Now it’s obvious, is it not, where this picky procuring has been leading? Deep inside the steel bowels of a dreary institution somewhere, I’m about to lay out a half-dozen slices of cloud-fluffy, cloud-white Wonder Bread. Then, using my toothbrush or my index finger in lieu of the forbidden knife, I’ll lather Best Foods onto all six exposed surfaces, careful to spread the eggy ambrosia from edge to edge, crust to crust, because to do otherwise would dishonor the craft of sandwich-making. Rest assured, fellow connoisseurs, an observer would see me blanket the entire slice and blanket it to a most liberal and generous depth.
You might ask, “Tom, is it safe to try this at home?” Well, I can only report that when I, a lifelong consumer of gargantuan amounts of mayonnaise, underwent an angiographic screening in 1999, the attending physicians said I had the arteries of a twelve-year-old boy. (Of course, they didn’t say which twelve-year-old boy. I suppose they could have meant that double-wide porker who squirms and farts in the seat in front of you every time you go to a Saturday matinée.)
In any event, once the divine dressing has been plastered to an agreeably hedonistic expanse and depth, I’ll step back for a moment and admire the sheen of it, the goopy swooze of it, the innocence and decadence and Brigitte Bardot blondeness of it. Alas, however, the great clock is ticking. I’d better proceed to adding the radiant little circles of tomato (round and red as the lenses in a firebug’s spectacles), distributing them sufficiently over three of the heavily mayonnaised planes. That done, I’ll sprinkle on a trace of pepper and a lot of salt (remember, I have clear arteries). Finally, I’ll lay on the roof slices, and with the heel of my hand, apply just enough pressure so that the ingredients adhere to one another, forming a coherent whole; kind of flattened and splayed and fused; spongy to the touch, restful to the eye, inviting to the bite, secure against any untidy loss of contents.
Voilà! That which you now behold, that at which you cannot help but cock a gentle snook, are three newborn examples of one of civilized mankind’s most unassuming yet wondrous concoctions: the pauper king of lunchland, the naïf whose seemingly primitive genius is sadly undervalued by pucky-wucked canapé-snappers and meat-and-potatoes he-men alike; the modest though ever-spunky… TOMATO SANDWICH!
A brave little raft in a sea of culinary confusion; the deuce of hearts turned inside out, wild card in the dog-eared deck of summer dining; pot of rubies at the end of a bleached-out rainbow; the tomato sandwich is soft and voluptuous, sweetish and acidic, sunny, accessible, unashamedly fatty, and deceptively sumptuous.
Comfort food, you say? Granted, it is comforting although not precisely in that “I-miss-my-mommy” sense that, to some, a bowl of good old-fashioned macaroni-and-cheese might be comforting. In fact, few are today’s children who would not squawk like a cartoon duck if you plopped a tomato sandwich on their TV tray. No, the properly made tomato sandwich bespeaks a quality beyond adult regression or childish gratification.
For me—and possibly for you as well—there are special foods capable of literally connecting the tastebuds to the soul; foods of which neither my tongue nor my soul ever tires, even were I to eat them every day of my life. And when it comes to tomato sandwiches, I very nearly have.
So, it is completely appropriate that, with a combination of deep reverence and vigorous gusto, I consume a trio of them while awaiting the shadows that are soon to fall across my barred door.
And now here they are, those righteous authorities, all terse and businesslike, scarcely granting me time to wipe my greasy mouth with my sleeve before ushering me out of the cell and down the piss-green corridor to that clean, well-lighted place where I’m to be legally murdered by the state.
Despite having once again enjoyed, in what are scheduled to be my closing minutes, one of life’s most agreeable pleasures, I will not falsely claim that I am wholly at peace. Even tomato sandwiches have their limitations. They’ve left me satiated but, in my current situation, hardly serene. Yet neither am I defiant. And I’m certainly not resigned.
I’m not resigned because, you see, I have a plan. I’m not resigned because this is my fantasy, after all, and provided it is dramatically correct, I must insist on a happy ending.
Whoa! What’s this? A tremendous explosion has suddenly ripped through the building, throwing me to the floor like a Dear John letter. As debris sifts down upon us, my escorts and I lie there, they stunned, I looking up frantically through the swirling cumulus of dust until I see in the near distance the beckoning lights of dawn.
Bleeding, soiled, lame, I hop through the rubble on one leg, like a flamingo in a sack race. With surprising speed, I’m out into the exercise yard. The guard tower has toppled and in the prison wall there’s a hole so wide you could fit an hour’s worth of corporate greed in it and have room left over for all of Dick Cheney’s draft deferments. Wow! My friends in the Mad Scientists Underground sure know how to orchestrate a jailbreak!
