Notes from the Playground

Foreword Philippe Vergne

One of Us

If I were to tell you the story of a man who fell off a kayak in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, minutes before he set his friend’s cabin on fire, with his own belongings in the middle of it all, you might plausibly think that I was overly elaborating on some incidents in this man’s life. This is too much of a Keatonesque or Coen Brothers–like series of events. Or, you might tell me that I have spent too much time with Richard Prince’s joke:

Fireman pulling drunk out of a burning bed: You darned fool, that’ll teach you to smoke in bed.

Drunk: I wasn’t smoking in bed, it was on fire when I laid down.

Thankfully for my friend, the lake was not on fire … but thankfully for the story, the rest is all true.

Life, at times, can be better than fiction, if your attitude toward life is aimed at crystallizing, in a Stendhalian move, the beauty, the serendipity, the horror, the conflicts, the elegy of your everyday stumbles. It is a fair and charming paradox that my friend who fell into the open waters is named Richard Flood. Mr. Flood survived both the water and the fire and lived to tell the story; he lived to share many stories.

When not swimming toward a fire, Mr. Flood is known for his peculiarities. He hates adjectives and is the inventor of the word “gravitas.” He invented a time zone named Fooly Time—a no-man’s-time in a work day that unleashed irrational streams of consciousness informed by bad television, the fashion police, word play, and salon jousts.

Peter Hujar, Paul Thek ii , 1975

Vintage gelatin silver print, 40.6 × 50.8 cm (16 × 20 in.)

Paul Thek: Real Misunderstanding

Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts … it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; “eternal values,” “immortality” and “masterpiece” were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.

ingmar bergman 1

In the context of mainstream American art, Paul Thek is an outsider. Except for three years in the late 1960s, his work has, almost exclusively, been created and chronicled in Europe. While he is well represented abroad, not one painting or sculpture by him has found a home in an American public collection. One can speculate endlessly as to why Thek has been so ignored in his own country. The adamant secularism of contemporary American art has certainly not helped to advance an artist so deeply responsive to Catholicism, scholasticism, current events, folk ritual, legend, and literature in his creative expression. But the simplest reason for his exclusion may well be expressed by a qualified saw from that most irascible of American thinkers, H. L. Mencken: “It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume

So, in a way Wagner’s head did finally come to Kassel. Instead of the original plan, it was brought by Nitsch, Beuys, and Syberberg. And as was originally feared, it provided an uncomfortable moment. It would be convenient to see Wagner’s legacy as belonging only to a specific time and place. But that’s wrong. It belongs to the West and he is all of ours. Our artists, Nitsch and Beuys and Syberberg, also refuse to fit gracefully into a structure. Their projects not only encourage followers, they demand them—that is the point. Without followers, they would simply have an audience and the world that they want would be left as an idea. Like Wagner, their aesthetic requires first reevaluation, then appreciation. Their effect, or potential effect, is what elevates their art to life—to our lives, to our collective society, which is no less exhausted than the one that longed to cry out “Brother … master” to Wagner when he took his bows at Bayreuth.

Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982): 68–70.

Sugar and Vice and …

Balthus: A Retrospective

I saw the polka dots dancing, so to speak, on the ruffled jumpers of the two smaller girls seated side by side in the warm grass and holding hands, blowing chubby laughter in my direction as if they had never seen me before. And the peace, the warmth, the stasis, the smell of it—in such circumstances how could I help but enjoy my own immensity of size or the range of my interests, how help but appreciate the adaptability of certain natural scenes which, like this one, allow for the play of children one minute and the seclusion of adults the next? I felt a coolness between my porous thin white shirt and the skin of my chest. In linen slacks and alligator belt and hard low-cut shoes the color of amber, I sensed the consciousness of someone carefully dressed for taking care of children.

john hawkes, the blood oranges

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installation of Balthus began with The Window (1933), in which a young model—her blouse ripped back to expose one breast, her hand raised to ward off something melodramatic—teeters precariously toward an open window. The emotional mood of the painting is unattractively underscored in Sabine Rewald’s catalogue comments concerning its genesis:

