January 2016 – Snopes

Sharks, Spaghetti-Os, and Other Nonsense

todda17

by Caroline Todd

Here’s a quick summary of every Art History course from 101 to an honors thesis: every artistic movement is a reaction against whatever came before it. After the austere extravagance of the Baroque era, the French aristocracy introduced the light, whimsical, Rococo style, and the Realists followed the Romantics. Nowadays, though, the art world is stuck in a strange limbo. Many art historians and critics refer to our contemporary art scene as “post-postmodernist” (some are serious, but thankfully most are joking) – though modernism stuck around for a while after World War II, our self-reflective postmodern ship sailed a few decades back. With a critical perspective on artistic production at the center of artists’ minds since the 1950s and ’60s, our predominant artistic mode has been anti-establishment ever since. In fact, it’s been that way for so long that we no longer have any boundaries to test. Real people visited a Chicago art gallery in 2010 to watch a performance artist open a can of Spaghetti-Os and stuff them in her pants while reciting a nihilistic poem. In 1991, a New York investment banker paid $12 million for a dead shark placed in an enormous tank of formaldehyde (that eventually decomposed to the point that it had to be replaced). All this more than forty years after celebrated composer John Cage premiered his famous work 4’33” – four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.

Damien Hirst's pretentiously titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — Damien Hirst’s *The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living*

Call me a traditionalist, but there’s little contemporary art I legitimately enjoy. When I visit a museum, my first stop is the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European art galleries; I’m one of the emerging avant-garde’s biggest fans. Though the art world has never been a flawless one, and gifted artists go overlooked just as less-talented-but-well-connected ones ascend to fame, the twentieth century’s decreased attention to aesthetics makes talent less a part of the artist-as-celebrity equation than it used to be. Now it’s more about ideas, which is admirable to an extent – after all, pure aesthetics can only go so far to convey the depth of human experience. But since what people are willing to pay for your work serves as a measure of your worth as an artist, those who somehow manage to make millions of dollars on a few pieces emerge triumphant. Take Jeff Koons, for example, who came to the art world from Wall Street. Armed with knowledge of what an equal parts fabulously wealthy and spectacularly pretentious New York art market might be willing to pay for, he made his artistic debut in the 1970s. (One time, he stuck three basketballs in an aquarium, and another time he set four vacuums on display in a glass case.) His Balloon Animal (Orange) recently sold at Christie’s for $155 million, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold by a living artist. Of course, it can’t even really be called “his” Balloon Animal, as Koons’ process relies entirely on his artistic workshop making every one of his pieces for him.

Kandinsky's Composition VII — Wassily Kandinsky’s *Composition VII*

Koons’ work, as well as other contemporary artists’, raises an important question: is it truly good art, or does its value stem from the good name attached to it? As an English and Art History double major, I’ve become somewhat of a snob by default, and I understand just enough postmodern cultural theory to declare the latter. But my official pronouncement of Bad Art stems out of a respect for all the works I’ve mentioned so far, with no small amount of disdain, as “art” – which at its most basic definition is anything, truly anything, the artist or creator decided to endow with the title. You can’t claim something like Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII isn’t art because your four-year-old niece could do it, chiefly because she didn’t, and she probably wasn’t around to understand the transformative cultural implications of expressionistic art in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Art hasn’t always been perfect – the Old Masters had workshops too, and they didn’t paint every one of their works all by themselves, especially if they were in high demand. Many artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became famous because they were in the right place at the right time, or were lucky enough to have enough money to spend on an extensive Royal Academy training. (Of course, most of these artists also happened to be white men, but redefining the artistic canon is another problem altogether.) Generally, though, the artists we keep coming back to have one thing in common: they set historical precedent. Major players like the Cubists, the Dadaists, the first performance artists, or my favorite Manet, all caused a stir, but a few brave others followed suit and the legitimate movements that we still discuss today were born.

You can’t do that with Spaghetti-Os.

