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?

]]> http://ehjohnson3.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/ontogeny-recapitulating/feed/ 2 ehjohnson3 future2 thepast2 part2-present http://ehjohnson3.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/imaginary-progress/ http://ehjohnson3.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/imaginary-progress/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:25:53 +0000 howard johnson http://ehjohnson3.wordpress.com/?p=1466 ]]> 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.

In one poem Robert Graves’ Pygmalion has his creation made human, not by pleading for Aphrodite’s kindness, but “by [his] greed enchanted.” But soon enough Galatea’s greed kicks in too, after all she’s now human as well. Her many wanna-be lovers; “…schools of eager connoisseurs beset / Her single person with perennial suit …” however, to Pygmalion’s dismay, the lovers will praise and use his creation for their desires  “…Of themes that crowned her own, not his repute.”

In another poem, I think, Graves has the statue patiently listening to the sculptor’s lengthy wish list for her and his pledges in response. She, with a sigh, she agrees to the terms, “Pygmalion, as you woke me from the stone, / So shall I you from bonds of sullen flesh./ Lovely I am, merciful I shall prove…” But later Graves drops –perhaps because of the sigh– that hesitant acquiescence, admitting by that erasure, perhaps from experience, knowledge of its deceit. Unlike with Ovid’s ‘happy’ ending, this poet’s artist’s pleadings now go unanswered. Will this Pygmalion, sadder but wiser, move on? You’d have had to asked Graves.

H.D., too, wrote of artist’s pleadings in her “Pygmalion.” She has him ask if he can use art as therapy? “[S]hall I let myself be broken / in my own heat, / or shall I cleft the rock as of old  /and break my own fire / with its surface?” He also asks if he’s talented or just lucky? “Have I made this / fire from myself, / or is this arrogance / is this fire a god / that seeks me in the dark ? The statue says no to the latter, it replies, “you are useless, / no marble can bind me, / no stone suggest.” The poet then has Pygmalion answer the former himself , “They have gone, / what agony can express my grief? / Each from his marble base / has stepped into the light / and my work is for naught.”

And so on to the drawing. The Art/Arbeit/Amour (art/work/love) characters are all here again, twice even. Once again they show the sadness, the silliness, the futility of an artist trying to link up art with either work or love. The trio are first in the allegorical sculpture, a menage a troi in stone, where a woman is being carved as “Amour” lifting her dress, equating love with sex. She, as well, promotes the artist’s fantasy of work equated with love–allow me a pun on Graves” “suit”–  by pushing “Arbeit’s” money-spurting sleeve toward the laboring “Art”-ist. Thank whom or whatever that I’m not a Freudian.

I repeat the threesome, in the flesh this time, as artist and models. Yes, I know they are nor really real or in the flesh –I don’t draw from life, —  they are just another set of my drawings of people from memory (or mirror) not from life. but I’ll assume that you’ve seen real people like them as you inhabit the same world I do, whether you perceive them as I do is another story. One is the annoyingly recurrent self-portrait and the other two are hired bodies who’ll pretend to be metaphors.

The word “model” has two meanings, here. An artists model is a real human and the artist used he or she to create something imaginary. A philosopher or scientist’s model is imaginary and either would use it to understand something real. Do these contrary, incompatible meanings render the word useless? Not exactly, as create and understand aren’t opposites, but close enough because the directions from real to imaginary and imaginary to real are.

Context is everything. The woman/model is no longer in a pose. She’s clocked out as the artist’s fantasy “Amour.” she’s turned time backwards She reclaimed herself from the artists possessing gaze, she’s not like H.D.’s nor Graves’ quickened statue and never was, except for the time of her posing and only then in the sad and silly artists mind. The suit, the model for “Arbeit” is still in character, still a metaphor, were he not we’d see his grinning face and other indications of lustful anticipation. Give him a minute and the couple will be out the door.

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” ― Thomas Merton

If you say so, Tom. In this studio scene, himself alone is all that another “by greed enchanted” artist can find. All he loses is “Amour”  and “Arbeit.” He thought/felt if he could find himself in “Art,” he could find either, in both of them in it. He knows better now; art is art, nothing more. That’s good enough though, it has to be.

I’m not some kind of Paleolithic animist. i don’t think that there are demons out there trying to mess with me. don’t need no stinkin’ demons, there are enough real people are doing that. so here consumerism burns wealth; a smart phone roasts a debit card. and by that light hunters and gatherers, hunt and gather. in a deeper part of the cave the artist has made some art, with stone age (20th century, really) tools; with pen and wine by an incandescent bulb.