When the young model Elsa Henriquez first arrived at Balthus’s studio in the Rue de Furstenberg, he opened the door dressed in his old army uniform, a dagger in his hand and a scowl on his face. He grabbed her blouse and tried to pull it open. Elsa recoiled in horror,

Sugar and Vice and … Balthus: A Retrospective

young child … was longing to hack off those cheeks with a razor and would have done so often had not the idea of Justice and her long cortège of punishments restrained him on every occasion.”5 (Every occasion, that is, except The Guitar Lesson.) Clearly Balthus strains toward the dark, self-conscious surrealism of Lautréamont and its “sweet atmosphere” of evil. Still, for all his efforting, he emerges as a poseur caught in an onanistic web of artifice. In the end, a drop of semen on a silk handkerchief is not really the stuff of great art.

Artforum 22, no. 1 (June 1984): 84–85.

Cumulus from America

She stands on a river of prayer rugs. At her feet, a filigreed brazier purrs its fumes into the envelope of fabric that she holds above her head. Her face, with kohl-smeared eyes and pouty crescent mouth, is softfocus in shadow. Her naked arms rise from cascading sleeves to tenderly support the fabric that snares the incense. Her gown is a languid series of hieratic transitions, rippling from wimple to bib to paneled alb. Her only adornment—a manta-shaped silver clasp—slithers across her bosom toward her shoulder. The room in which she stands is almost coagulent with milky light. Its one architectural detail—a simple column that turns into a horizontally fluted arch—could just as easily evoke Wilhelm von Gloeden’s Taormina as Ingres’s Morocco. Suffice to say, the indolent artificial ambiance of it all is staggering. The woman, the gown, the room—all are elements in John Singer Sargent’s Fumée d’Ambre Gris (1880), which resides in the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is, in fact, one of twelve Sargent paintings in the Institute’s collection. And, to be fair, not one of the best in a selection that includes such wonderful representative portraits as Mademoiselle Jourdain (1889) and that of Sargent’s teacher Carolus Duran (1879). However, in Fumée, Sargent’s staggering addiction to soigné chic reaches some kind of awful (old sense of the word) apogee. It would take no suspension of disbelief to move this Pasoliniesque Arabian Nights tableau onto a couturier’s runway. (Claude Montana would be a perfect interpreter.) This is fantasy as fashion as art, and its aesthetic is highly debatable. But—and the qualification is enormous—Fumée is a beautiful painting.

Jean Brooks as “Jacqueline Gibson” in The Seventh Victim (1943) Film still

The Dog and the Suicide

On the boat to St. Sebastian, Betsy is interrupted in her contemplation of the ocean by Paul’s Byronic musing. He tells her that the sea only seems beautiful because she does not understand it; that the flying fish are not leaping for joy but in terror, escaping their predators; that the glittering water “takes its gleam from millions of tiny bodies. It’s the glitter of putrescence. There’s no beauty here—only death and decay.”

I like lots and lots of atmosphere and I like it damp. I’m talking about the kind of atmosphere that permeates floorboards, curls up pant legs, chills spines, and laces undulant tentacles around the brain. It’s that ferocious Brontëan rot that got hold of Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester. It’s the terrible percussion that danced Richard Strauss’s Salome and Alban Berg’s Lulu over the edge of the abyss. It can’t be reasoned with, and once it’s taken hold, it can’t be shaken off.

My favorite master of atmosphere is Val Lewton, who, between 1942 and 1946, produced nine indelibly corrosive films. All were shot on a shoestring in two months or less by RKO Studio’s cheapie unit and rushed into release. Lewton worked with three directors (Mark Robson, Jacques Tourneur, and Robert Wise), each of whom had his own distinct stylistic demeanor, but all of whom served Lewton’s overwhelming unity of vision.

