a multi-disciplinary dialog
Evening by June Underwood
We can banter about crows all we like, but if a subject has weight for us, then likely it has been touched on in our art. What have we said in that way? I decided to have a look at A&P contributor web sites, broadening the subject a bit from just crows to birds. I present to you the interesting variety I found. What do these works have to say to each other?
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I’m still reading Pessoa, especially his Alberto Caeiro persona, my favorite, who has a seemingly clear and simple view of the world and our experience of it. According to Wikipedia: “Central to his world-view is the idea that in the world around us, all is surface: things are precisely what they seem, there is no hidden meaning anywhere.” Suppose we accept this for encounters with the natural world; how can or should we apply it to looking at art? Can a river, a tree, a rock in an artwork be as innocent of meaning as in nature?
In the spirit of June Underwood’s idea of gathering of A&P contributor artworks to let them “chat” with each other, I’ve gathered a few here to let them also converse with Caeiro/Pessoa. I’ll start with poem 39 from “The Keeper of Sheep,” translated this time by Peter Rickard (original on this page).
Yellow Tulip by Bob Martin
three pears by Hanneke van Oosterhout
I’ve been reading Fernando Pessoa, the quite unusual Portuguese poet. I really like the following poem from “The Keeper of Sheep,” translated by Richard Zenith.
Sometimes, on days of perfect and exact light,
When things are as real as they can possibly be,
I slowly ask myself
Why I even bother to attribute
Beauty to things.Does a flower really have beauty?
Does a fruit really have beauty?
No: they have only color and form
And existence.
Beauty is the name of something that doesn’t exist
But that I give to things in exchange for the pleasure they give me.
It means nothing.
So why do I say about things: they’re beautiful?
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How hard to be just what we are and see nothing but the visible!
Are the two works above about just the visible, or more than the visible?
For me, Art competes with Life.
Just a few minutes ago, while sitting here, thinking, I overheard my son tell my wife how his friend B.’s sister, C., was trying to starve her turtle because she wanted to get a new pet. On the sly, B. was feeding the turtle. B. admitted that he too wanted a new pet and had decided to stop feeding his fish. They were still alive, though, and he wondered if C. was feeding them. He was pretty sure that she was.
I suppose this is why my expectations for the art experience are pretty high. I look at a lot of work and it is always curious to me when and why a work thrills me and how some continue to do so?
I saw these photographs by Larry Sultan in San Francisco over fifteen years ago. I think about them often.
Whose culture is it anyway? more… »
One of my most powerful and influential muses both in my writing and photography is incongruity. I believe this is the case for two reasons. First, growing up gay in mid 20th Century America means you daily face living in a state of perpetual incongruousness. Almost every thought you have is incongruous with your surroundings and the apparent thoughts of most everyone around you. Your self-confidence, self-respect and development as a human being depends on embracing and owning your state of incongruity. As a child and especially as a closeted teenager and college student I was often called a non-conformist and an iconoclast. That was unfair to true non-conformists and iconoclasts because I did not choose to be so whereas they do. What appeared to be non-conformity and iconoclasm was merely the manifestations of my incongruous condition.
The second reason for my creative relationship with incongruity is Manhattan, my life-long environment. Environmentally, my home town provided a visual and cultural stew that celebrated and exploded with incongruity. As a child and closeted young man, I could swim in the waters of Manhattan with complete confidence and comfort. Who would notice my quirky little self in this ocean of intensely complex cultural, economic, political, racial and ethnic diversity and this visual cacophony and feast of discordant shapes, colors and textures?
So incongruity became my home and my muse.
I believe that New York is as important to the art world as it is because this city”s uniquely incongruous nature drives an unequaled atmosphere of creative energy and frenetic industry. I was recently asked why I “limit” my camera to New York. In fact, I almost never travel with my camera. My inventory of Manhattan photography is vast. And having traveled extensively throughout more than two dozen countries and countless cities and towns, I have but a few hundred old transparencies buried in a drawer somewhere.
The reason is that my muse is a very demanding mistress. Paris is a city of harmony and balance. London delivers an abundance of quaint, stately and a touch of the eccentric. Tokyo is an avalanche of uniformity and elegance. Bangkok is an ocean of golden spires. Amsterdam’s incongruity lies in the sexual antics hidden behind sparkling clean windows and compulsively neat little houses. But if I photographed these places I would feel like an adulterer.
For many reasons: Chance, the forces of chaos, competing cultural perspectives, subconscious manifestations of the city’s demographics–Manhattan’s is the queen of incongruity. My camera’s appetite for it seems never to be satisfied by the cornucopia of inharmonious diversity of architecture, styles and design. New York never disappoints in that regard. In most any direction you look in most parts of town, you will find bizarre, often inappropriate and jarring juxtapositions of lifestyles and perspectives that should make for one big jumble of chaos but instead it is in that brazen incongruity that the city finds an amazing visual harmony.
Tourists are often jarred by this as they discover that a wrong turn on a city block can transport you into an entirely different world after merely walking a few feet. Other than the city’s famous grid pattern, little else has been done in concert thanks to the egos and individuality of very wealthy men and the American habit of borrowing architectural styles and ornamental designs and decorative effects from several thousand years of human history which is no where more apparent than in this city.
On one city block you may catch glimpses of ancient Babylonia, Classical Greece, Medieval Europe, Art Nouveau Vienna, and Renaissance France. Some of these will be bizarrely newish, some aged through recent neglect and other parts deliberately made to look weathered over hundreds or even thousands of years. In fact, one of the most charming characteristics of this great lady with a passion for phallic symbols is that it is often impossible to differentiate between neglect and artful and deliberate antiquing.
I will be quite content to spend the rest of my life exploring this town’s details. I consider myself to be extremely lucky to have found a model who remains timeless, always changing and forever surprising. My work is completely a product of my environment. Incongruity. Except Manhattan is also the glue that holds it together, and I mean “it” in every sense of the word.