Some say back then, that the artist worked isolated and alone to assure a good hunt and successful gatherings by his ad hoc icons. but he was still part of the team. others give it a more shamanistic, solitary turn, saying that his going to the dark, dangerous part of the cave is more important than the drawing left there unseen. the art more tagging than iconography; the gesture more of sacrifice than of camaraderie.

For Peircian icons similarity is identity, and for X-ian icons St. Basil the Great said “The honor shown the image passes over to the archetype.” an animist society could think that having a well-done drawing of a beast would lead to having one in their larder. therefore iconographers would have been well thought of.

The shaman-artist would return –if he survived– to the bright, safe part of the cave where his insights were listened to and acted on. he’d get a share of the bounty as compensation for his trouble. sure ain’t happening that way here, the hunters and gatherers are too busy acting on their own urges. were shamans’ visions respected back then or were they thought of as schizophrenic hallucinations as there are now? perhaps.

Then there is R. Dale Guthrie who says –i think, i’ve only read summaries and reviews of his $45 book– the artists back then were just kids. but everyone a kid was then, nobody lived long. they made art for whatever reasons artist do today; they made art of what they saw and what concerned them. being teenagers that was wild animals, wild sex, wild behavior in general. it’s a reasonable hypothesis.

This drawing mixes all that, the real upper paleolithic times and a modern artist’s youth. the other 2 drawings –knock on wood, i get to them– are of that now, far from young youth’s  present and future epochs.  here he’s drawn what he’s seen, what concerned him. he’s made a icon of the hunter and gatherer otherwise occupied, though he’s now more careful what he wishes for.  He hopes the shaman-artist combo is crap too, as his visions depress him.

1. EKPHRASES

The stage is the ‘set’ from Velasquez’s mid-17th cent. painting originally called ‘The Myth of Arachne’ where there are three separate yet linked worlds. In the foreground world, there are 5 working class women and in the middle world behind them, there are 2 leisure class women while in the third world, the tapestry beyond them, the eponymous myth plays out.

This drawing turns the working women into working men, the women’s workshop into a men’s assembly line. One of the baroque celebutantes is now a male manager who no longer contemplates a myth in art, but greedily stares at, clutches one of his mass-produced cycladic-like idols. The other ‘lady’ has become another product/possession, she’s his ‘eye doll,’ his mistress, who has the same proportions and pose as the product.

Please don’t take me for a sexist, I know women workers are as oppressed as men. Double click this small drawing  to see the womanly variation same size as the men’s. The guy version was the first drawn, only when it was almost finished did I think I should make a female one, sorry about that.

So what’s different about the second one? The manager is now a woman and the mistress has become a boy-toy, assistant, whatever. The figurines are male of a sort never found in the Cyclades. The women workers are aging better than the men too.

2. AGES OF ‘MAN’

Look at the three male wage slaves. rightmost we have 20-something dude. He’s strong and happy. Why shouldn’t he be? He still gets to draw. The middle aged man in the center, bald and pot-bellied, he works a skilled but artless trade. The old man on the left just cleans the things up, a monkey could do his job.

The youngest of the trio seamlessly mixes art, work and social worlds; he’s got a smart phone and a glass of wine and/or paint. The middle guy’s glass has been emptied and spilled, his existence is work, work, work. He’s got no life, and no art, still he keeps busy. He has to. The old man is tired and wounded, having stepped on the now broken glass; he sees art –not that it’s his art or art at all any more– slipping out of his reach.

The women workers do age but the are not as ‘decline and fall’ as the men. All three ages remain attractive and content. The youngest is young and strong like her male counterpart; she too has a smart phone and she effortlessly mixes art, work and life. Ms. Middle Age appears to still see some art in her craft. And even the most mature of the trio, unlike her geezer counterpart, seems almost happy that the work–artless now that it is–  is slipping away. Her gesture is less a weary polish and more a wave good bye.

3. ARBITRAGE

In the Velasquez, the three world all connected. the physical tapestry made by hand is one and the same with the myth made by mind, The painting has more recently been called ‘Las Hilanderas’ or ‘The Spinners.’ This double titling confirms the connection by naming it after both the background and the foreground. And the scene in the middle also serves to connect as one of the pair of ladies looks back at the tapestry and the other looks out at the spinners. And a spinner returns the gaze.