Experimental Literature

nashe16

By Emma Nash

Generally speaking, I favor what’s conventional. I’m the type who prefers paintings be of traditional landscapes, hunting dogs, or horses, and finds that anything more avant-garde than Picasso is best viewed in a museum. Therefore, it can come as little surprise to the reader that I was wary of Experimental Literature when I first began studying it. My initial instinct was to consign Experimental Writing to the same place I had avant-garde artwork. That is, I thought it might be worthwhile for study in academic settings, but had no place in practical or everyday use. Basically, when I thought of “experimental” literature, I pictured gaunt, turtleneck-clad figures lurking in dank coffee shops and jazz clubs, taking drags from quellazaires and cultivating their ennui. I never imagined it could grace the bedside tables of working mothers or the beach bags of vacationing grandfathers. To use an obvious and perhaps extreme comparison, your average suburban family wouldn’t have Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” in its living room.

Of course, my conception of Experimental Literature resulted largely from ignorance of the genre (Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad not only received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2011, but also enjoyed a high degree of commercial success). When I began my capstone course on “Hybrid Texts,” I quickly and happily discovered the wide variety of experimental work that was simultaneously thought provoking and conventionally entertaining.

For example, consider M.K. Asante’s memoir Buck, which includes a free hip-hop soundtrack to accompany the book. The soundtrack adds meaning to Buck’s story, and readers’ experience wouldn’t be the same without it (in an interview with allhiphop.com, Talib Kweli, who partnered with Asante to create the album, noted that it allowed the viewer to enter the world portrayed in Buck). However, the book still stands alone without the accompanying soundtrack, dealing poignantly with difficult issues in a concrete and approachable way, such that the reader need not be an expert on hip-hop to appreciate the story portrayed.

Consider also Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Maus is Spiegelman’s retelling of his father’s memory of the Holocaust. Importantly, it is a comic book, and as such differs vastly from traditional literature. However, unlike what I’d imagined of experimental literature, rather than alienating its audience through excessively cerebral and ostentatious devices, Maus’s form allows greater access to the emotion and horror associated with an impossibly awful story. For instance, Maus depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The metaphor is simple, but the implications are profound: readers better apprehend the helpless fear the Jews felt of the Nazis who hunted them.

Asante and Spiegelman certainly made use of experimental writing in ways that deepen every reader’s understanding of their books. In these instances, experimental writing is helpful to the lay reader. However, what do we do about those pieces of experimental literature that are not immediately accessible to readers, particularly those outside of academic settings? Anne Carson’s Nox is a beautiful and fascinating elegiac remembrance of her older brother Michael, written around the framework of Catullus’ 101, an ancient Latin elegy honoring that poet’s brother. Nox is highly experimental (it’s compiled like a scrapbook, the pages covered in ephemera from the author’s life). Fully understanding Nox requires that the reader have extensive knowledge about the Latin language and the study of Classical languages and culture. What’s more, even a cursory apprehension of the book requires some outside knowledge or research (i.e. knowing that Catullus’ 101 is about the poet’s brother). This kind of book demands that its audience engage with more than just the textual story, and is therefore inaccessible to the casual reader. What’s more, Nox’s sticker price ($30 on Amazon after a price cut from the original $42) might be discouraging to “casual” readers. This being the case, I wonder where Nox belongs. Does it require too much effort to belong in the popular canon? Are there books that belong only in academia? Or is it unfair of us to limit its sphere just because it requires greater engagement on the reader’s part?

These questions raise others: If some books are best studied in academia, what is the cutoff? Is it a spectrum? Is there a point at which a book becomes such a hassle that it no longer counts as entertainment? Is there a point at which innovation becomes so cumbersome as to make it impractical?

What do you think? When does innovation lose its value? Do books like Spiegelman’s Maus belong in the same curriculum as those like Night by Elie Wiesel?

