Ontogeny Recapitulating

This drawing is the third part of a series. Go back a couple of posts, skipping the sculptor’s studio one and you’ll see the connections. The crouching man is here again. The technologies are too. There are smart phones in all the three pix. As are other emblems of consumerism; the roasting credit card, the leaking Montblanc 149 and a lamp that could only be purchased at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shop.

PART I. ‘NO RELIGION, TOO’

The theory that the Paleolithic cave paintings are anonymous juvenilia, just ‘really’ old school graffiti, makes sense. Yes, they are wishful iconography, but they are that of a self-centered adolescent not that of an adult member of a society. Social icons, those prayed to for a good hunt, food for all, etc,  would require a social hierarchy. And with that would come this; a select few people at the top are free to exercise their Luxuria (greed and lust shown) while the majority of folks are only able to wish to do so. The former infect the latter with their guilt and then create a profitable church/fetish/product as its cure.

PART II. ‘CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION’

On to middle age, The Middle Ages. Here, as well as now, we are marching back to a feudal economy. Petty fiefdoms, a.k.a. corporations, that can require our participation in their crusades for wealth and glory run the world. Meaningless freedom, but no democracy –if there ever was such a thing– remains. Art hides from view, from ridicule, from theft. A new ‘high’ way has been built and the old glue has failed. The above mentioned wishful iconography has regressed to transitional objectivity.

PART III. ‘I LOVE YOU…ME NEITHER’

Speaking of regression, let’s go back to a cave, but a human-made one this time, a hotel room. The smart phone, that was the fire, is now doubled as hot couplers; the debit card is thereby consumed. The artist is still there but he’s not the youth of Part I, scratching a hopeful icon; nor is he the Sisyphean wage slave of Part II.  He’s now an invert Pygmalion, he’s become furniture, irrelevant old technology.

Then there is the “Art.” The artist’s opposite number is a lamp statuette which is a good copy of an 3rd cent. A.D. terra cotta Isis-Aphrodite. Check her out on the Met’s site. The over-the-bed decoration is a cheap litho copy of Titian’s 1538 ‘Venus of Urbino.’ And the lo-res image on one of the lovers’ “face” is of Picasso’s 1937 portrait of of his lover, Dora Maar.  Why these illuminations? Well, they are all IMHO created from life. In each, two real people stood/sat/lounged face to face as the art object was being created.

The Isis-Aphrodite is a Part I-like wishful icon. We can’t know who was the model/muse for it, but she was obviously a real person. The Venus, too, is from life, she was perhaps the patron’s wife. If so, she was Part II-like, no longer a passive model for an image of an ideal. She, by becoming a model/mate, has created a lucrative career for herself. Ms. Maar was, for sure, a real person. She played both of the above roles, a “private muse” and renaissance-style wife. But she was, unlike the Isis or Venus models, an artist in her own right.

But why in this hotel room as meta-studio in spite of the technological distractions (the copulating smart phones) and aesthetic obfuscations (art reproduced lo-res as print, lamp, and screen saver) does the hardened artist attempt a self-revival from his Galatean shell?  Why, in spite of his ‘shelved’ status, does the artist yank the chain and give it another go?

Imaginary Progress

The drawing is divided in two by the concrete barrier. The characters above the line are like those in William Hogarth’s (1697-1764) several ‘Progresses.’ They are in his words; ‘Modern Moral Subjects.’ In mine; allegories of Work and Love. Look below the line to see a take on ‘Carceri d’Invenzione’ by Giovanni Piranesi (1720- 1778.)

Hogarth first. He was an artist who also wrote on Aesthetics said that observing a subtle–neither too round nor angular–curve of a ‘serpentine’ line in an art object ‘lead the eye on a wanton cha[s]e’ as exciting as gazing at real curves in real life. And that for the artist the drawing, cutting or brushing of those lines was as good as a real-life caress.

The making OF the art was to him more sensual than the sexual antics portrayed IN the art, with none of the social or venereal consequences therein displayed. So in a way, he –the artist– was isolating himself, like here, where Work and Love are on one side of the barrier and Art is on the other.

But Work and Love are no longer his motley parade of 18th century fashions, they are a march of uniforms. They are still like then made manifest as others, separate from Art. They are still composed of lines; but not of the desirable serpentine perfection. The Works’ lines are too pointy and linear, they thrust weapon-like. And the lines of the Loves are too curvy, they curl and tighten knot-like. Work stabs Love, Love strangles Work.

On to Piranesi,. A visit to his ‘Invented Prisons’ is described by Thomas De Quincey thusly, “Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him.”

In this drawing’s invented prison, below work and love’s highway, there is no wall to creep along but there’s a billboard to grope. There are no stairs but there is a ladder. It, too, is perceived as coming to ‘a sudden abrupt termination’ below the advertisement at a narrow and flimsy laborer’s deck which is also ‘without any balustrade.’

The personified Work and Love are shown arm in arm, but they are out of arm’s reach for Art personified below the barrier. In the old days Art had copied their images for himself on the now ill-placed billboard, when he could see them from the old road which is now buried by the viaducts.

Art has now invented a new image with him in Work’s place. The pun[n]y metaphor for that inventing is to pull a biting print from bitten copper plate. Both Hogarth and Piranesi were commercial engravers so the metaphor is apt, clever even. But the pull, as a futile attempt to reverse the isolation, has failed; the unseen image remains a private comfort against the cold of the coming night.