In my drawings there is no such connection. the foreground and the background are quite separate. The originals steps between palace and shop were brightly lit and there is a musician, a craftsperson but in the palace, as another link. In mine the empty steps between management and worker are a DMZ. No one in the palace looks at the factory no one in the factory looks at the palace

The object loses its art-ness as it proceeds on the assembly line. It declines from a inspired drawing to a careless carving to a mass-produced thing.  As opposed to tapestry making which become more art-like in each step of its production. By the time the ‘eye doll’ gets to the palace, it is mere product, a symbol, absolutely equivalent to cash, absolutely artless. The Spanish lady looks at the tapestry as art, but the American managers look the idol as profit.

  ‘… Between the mind that plans and the hands that build there must be a Mediator, and this must be the heart.’ – Maria Metropolis, again.

 I. The Lizards[2]

A symbol is one  kind of sign. The chieftain sees the painting and the consort as symbols. Symbols are equivalencies by convention, they have no value in isolation, they only worth what the particular social troop declares them to be[3]. Art as symbol or a consort as a symbol are currencies, not different from money.

Icons are something else, they are signifiers that relate to their signifieds by resemblance. The chieftain (varanus carnificina) appears to see the art as an icon[4]. He fondles the painting because it resembles his consort (varanus uxorera quisquis). It does resemble, but it is not identical to, her. In the painting he sees her as a muse, guiding him, he likes that. But in the reality of the gallery she’s not a muse, but a mistress, groping for his wallet. This he doesn’t see.

The consort is not interested in the simply too-human appreciation of icons. She doesn’t participate in his unfounded and dangerous fantasy. The chieftain, like art are simply currencies to her,  they are just money in a different form. And as possessing money makes one wealthy and powerful so does owning art and mistressing chieftains.

II. The Dogs

In the painting in the drawing, we have a scene in a snooty park in a fancy neighborhood. A chieftain and his consort are enjoying their evening stroll. It’s a symbolic and iconic demonstration that all they survey, is under their control.

Now look at the dogs, long ago they were protectors, now they are pets. The statue is both an icon and symbol as it resembles a conventional mythic savior, a protector of the people[5]. see the arms and hair of a woman (signifying the people) behind the dog. the dog-hero statue is wielding a pen as a sword, another icon/symbol, public executing a pest[6]. the chieftain claims some of his power via a false canis lineage. Here image as symbol fails and but as icon survives. We all see the chieftain’s heritage as clearly varanus. Not that he notices or cares, because second pen is a useless stick, fetched by a dog-pet as a symbol of servitude, a pointless exercise unquestionably done at the whim of the chieftain or consort.

 III. The Artist

 A third pen is in the border of the drawing. Pen is also a word for an enclosure for animals. Both make boundaries, lines. So, with both meanings in mind, The artist adds limits as he draws. We, looking at his work, begin at it’s center, in a public space, the park in the painting. We’ll then skip over, looking but not touching while we do, the exclusive varanus-only gallery. Finally we’ll stop at the outer edge, the most private part, which is a journal, limited to the artist himself. The pens enclose/align the artist with both dogs, but separate him from the varanus types. Is the artist servant, or savior? Or neither, is he a useless, ignored, an insignificant other?

Notes:

1–Tribes of early hunters and gatherers, ruled by chieftains became kingdoms, then became empires. Those chieftains became kings then emperors. The kingdoms and the empires rose, morphed and fell, but petty chieftains have survived to this day.

2– the couple were originally rats, but thinking better of rats, I made them monitor lizards ‘Varanus’ is the monitor lizard genus. ‘Carnificina’ means the work of a hangman, execution /torture. ‘Uxorera quisquis’ mean wife-mistress, whatever.

Monitors are amazingly humanlike. They are active and hostile animals, about the same size as us. They hold their heads erect to appear alert. ‘They intimidate others by hissing and modifying their bodies to appear larger than they are. They don’t listen well, nor do they have good vision.

Monitors only cooperate when the have to, e.g. mating, or killing. So it’s odd that neither of those activities are really must-dos for them. As for the first, monitors paradoxically practice pathogenesis, but form pair-bonds. And for the second, they prefer to eat the already dead — they can smell rottenness at 6 miles.

3– Odd too, to think of the essentially psychopathic v. carnificina and v. uxorera quisquis  using symbols, as symbols require a social structure. So let me invent a society for them. I’ll call it the somewhat paradoxical ‘anomie zoku’ or ‘gang without rules.’

4– In the art world you must buy an art object before you touch it. I’ve drawn his gesture here as a symbol within an icon. The buy-touch equivalency is from convention and is therefore a symbol. The painting-as-icon is a symbol of wealth and power in remission.