Ivory Kings/ Stern Beauty and a Rich History in Chess

R.T. Smith

When I ordered the erudite Nancy Marie Brown’s Ivory Vikings (St. Martins, 2015), I just meant to scratch little itch, satisfy a whimsical curiosity. Years ago when I was a dedicated chess stumblebum I learned about the Isle of Lewis chessmen and was enchanted by photos of them – severe, dignified, beautiful. When I had the opportunity, a decade ago in Cobh, I purchased a polymer replica of one of the kings from that bag of artifacts and placed it on the desk in my study, so when I recently saw that someone had written a new book about them, I thought it would be more about art and carving than anything else and that I’d get a full explanation of their origins, history and so on. No weighty cultural stuff, you understand. And, by the way, there are many books on these fascinating figures.

After all, what did I know of the far north beyond skalds, Danegold, Showtime’s Ragnar Lothbrok (who was a historical figure), Vineland, scenes from a Kirk Douglas film, bits of eddas, the Penguin version of the Laexdala Saga, broadswords and dragon ships, the majority of it remembered from my readings of Beowulf? I sought a taste and found a feast.

Half an hour into the book I was learning about the walrus ivory trade, amazing raids, Arabian silver, trade and migrations of the Vikings, the history of Scandinavian Christianity as reflected in the game’s evolution, conflicts between the sagas, the nature and legends of the berserkers and much more. Amid the unfamiliar place names, kings’ and saints’ names, multilingual references and etymologies, Brown has used the evolving history of the military, royal and ecclesiastical figures in the Lewis find as a portal to the history of chess and of northern Europe. And though she suggests the story’s big surprise early on, the author gives us plenty to think about before details of the big reveal: the likely carver of most of the pieces was, appropriately, Margret the Adroit. Yes, “Magret,” as in “Margaret.”

Whim is not enough to get one as innocent of Norse culture as I am through a book so dense with the names of fjords, stave churches, major figures like Sigurd Mouth and Gudmund the Good, but Brown’s energetic and precise writing, her own sense of whim and the growing implication of the importance of the details of Viking merchants and their pursuit of silk or the greed of archbishops or the grit of explorers seeking the next big walrus hunting ground . . . well, it’s a hard book to read but equally hard to close. Ivory Vikings sports forty pages of notes, but I could also have used a glossary, more images of the pieces, more extensive genealogies, more detailed maps and timelines to make me feel at home in the braided and jump-cut narrative, which is as clever as it is learned but so rife with the ancient (but to me “new”) information, that its pleasure and labor are seldom quite separate.

Thank goodness Brown writes with panache and a sense of humor about the high seriousness of her larger subject, which is the shaping of modern thought and human ambitions, but I felt a little ambushed near the end when her early assertions about the actual authorship of the late medieval carvings turns out to be just a viable theory. She occasionally winks and nods and hints, but otherwise treats the belief (or wish) that Margret the Adroit made the bishops, kings, queens and rooks as if there were some consensus. I know the mystery is intriguing, and saying we don’t really know the creator’s identity would likely dampen the allure, but though I won’t deny her gambits and tactics, I think her knights should move in conventional and uniform fashion throughout the book. She should say early on that Margret is primarily an appealing candidate whose presence allows for a compelling narrative..

Ivory Vikings has, nonetheless, many wonders to reveal. How can a chess piece be berserk, go berserk, be a berserker? [Berserk is literally “bear shirt.”] Before the rooks were images of towers, they were shield-bearing warriors in byrnies and helms. Bearing their swords, eager for battle glory, many are portrayed as chewing on the rims of their shields. If this seems unlikely, watch football players on the sidelines in their pre-game rage wind-ups. But my description of the pieces is neither as accurate nor as deft as that of NMB the Adroit.

The queens – whether in dismay or despair, grief or calculation – are all portrayed with a hand on the cheek, as if mid-sigh. I think one look at the Lewis Chessmen entry on the images search of Google will send hordes to Amazon for this book, and Ms. Brown’s rigor and panache as a storyteller are up to the task of chronicling a voyage through the book. For accompanying images, however, Google will be useful as a prop.

Just a note on Brown’s style may be useful. She’s witty, fond of extended catalogues and embellishment. It’s tempting to say that her writing is as Romanesque as the ornaments on the Lewis royal pieces’ thrones, the clauses curling like vines and lush foliage, dragonish, elegant as competition knots. But it’s easy to fall into rhythm with them and just enjoy the language . . . until another of those paragraphs with (to the uninitiated) unpronounceable names and places rolls around.