In the deserted street outside the prison walls, Naomi Watts waits in a black Ferrari, its engine revving like a velvet chainsaw. I get in, give Naomi a kiss, she pops the clutch, and off we rocket, barreling down to Mexico at 110 miles an hour. Mexico. Our good neighbor to the south. Mexico, where nowadays sliced bread is widely available, where the lime-flavored mayonnaise is muy bueno, and where the tomatoes—if not harvested prematurely or shampooed in pesticide—are muy damn bueno, indeed.
What Is Art and If We Know What Art Is, What Is Politics?
“Whoever communicates to his brothers in suffering the secret splendor of his dreams acts upon the surrounding society like a solvent, and makes all who understand him, often without their realization, outlaws and rebels.”
—Pierre Quillard
The most useful thing about art is its uselessness.
Have I lost you already? Wait a minute. My point is that there’s a place—an important place, as a matter of fact—in our all too pragmatic world for the impractical and the non-essential, and that art occupies that place more gloriously than does just about anything else; occupies it with such authority and with such inspirational if quixotic results that we find ourselves in the contradictory position of having to concede that the non-essential can be very essential, indeed, if for no other reason than that an environment reduced to essentials is a subhuman environment in which only drones will thrive.
Taking it a step further, perhaps, let’s proclaim that art has no greater enemy than those artists who permit their art to become subservient to socio-political issues or ideals. In so doing, they not only violate art’s fundamental sovereignty, they surrender that independence from function that made it art (as opposed to craft or propaganda) in the first place. At the heart of any genuine aesthetic response are sensations that have no rational application, material or psychological, yet somehow manage to enrich our lives.
The notion that art must be an instrument for discernible social betterment is Calvinistic, and the work that is guided by that premise is fundamentally puritanical, even when its content is sexually explicit.
Obviously, art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Like a coral animal, it is embedded in a vast undulating reef of economics, politics, religion, entertainment, and social movements of one kind or another. Yet, while we are in art’s thrall, we’re lifted out of mundane context and granted a temporary visa to a less ordinary dimension, where our existential burden is momentarily lifted and we surf a wave of pure perceptual pleasure. And what is art, after all, but a vehicle for the transportation of perceptual (i.e. aesthetic) values?
This is not to say that a work of art can’t convey other, additional values, values with intellectual and/or emotional heft. However, if it’s really art, then those values will play a secondary role. To be sure, we may praise a piece for its cultural insights, for the progressive statement it makes and the courageous stand it takes, but to honor it as “art” when its aesthetic impact is not its dominant feature is to fall into a philistine trap of shoddy semantics and false emphasis.
Speaking of
semantics, let’s pause for an irritating second or two and define our terms. Ask most people what the word “aesthetic” means and they’ll unhesitantly answer, “beauty.” Sorry, friends, it just ain’t so. Beauty is frequently the major generative force in aesthetics, for the artist and his or her audience alike—but beauty isn’t a necessary ingredient in an aesthetic enterprise nor does it by any means define one. In aesthetics, beauty and ugliness are relative terms, and whether a piece is one or the other is often merely a matter of taste.
Like ethics, logic, theology, epistemology, metaphysics, etc., aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, in this case the branch that deals with our powers of sensory perception; more specifically, with how we attempt to understand and evaluate the external phenomena registered by our eyes and ears. When the composition that delights, thrills, captivates, or challenges our sensory receptors has been created for that very purpose, we call it art.
Artistic creation is a mysterious venture about which little can be said that isn’t misleading. To attempt to pin down art, to lock it in the airless closet of tight definition is boorish, even totalitarian. Yet unless we have somewhat of a consensus about what art is, unless we can evaluate it within certain aesthetic parameters, however flexible and broad, we cannot claim it as a subject. In the latter part of the twentieth century, it became hip to assert, “Hey, man, everything is art.” That convenient notion is as evasive as it is inclusive, for if everything is art, then hey, man, nothing is art. If there’s no separate category of human production that can be identified as “art,” then we can no longer discuss art, let alone isolate it in a coherent exhibition or hold it to standards of excellence; art will have become indistinguishable from the manufactured flotsam and jetsam under whose weight the crust of the earth (and likely the collective soul) is slowly cracking, sinking, festering.
Politics, too, is a somewhat nebulous subject. It has been defined as “the art (sic) of compromise,” ignoring the fact that artists historically have been among the least compromising of individuals, or that while most universities offer degrees in political science, none to my knowledge teach political art.
Personally, I define politics as “the ambition to preside over property and make other people’s decisions for them.” Politics, in other words, is an organized, publicly sanctioned amplification of the infantile itch to always have one’s own way.
But let’s not eat off the cynic’s plate. Certainly, ninety percent of the planet’s politicians have a single unwavering goal: to gain power, hold on to it at all costs, and reap the rewards. Yet there is political thought and political action that is altruistic and humanistic, free of narcissism and avarice (temporarily, at least: the truest of all truisms is the one that declares that sooner or later power corrupts). There are political agendas that champion pacifism, civil rights, health care, and environmental preservation, and those agendas merit our support and respect. What they do not merit is an uncontested usurpation of our art.