5– C.S. Peirce’s signifiers –icon, index and symbol– are not discrete terms.  His triad tumbles into a neological abyss, triad upon triad fall into obscurity. I won’t go there. Just leave it that some things can have qualities of all three. A photograph is often given as an example.

6– ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ wrote Bulwer-Lytton; that is the symbol/icon here. The dog-hero’s pen-sword is righting a wrong, as opposed to the dog-pet writing (drawing) one.

All our world, except the most recent couple of seconds are really memories. Memories from a minute ago mix up with those from earlier today, likewise last year and even our ancient childhoods. Labels on boxes of memories are scanned for relevance and opened; stuff is taken out, put back. And with this temporary collection of thoughts and images, brought to or near consciousness, we make plans as to what to do next, next week, the rest of our lives.

But these plans, fantasies really, become memories almost as soon as we create them. It’s chaos in there. Deterministic, yes, but way too complicated for us to really know what it is that we really want to do, let alone what the as-chaotic rest of the world will do to us. 200 years ago we thought our gods knew, 50 years from now we think our computers will know, but right now we know we will never know.

Metonym: Consciousness is a spotlight not a floodlight. The artist reflects on this by stepping back to see, not just what’s in those tightly focused lights, but the lights themselves. In his garret he sees, and here records, a sketch of his memory boxes and a summary of this moment. long and short term memories, respectively.

Below, at street level, one of the artist’s fantasies is just beginning to turn memory. He is trying to stop time, trying to defeat the frustrating complementarily of memory and fantasy. He’s trying to catch a fantasy with all hooves off the ground.

The garret is as real as it gets and as a consequence it’s both/neither good and evil. Here the artist can close his eyes for a moment and when he opens them, the same boxes, computer, bed are there. He can go away for a couple of days, then coming back find all is the same, too. He can even recall 20 years ago, –the fall of ’91– all was pretty much the same. Except for the older computer and fewer boxes, of course.

The street-level gallery fantasy is as ephemeral as the floor above it is real.  It begins as his art on exhibit at a gallery opening, it and he respected by critics and collectors alike. But the possible quickly gets knocked down by the probable, as memories of rejection intrude. Then there appears the crueler fantasy –the one the pleasant ones always become– where the art and artist are moved to a back room rejected by partying critics and collectors. That fantasy is surely more painful than the one where the art is kept upstairs, never offered, simply withheld.

Synecdoche: Did the artist stop time? Look at the gallery scene. The art on the wall in itself is an abstraction of the consciousness process. It’s a sketch of the upstairs scene, a scene in a scene. It’s being looked at, like the first fantasy. but by whom or what?  The partying critics and collectors here are replaced by empty uniforms, nothing in themselves. They are mere scraps of cloth that can’t see or touch, that can indicate nothing. They are held mysteriously in shapes that lacking flesh, eyes and voice, don’t resemble people as the artist remembers them.

Do they still signify something or someone to the artist? Are they something/one half gone from respecters to rejecters? Does he have indeterminate, superimposed memories of people causing both pleasant and ill feelings? As symbols, this they do and are. By cultural convention LBDs and tuxes replace respecters and rejecters alike. They are social-role specific drapery shaped like the critics and collectors, which his gestalt-bound eyes fill with rejecting flesh. They are, at the same time, harmless, existentially empty shells. Time does not stop for him, it loops. l’enfer, c’est les autres.

NOTES

• ‘complementarity’ —  A quantum physics term I, as many others do, generalize to non-quantum scale events; it means that an event can have pairs of attributes that the more you know about one of them, the less you can know about the other. so is I this mental event I am having a memory or a fantasy?
• ‘Huis Clo’ —  The title of Sartre’s 1943 play usually translated as ‘No Exit.’ but the translation could also be the English of the French legalese of the Latin ‘in camera,’ or in non-legalese English ‘in a [secret] room.’ a vague, polyglot pun/paradox, is that ‘in [a] camera’ now means in public.
• ‘all hooves off the ground’ — Another paradox In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge, in trying to settle a bet about horses running, used ‘moving’ pictures to ‘stop’ the horses gallop long enough to see if ‘all hooves off the ground’ is ever the case.
• ‘good and evil’ — OK, may be happy/sad works better. I did read Freddy’s book years ago, and should read it again before evoking it. I do remember it took a sadistic stab at philosophers, though. So what is this philosophizing post, good or evil?
• ‘indeterminate, superimposed’ –  more quantum terms up-scaled; an unobserved –but thought– event is all of several outcomes at the same time. Can such a thought be declared either a memory or fantasy, or must it remain both and neither?
• l’enfer, c’est les autres. ‘Hell, it’s the others’ Sartre’s set is a room with the one door. In my drawing it’s two rooms and unconnecting stairs instead of a opening door. The quote says the cast is the hell not the set, people not a place. When I saw the play (c. 1968) instead of ending. it began again, repeating a couple of lines before lights dimmed. It looped.