Superficially, Lewton made horror movies; intrinsically, they were meditations on death—always death. One of the producer’s tenderest critics, Manny Farber, quite accurately described Lewton’s special gift:

joel e. siegel on val lewton’s i walked with a zombie 1

On the shore stands a girl with a video camera; it is aimed at the young keeper in the bloody flannels standing on the deck of the listing hms Thatcher. Silently she mouths the word “brother” and smiles.

Brilliant! New Art from London, ed. Richard Flood (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1995), 48–55.

Slow. Fade.

I met Paul Thek in 1977 while he was installing Processions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Watching him madly attempting to create his kind of something out of a plenitude of other people’s nothing was like stumbling on Hamlet directing the play within the play. Wrenching a cathartically redemptive environment out of the sterile, ungiving architecture of the ica space perfectly suited Paul’s psychodramatic persona. The first time I encountered him he was flailing around the gallery plaintively crying out for stuffed birds, which he wanted to hang from the ceiling. Components of the installation were pouring in all around him—bales of newspapers, oars, a bathtub, tons of sand, park benches—but he was missing birds and that was all he could think about. He was also working, essentially, alone. At the time, I didn’t understand how different it was for him to be lacking the theater of collaboration. In Europe, he had put together a carnival of players whose contributions melded into his own and catalyzed the whole (rather like what Julian Beck and Judith Malina were doing with the Living Theater); in Philadelphia, there were certainly plenty of ica -supplied assistants, but they were not collaborators and he knew it, and, by the time I arrived, they knew it.

I was naïvely enraptured by Paul’s temperament and eagerly jumped at an invitation to have dinner with him and the director of the ica , Suzanne Delehanty. Too quickly, it emerged that all three of us were raised as Roman Catholics, and I remember clinging to that odd unity of past history as an increasingly rocky evening progressed. Suzanne’s religion was still in place; mine was long gone. Paul’s

Frances McDormand as “Marge Gunderson” in Fargo (1996) Film still

Minnesota Nice: Fargo

I’ve been thinking about the Joel and Ethan Coen movie Fargo (1996). I’ve been trying to figure out why it left me elated and flattened all at once. A big part of my mixed reaction is due, I’m convinced, to the film’s setting in the state on Minnesota (with a preface and afterword in North Dakota). I happen to have recently moved to Minnesota [in 1994], and I went to see Fargo with all the anticipation of the newly baptized to their first church meeting. Before Minnesota, I’d lived on the East Coast, and trust me, nothing on the East Coast can in any way prepare you for what is west of it. The Minnesota I’d been creating for myself since my arrival was necessarily more exotic than prosaic. I really wasn’t interested in how it conformed to what I knew, only how it differed.

The key to the difference was the Mississippi River, legendary divider of America’s East and West. The epic grain elevators that flank its shoreline give the place a purpose that is mythic—feeding America. Here was where the harvest of the Great Plains was distributed so that a nation would never go hungry. A couple of car rides later, the grain silos were joined by the ore docks, which spread up along the shore of Lake Superior from Duluth. Unlike the wholesome volumetrics of the concrete elevators, the ore docks are spidery and sinister. Railroad tracks feed down to the lake from the Iron Range and disappear behind chain-link fencing through jumbles of smoking outbuildings and onto silhouetted trestles where the ore is loaded onto waiting tankers. For me, ore is almost better than grain—more brutal, bigger businesses and bigger bastards running them. Also the names of the

Casa Malaparte by architect Adalberto Libera, Capri, Italy

Curzio Malaparte: Casa Malaparte, 1938

When it came to writing, Curzio Malaparte was a man on fire. He was a journalist and an essayist, a novelist and a playwright. When it came to politics, Malaparte was a human weather vane. He was a republican, a nationalist, a fascist, and a communist. While he was dying of cancer in 1957, Malaparte turned the Roman clinic where he was undergoing treatment into the set of a postwar opera buffa. Lying in state, he was paid homage by the most notable of his countrymen, joined the Communist Party, converted to Catholicism, and then, totally synchronized with the prevailing power structure, expired. The fifty-nine-year-old writer left behind a literary legacy that, in its opportunistic relationship to historical “necessity,” mirrored nothing less than the convulsive contractions that led to the birth of modern Italy.