Most people are familiar with Staunton style chess pieces, and quite a few with Renaissance sets reminiscent of Charlemagne’s court, Bergmanesque Gothic and even Civil War sets. Brown never points this out, but the Lewis set is so much richer a trove of historical and cultural implication that to play with such a set must be a different experience from what I’m accustomed to. The non-white pieces would likely have been (back when Bishop Pall commissioned Margret to fashion them, if that’s truly what happened) reddish, madder-stained, and since I’ve often held my polymer replica (similar in size and weight, as well as configuration) of a walrus ivory original king, I’m not sure playing with plastic would be bearable, though a nicely-turned Staunton set still works.

I’ve learned a little of what the pages of Ivory Vikings have to offer (say a shifty opening, a Sicilian defense, a fork) but I’m still playing in the dark, as I read the book only once and quickly. If I don’t find to correct that soon, I expect to be punished, perhaps with the shameful fretsterfermat, a kind of mate, but you’ll have to look that one up on your own.

R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

Tangerines and Grief

R.T. Smith

In the Estonian-Georgian film Tangerines, which I recently viewed on Netflix, the central character Ivo, at an impromptu evening picnic in a near-deserted war-torn village, can think of only Death to toast. His three companions, all deeply scarred by the 1992 conflict – two of them enemies, rescued casualties from a firefight – demur, but Ivo persists, telling the soldiers Ahmed, a Chechen mercenary, and Niko, a Georgian volunteer, that they are the children of Death and its servants. For the past year I have been disheartened and almost willing to raise a glass in that desperately defiant and ironic salute to the grim reaper, but after an hour and a half with Tangerines, I began to feel ashamed of myself.

The last decade has been hard on my friends, and I have counted the afflictions and fatalities, nursing my grief like a private, secret, even prized, possession. I’ve been unable or unwilling to attend memorial ceremonies, keep in contact with families, participate in written tributes. Those who found solace in the sorrow dance suddenly seemed like strangers. The result has been a self-righteous isolation: these public rituals fell so far short of what I believed my profounder-than-thou feelings of loss that participation would seem, I reasoned, like an understatement. My misery didn’t want company, as I didn’t want to overdramatize my sorrow nor to minimize it, so I withdrew from any potential community of mutual solace and bore down, pulled in my outposts, concentrating on daily survival, sequestering when possible with my wife, staring at the TV’s festival of horrors – extreme weather, national and international political sniping and lying, terrorism, insurrection, economic threats. The collective grievances all served to distract me from examining my own grieving inertia, which amounted in the end to misconduct.

Eager to deny that we’re immersed in self-pity, we’re capable of excavating a sanctuary of distraction and numbness, only to discover that it soon becomes a pretty effective grave. We harden, accentuate the practical, minimize the emotional. We soldier on, eyes front. But then, if we’re very lucky, something breaks the trance. In my life the awakening agent has often been the discovery (or rediscovery) of a work of art – film, poem, story, song, painting – and I won’t go so far as to claim that art heals me like some medical prozac panacea, but it speaks to me in that thunderous and irresistible whisper with which the bust of Apollo said to Rilke, “You much change your life.”

Of course, timing is crucial. Back before Christmas, I would have kept my mind too distracted to really engage with Tangerines, and even last week I probably wouldn’t have been quite ripe for a face-to-face encounter with Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to help me start rescuing myself, but Tangerines (Mandarinebi in Estonian) came as a surprise and provided just the summons I needed. I suspect I was not alone. After all, the film received, I’ve discovered, nominations for best foreign language film in both the Golden Globes and Academy Awards last year. . . though on second thought, those may be suspect credentials. Fortunately, I often find the decentering element of foreign films can bring from the periphery some topic or imagery that I can see with my direct gaze clearly for the first time. Maybe it’s the subtitles, but I suspect it’s more a matter of non-American filmmakers being not so inclined to “entertain,” to both exploit and encourage our shallowness. They demand more.