This is one of the latter; a hypnopompic drawing of a life of starts and stops. It began as one idea then became another, finally settling for both. A compromise negotiated by a third, together a threesome, but not of a carnal sort, more a confused collage. I’ll post it anyway with this explanation.

The walls of a prison is seen in all three parts. The top left shows a actual attempt at breaking out, begun in ‘dark of night’ but caught by spotlight. It’s a transit to the reality of work (the suit) made to look like art by graffiti, a youthful and anti-social gesture. Perhaps the reason for the incarceration was an earlier attempt to turn work into art.

Top right is just the opposite. Here ‘light of day’ the art object –in an obsolete medium, a canvas on easel– is real, but imprisoned. but the escape –this time to love, the nude– is an illusion.

The [European renaissance view of ] art as what you’d see through a window is history. Art, whether it paints over the vandalism or voyeurs the voyeur, stands still and silent. It’s locked up in book and blog.

And below is ‘objective’ ‘reality,’ as a sum of work and love that is the poshlost life as we know it. Here it is seen from outside the prison wall and sadly seen as another wall just as forbidding, a premature asphodel. The escape attempt from –and oddly, by as well– 40 years of dutiful adulthood, obedience to the social order etc, proved futile, merely opening one wall to face others.

This posting is about art and alcohol as a saudade. That being a Portuguese word meaning a sadness for the lacking something that you never did or could have. Art and alcohol are both palliatives to, but not cures for this social anxiety which is this feeling that you are not really liked or respected by your peers, coworkers, &c. And to get them to like/respect you, you can pretend do be more like them than you really are. Alcohol makes this accepting of false acceptance easier to pull off, but it costs. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. You are never really sure which, because you were drunk.

If peer-bonding is difficult enough, pair-bonding is worse by orders of magnitude being by definition, but not so in practice, exclusive and permanent. And the extent to which alcohol appears to help, but actually hinders, is magnified correspondingly. no doubt, since you have your own horrors to recall here, I won’t regale you with mine. Except to say that wearing a mask at a party is one thing, being trapped in a disguise for years is another.

Alcohol is a self medication for that anxiety, the fallout of an unsuccessful adolescence. It’s the failing of the test of acceptance in Freud’s spheres of work and love; a failing and a losing out on the Gemütlichkeit of both peer and pair bondings. The simple facts of this drawing’s life are; no social, no symptom. It’s about giving up what could be good, rewarding, or fun about polite company to avoid revisiting all that’s been not so. Saudade.

The drawing makes concrete a fantasy; the uneasy cohabitation of a desired imaginary and a tolerated actual. The table-for-two scene is the same in the drawing and the painting in the drawing, but the lover is only in the painting, imagined by the imaginary painter. I created him to create her. The paradox of it is for the artist, being with the desired fantasy would require a drink, yet to pour himself that drink he needs to invert, abstract, deny than desired fantasy. Basically neither alcohol nor art, either together or separately will bring this fantasy to life in either the drawing or the real world..

Alcohol works sometimes. With it you can palliate the symptoms (the nausea or the angst, if you are of a philosophical-literary sort) that happens when you try to enjoy the good parts of a memory and/or fantasy at the same time as trying to deny the bad parts. With it you can be social. you can relax over a couple of beers with friends. You can share wine as a ‘romantic’ way to get to better know someone you’d like know better. Friends and a lover can be good to be with. Even I have some good memories, among the bad. Saudade.

Art can, too, function as a socializing mask that can be liked and respected and you with it. But art is a better ‘cure’ than alcohol. Yes, behind that mask, you are still alone; and therefore the person you’ll be relaxing with, getting to know better is just yourself, who are unlike a friend who can leave or a lover who can turn on you. Art is also an intoxicant, but it’s just the opposite of losing yourself in alcohol (or love?) With it, if you are lucky, persevere or both, you can find yourself instead. Art is more a mirror than a mask, more a window than a wall.