If there was one constant in the contradictory trajectory of Malaparte’s life, it was his fidelity to a dream he embraced in 1938. The topic of his fantasy was nothing remarkable—a retreat where he could pursue his writing without distraction. The location was, however, the stuff of legend. Malaparte fell in love with a rocky peninsula called Capo Massullo on the coast of Capri. Barely 100 feet long by 30 feet wide, bounded on three sides by cliffs plummeting 650 feet into the Mediterranean Sea, Capo Massullo is a tapered finger sticking out into an eternity of blue. In Curzio Malaparte, Capo Massullo found both a lover and a colonizer.

The house Malaparte dreamed into being is arguably the century’s most eloquent marriage of landscape and architecture. Initially, Malaparte consulted with Roman architect Adalberto Libera, but the final

Renée Jeanne Falconetti as “Joan” in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) Film still

Voodoo Auteurism:

Film Stills and Photography

Larry Johnson’s suite of six photographs Untitled (Movie Stars on Clouds) (1983) imagines identical, sweetly elegiac credit sequences for two of Hollywood’s most fatally iconic films, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Misfits (1961). On fluffy white clouds adrift over Technicolor blue skies, Johnson simply imposes the names of the stars in each of the films: James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood signify Rebel Without a Cause, and Montgomery Clift, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe signify The Misfits. The series is arguably the most effective double entendre about the promise and the lie of cinematic immortality in contemporary art. (Only Andy Warhol’s faux-innocent silkscreens of movie stars occupy similar territory.) Dean died in a car crash, Mineo was stabbed to death, and Wood died by drowning—all violently fatal baptisms into legend. As for Gable and Monroe, The Misfits was their last film; Clift lingered on with increasingly apparent disabilities for three more.

While the cast of Rebel remains pretty much frozen in amber and emblematic of glittering youth, the stars of The Misfits are more like touchstones for the cruelty of illusion: all three had stayed much too long at the fair and the film shows each of them in an almost documentary state of naked disintegration. In Johnson’s photographs, it is assumed that we know the names and, more important, can supply the faces as well as an emotional tenor to those names. He further assumes that we carry within us those signifying freeze-frames that confirm the emotional weight of who these people were, that we invest in the myth of artifice that is the cinema’s greatest allure.

Gene Evans as “Sergeant Zack” in The Steel Helmet (1951) Film still (detail)

Reel Crank: On Manny Farber’s Negative Space

Manny Farber is the Raymond Chandler of American film criticism. His adrenaline prose has been pumping since 1942, when he began reviewing for the New Republic. Over the succeeding four decades, he kept his writing lean and mean, florid and furious, absolutely unique. He reviewed for Time, the Nation, the New Leader, Artforum, and a parcel of other publications. In the late 1970s his successful career as a painter increasingly took center stage, and film gradually lost an important, always surprising apologist.

I first learned of Farber’s criticism about twenty years ago, at the height of my enthusiasm for the films of the B-movie producer Val Lewton, who assembled a kind of atelier for writers, directors, cameramen, and actors to churn out low-budget horror movies of extraordinary beauty and, time permitting, intelligence (including The Seventh Victim, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Curse of the Cat People). A friend gave me a copy of the 1971 edition of Farber’s Negative Space, a collection of his reviews that contains a brief obituary consideration of Lewton, written in 1951 for the Nation, and I became an instant convert, as much to the energy of the writing as to the writer’s opinions, which were singularly cantankerous. At the time, I was so thrilled to have encountered someone else’s thinking about Lewton that I didn’t notice just how elegantly parsimonious Farber was in his postmortem critique, which, typically, leads with a vice to identify a virtue. He cut to the core of Lewton’s methodology, observing that the producer “hid much more of his story than any other filmmaker, and forced his crew to create drama almost abstractly with symbolic sounds, textures, and