I don’t want to tell too much about this film. Its story is an old one, its trajectory nearly guessable, but what follows is just a hint at how the small story of four men working out their salvation with diligence plays against the backdrop of the “large” stories of war, sectarian hostility, displacement, harvest.

In Zaza Urushadze’s film (his as writer, director, producer), the grandfatherly Ivo and the younger Margus remain in their evacuated village to bring in the precious tangerine harvest, despite war’s rapid approach. Ivo makes crates, his friend picks fruit, the landscape teems and shimmers – with both sea and mountains close, the forest deep and the sky deeper. The setting is vital in all senses, and the men robust, disciplined, dedicated to their task, stoically good-natured, given the circumstances. But the savagery falls upon them, and soon they witness a firefight and rescue a pair or survivors, whom they nurse as the two sworn enemies taunt each other, threaten and engage in vitriolic dispute. I’m paring this down in an embarrassing way, but I don’t want to interfere with readerss chances to see the film afresh.

It’s an old story: each combatant slowly and perilously begins to recognize the other’s humanity, and as they do, their allegiances, losses and griefs are revealed, along with those of Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak) and Margus (Elmo Nuganen). The Chechen mercenary Ahmed and the Georgian volunteer Niko begin to shed their prejudices and indoctrination. (There’s an old Twilight Zone episode, “Two,” along this line with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery, and such stories usually begin with the “last two standing” premise, as does the song “Wooden Ships” or Hardy’s “The Man He Killed”). Empathizing as they learn to share their sorrows, they assist their hosts with the work around the farm and promise to assist with the harvest. To watch them guardedly gravitate towards one another is to be reminded of Faulkner’s “human heart in conflict with itself.”

You don’t want to be told how the inhumane obstacles arise, as that would spoil the dramatic tension, but before they do, much is exchanged among fatalist, Christian and Muslim – questions of mortality and duty, fathers and sons, harvests accomplished and harvests thwarted, honor and fairness. The rough bucolics provide a powerful backdrop which helps to keep sentimentality at bay; the wounds are all deep, the treatments severe, the dialogue authentic. Perhaps the hardest element of the narrative to embrace is: of the four survivors holed up in this front line village, all four are actually good men, but none a duplicate of the other. I wish I could believe in that ratio as representative. As the story develops, the men’s plans and needs twist together like the vines of a wisteria, braiding strength. Soon they are engaged in word and communion, at war with the war, but the story, the time, requires sacrifice in order that disaster be averted.

At the end, the titles rolled, as did the landscape and plangent music, and I pondered the cost to each of those men to understand and express his own dreams and miseries. Dire circumstances and the guidance of the sardonic Ivo brought them out of the solipsistic (or numbed) refraction of their feelings and into a vital relationship with their pasts, their destinies and their companions.

The acting was moving, the script running from grim to wry to droll. An allegory, perhaps, with its journeys and meetings, its dark night of the soul and the inexorable silent progress of the citrus crop – ripe for picking but with only a brief window of opportunity.

From start to finish, I saw actors portraying the kind of man I had forgotten how to strive to be – resourceful, stoic but sympathetic, receptive and centered and generous. Art had done its job again; a made-up but believable story had nurtured and stimulated me and said, “try harder; you have that responsibility.” The influence of Tangerines has lasted for days, and I hope it will continue to do so, but I’m sure I’ll eventually need another fix, which I can’t get from buying a rapid-fire weapon, nor from cursing and threatening a whole culture or a band of sojourners or a gender, not even from being rude or dismissive. Tangerines won’t banish pettiness or melodrama any more than “Mending Wall,” A Hundred Years of Solitude or “Trois Gymnopedies” will, and I continue to need booster shots, but I remember now where to seek them, and it will not be in a toast to death.

Tangerines reminds me that I owe a debt to what has been and what will be to shake off my sense of defeat, understand my losses and weave the grief tightly into my personal tapestry of human strength and vulnerability. I must change my life.