“How vainly seek
The selfish for that
happiness denied…
And sigh for pleasure
they refuse to give, -
Madly they frustrate still
their own designs;”

from “Queen Mab”
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I.

Did you notice that the scenario–click to enlarge– is the same as the previous post? Think of the gentlemen’s club as the billboard; both have a naked woman attended to by empty suits as well as cash nearby. Both, too, are well lit in as theatrical/commercial way. In both postings there are exhibitionists.

Shouldn’t the youthful exhibitionist in the previous post be an romantic artist in his studio creating something personal, honest, and original, instead of taking a pseudo-revolutionary stance, merely reacting to someone else’s work in a comic book cliché borrowed for the occasion? More reactionary than revolutionary he postures before an image of an image. Yes, he could fall, tragically young. But he fears more a fall on the street, comic and amusing– at his expense–to the mob there. So safer he feels, up there.

Fast forward 40 yrs; The nude and suits of the billboard “art” have now come to life at a gentlemen’s club where each member of that mob has grown up to be either a plutocrat “…the wearer of a gilded chain That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave Even to the basest appetites they joyfull watch,” or an ecdysiast whose “…features were fixed and meaningless, Yet animal life was there.”

And the youthful exhibitionist has become bitter and old; he has finally read “Queen Mab.” As an undergrad he, solitary on his romantic ledge, paid no more attention to poetry in Eng lit 201 than he did the politics in the street. But things aren’t all bad for our ex-romantic. He’s stepped off  his youthful perch, not by a leap but a cautious descent to the now safe street where he’s neither watched nor judged. Invisible, he gets into the show for free. He watches but can’t touch or take; but he is neither touched nor taken. He feels he’s safe down here now, an exhibitionist still.

II.

“… How vainly seek
The selfish for that happiness denied
To aught but virtue! Blind and hardened, they,
Who hope for peace amid the storms of care,
Who covet power they know not how to use,
And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give, -
Madly they frustrate still their own designs;
And, where they hope that quiet to enjoy
Which virtue pictures, bitterness of soul,
Pining regrets, and vain repentances,
Disease, disgust and lassitude pervade
Their valueless and miserable lives. …”

Or made into prose, sorry Shelley: …How the selfish vainly seek the happiness denied to them by their lack of virtue! They are blind and hardened. They hope for peace amid the storms of personal troubles. They covet power that they don’t know how to use. And they who sigh for pleasure that they refuse to give. Madly they frustrate their own designs; and where they hope to enjoy that quiet which virtue pictures, they find bitterness of soul, pining regrets, vain repentances, disease, disgust and lassitude pervade their valueless and miserable lives….

I read the whole thing quickly and that chunk caught my eye so I parsed it. Shelley, being a poet and all, mixed content up with rhyme and meter. But I, being poetry blind, to get at the content have to break it up again. Sorry again, “substance über form,” I’m just trying to understand what you said.

So who’s who? Who are the “The selfish”? “Who covet power they know not how to use, And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give”? Who “Madly … frustrate still their own designs”? An finally what is “that quiet to enjoy/Which virtue pictures”? These days certainly not the plutocrats Shelley condemns elsewhere in the poem. They don’t covet power, sadly what they covet is more of it, and that power is the pleasure taken, not given. Worse still, it’s the quiet of no morality–that which psychopaths enjoy–that the virtue of power pictures.

No, it’s more the artist who’s selfish &c. it’s the artist who covets power he wouldn’t know what to do with; who wants to be pleased but pleases no one. It’s the artist who neurotically frustrates his own plans; who knows no quiet of the virtuous. Shelley in his notes to the poem says “…employments are lucrative in an inverse ratio to their usefulness: the jeweller, the toyman, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art…” Who more useless and ridiculous than an artist, be he young romantic or old cynic?

III.

You wrote this clever rant 200 yrs ago, you were 1/3 my age at the time, so I’m sure you’d understand my problems translating your florid language. Some things have changed. Love, while not free, can now be bought and sold legally by both sexes. Vegetarian options are on every menu. God has retired, laid off actually. But some things haven’t. Yes, the church and monarchies have fallen on hard times. And there have been many revolutions, but all that was changed is back or getting there. Really, only the costumes have changed; secular, self-made plutocrats are sitting where priest and king once did.

“Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,
The signet of its all-enslaving power,
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold;
Before whose image bow the vulgar great,
The vainly rich, the miserable proud,”

“When merciless ambition, or mad zeal,
Has led two hosts of dupes to battle-field,
That, blind, they there may dig each other’s graves
And call the sad work glory,”