Socio-political statements, however laudable, however crucial, can cause the less sophisticated viewer to overlook the fact that the art delivering those statements is often inept, derivative, and trite. When we accept bad art because it’s good politics, we’re killing the swan to feed the chickens.
Those who would refute my contention that art and politics run on parallel tracks and seldom the twain shall meet inevitably confront me with the example of Picasso’s Guernica. There’s no denying that that monumental 1937 masterpiece was a direct result of Picasso’s revulsion at the unprecedented saturation bombing of a civilian village (a common military tactic nowadays, sad to say), or that the painting was intended as an impassioned protest against war in general (war being the all–too–frequent terminus of the political trajectory). However, had Picasso allowed his stirred feelings to override his radical painterly principles, had he produced a traditional, literal, unimaginative rendering of military atrocity instead of this wild, virtuoso outpouring of Cubistic invention, you can bet the ranch dressing that now, 70 years later, museum visitors would not be standing before it in awe.
What moves us finally in Guernica are the surprising range of its monochromatic colors, its dynamic lines, disturbing anatomical dislocations, bizarre metamorphoses, shocking fragmentations, and those raw, mysterious symbols that resonate with such potency in our psyches, even though they may never be completely understood by our rational minds.
Guernica succeeds politically because it first and foremost succeeds aesthetically. The memories it may once have invoked of Spanish fascism have long ago been eclipsed by the explosive, exhilarating force with which it deconstructs form and distributes it about the picture plane. Despite its underpinnings of horror and outrage, it is primarily a visual experience.
Because of the way they say “yes” to life—and thus automatically say “no” to those ideas and actions that threaten life or restrict it—there’s a sense in which Renoir’s rosy nudes, Calder’s dancing amoebas, and Warhol’s deadpan soup cans (to pick just three examples) are as much a condemnation of brutality as Picasso’s Guernica. Interpreted as antiwar statements, are they not then political? Seen from that angle, they are. But in the works of Renoir, Calder, and Warhol, even more than in Guernica, the political implications are subtle, ambiguous, and, most important, subordinate to the aesthetic. That’s what makes them art.
And art, like love, is what makes the world forever fresh and new. However, this revitalization cannot be said to be art’s purpose. Art revitalizes precisely because it has no purpose. Except to engage our senses. The emancipating jounce of inspired uselessness.
Morris Louis: Empty and Full
One of the more pleasant paradoxes of McLuhanization is that a “bush-league” town like Seattle can nurture a sensibility enlightened enough to organize, catalog, and mount a major exhibition of Morris Louis while at the same time—by virtue of the provincialism which persists here in spite of the new global togetherness—can afford an opportunity to view Louis in fresh context.
Sensibly, Seattle’s Contemporary Art Council resisted the impulse to attempt a Louis retrospective. It chose, instead, to restrict itself to two periods—the so-called “veils” and “unfurleds”—of the artist’s career, a decision that was not only realistic but one which permitted a more studied appreciation of the prowess of Louis’s talent than would have a less concentrated sampling of all four of his major periods. For one thing, there is greater stylistic variety within the veil series and the unfurled series than may be found within the paintings known as “florals” or those known as “stripes.” Moreover, the pairing of veils and unfurleds illustrated dramatically the dazzling creative leaps of which Louis was capable—the veils and unfurleds are virtually pictorial opposites.
In the veils, airy Niagaras of integrated color configurations flood their large supports from framing-edge to framing-edge; in the unfurleds, individual irregular ribbons of opaque color are stacked at the sides of equally large canvases, leaving in the interiors vast expanses of surface of approximately the same size and shape as the veil image—but blank.
Finally, since the specificity of its ambition allowed it to stress quality rather than quantity—of the 22 enormous pictures in the exhibition, at least 15 represent Louis at the summit of his achievement—the council was able to borrow from the Louis estate several important works which never had been displayed before.
Among the previously unexhibited pictures was Tau, a significant variant on the unfurled theme. Tau can be read as a greatly enlarged detail from one of the banked ribbon configurations of a more typical unfurled. Magnified, the ribbons (or rivulets)—flowing diagonally from framing-edge to framing-edge (and, by implication, indefinitely beyond)—take on an ominousness of shape that is only partly relieved by the resounding brilliance of their colors. In these proportions, the ribbons of consistent color become even more difficult to read as drawing than when of “normal” size; indeed, any relationship with a human creator is nearly impossible fo
r the eye to establish.
Tau, to my knowledge, is the only picture in which Louis’s romanticism seems more sardonic than benign: the proximity of large individual shapes manufactures a visual field that is oppressive, whereas Louis’s picture planes usually are almost seductively inviting.
Overhang, another variant, appears to be a transitional painting that successfully bridges the veil and floral periods. The color configurations are more distinct, more tangible than in the usual veil, but they are monadelphous to the extent that they resist establishing planes or Cubistic juxtapositions, a condition that, as Michael Fried has pointed out, created problems in some of the florals.