Arts candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied art history and philosophy as an undergraduate and delivered a Symposium paper on Mondrian.

David Aaron Mette (MFA '09) appointed as Editor of the Penn Art Review

The Penn Art Review is an extension of the Penn MFA Forum. Entries to the Penn Art Review will be posted on the MFA Forum and archived separately until the site develops several columns for each beat of this ever-changing and growing entity. David Aaron Mette, MFA '09, is serving as its first editor. Mette can be contacted at: theywerered at aol.com

About Mette: An excerpt from his paper "Sovereign Communication: Reading The Deconstruction of Discursive Language in Bataille" presented at an international conference on art and humanities this past January:

Transgression and servility in Bataille

Transgression is a theme in Bataille’s writings that has issued a great deal of controversy. According to the Hegel that Bataille received through the lectures of Alexander Kojève, man is self-conscious being that is founded upon the initial negation of animality. From the sociological thinking that Bataille received from Durkheim and Mauss, this self-consciousness is contemporaneous with man’s institution of prohibitions, the development of tools, and the production of language as discourse. According to Bataille, these phenomena, which form the realm of the profane, result in man’s alienation from an initial inner experience, or the experience of the divine. Things that pose a threat to the orderly, homogeneous and thus profane way of life are prohibited and constitute the sacred or divine, which is dependent upon a negation of the first negation, or rather a contestation of the rules that had initially separated man from animal. Bataille writes:

What is denied in profane life (through prohibitions and through work) is a dependent state of the animal, subject to death and to utterly blind needs. What is denied by means of divine life is still dependence, but this time it is the profane world whose lucid and voluntary servility is contested (Accursed Share Vol. II-III, 92-3).

According to this statement the sacred is not just a return to simple animality, but a willed gesture of insubordination that allows access to nature “transfigured by the curse” (93). It is this accursed share that founds the excessive movements of the festival. And what are revealed through the sacred are the limits of life and the continuum of being in relation to a general rather than a restricted economy.

According to Durkheim, the sacred/profane is a kind of ur-dualism from which others evolve. In Bataille’s text it is acknowledged as a fundamental social rhythm that elicits a dual solicitation: one toward order, production, and accumulation and the other toward disorder, destruction and expenditure. The argument most commonly leveled at Bataille for his transgressive strategies is that by defying a prohibition, the validity of the power of the prohibition is ultimately reaffirmed in its naming. Focusing on the sacred/profane dualism as it is structured in language, Foucault notes, to kill god, one has to summon his presence. In his essay “A Preface to Transgression,” he writes:

Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred—is this not more or less what we may call transgression? In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a way of recomposing its empty form, its absence, through which it becomes all the more scintillating (Language, Counter-memory…, 30).

In this formulation, transgression is rendered as a violent contestation that is the very creation of the sacred established by the interdiction. As Mauss has noted, the interdiction exists to be violated. In all societies, there are interdictions related to sex and death; Bataille is not seeking to establish a world without rules, rather he shows the social reality of the rhythm that exists in the establishment of the limit that defines the sacred and the profane. It is this experience of the sacred through transgression which is a condition of possibility for sovereign moments of inner experience; significantly, for Bataille, transgression is spoken of in relation to a situation in which the king/god has been killed, which necessitates a more general discussion of transgression as an experience of limits. Foucault writes that the death of god “leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign”(Language, Counter-Memory. . . 32). With the demise of god, man is subject to limitless chance and now is capable of confronting death without the hope of redemption. In Foucault’s view, the death of god reflects the decline of the Adamic view of language that is derived from the gospel of John, the idea that the word is God and that the word made flesh; in the sense that philosophy historically places god in the realm of the transcendent as the word that exceeds all words, the attempt to establish a language which considers the death of god constitutes a Nietzschean endeavor of the re-evaluation of values, and consequently the deconstruction of philosophical subjectivity. But Foucault de-emphasizes transgression as a subversive force:

Transgression does not seek to oppose one thing to another, nor does it achieve its purpose through mockery or by upsetting the solidity of foundations; it does not transform the other side of the mirror, beyond an invisible and uncrossable line, into a glittering expanse. Transgression is neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world); and exactly for this reason, its role is to measure the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit and to trace the flashing line that causes the limit to arise. Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being—affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone of existence for the first time (Language, Counter-memory. . . 35).

Transgression is a momentary transportation to a realm that imparts a kind of knowledge that can only be a moment of the unknown; it is a loss of ipséité, or the thing-ness of man, which ultimately provides the conditions needed for the possibility of ecstatic experience through sacred communion, or the disappearance of the real constituted by discourse and dialectics—a rhythm which makes and unmakes the world.

In the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave, the distinguishing feature of the master is that he has risked death while the slave has chosen to conserve his life. This model is subject to a displacement by Bataille in what Derrida points to as a distinction of sense between lordship and sovereignty. According to Bataille there is a fundamental glitch that prevents the master or lord from the authentic experience of sovereignty: although the master has risked death, the experience of being subject to chance causes an anxiety that he must overcome in order to maintain his superiority, so he is dependent upon the slave for the recognition of his value. Derrida writes, “when servility becomes lordship, it keeps within it the trace of its repressed origin . . . The truth of the master is in the slave; and the slave become a master remains a “repressed” slave”(Writing and Difference 255). The desire and consciousness of the master are not only dependent upon but also historically constituted by that of the slave. Thus, the conservation of the original term in its negation is exactly the paradox that accounts for how Bataille’s revision of the master and slave dialectic illustrates the inevitable servility of the master. Discursive thought has an inherent positivity that is always recuperated. In order to escape this circularity, Bataille posits sovereignty altogether exterior and heterogeneous to the dialectic. According to Derrida, it is no longer even within the realm of the phenomenal. Withdrawn from the limit of knowledge and meaning:

. . .sovereignty is no longer a figure in the continuous chain of phenomenology. Resembling a phenomenological figure, trait for trait, sovereignty is the absolute alteration of all of them . . . Far from being an abstract negativity, sovereignty (the absolute degree of putting at stake), rather, must make the seriousness of meaning appear as an abstraction inscribed in play (Writing and Diff 256).

In contradistinction to the Hegelian concept of abstract negativity, or loss of meaning as a result of a negativity that is still discursive, sovereignty, or the operation of freeing desire from the desire of the other amounts to the radical exclusion or suspension of meaning that can only be laughter in the face of the limitless limit that is death.
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Aaron Metté is a performance, video, sound and installation artist from the south who currently lives in West Philadelphia. He has also completed graduate work in Comparative Literature. Metté will receive his MFA from Penn in May.

The Penn Art Review

The University of Pennsylvania MFA Forum (also known as the PennDesign MFA Forum) is undergoing several changes. In addition to blog entries related to "Arts in Philly" and MFA-specific activity at Penn, we are inviting graduate students from other disciplines (e.g. philosophy) to join the editorial board to develop an "Art Review" division for the site. The goal is to expand our understanding of "art" by welcoming different points of view.

Suggestions are welcome at lime [at] alumni.upenn.edu.
--Elizabeth Lim, MFA '07, Founding Editor, PennDesign MFA Forum