Buddha was, and liked, a fatty
Give your apartment and yourself a wholly unwarranted sense of profundity! Get your Coffee Table Buddha today!
So, as I think I mentioned before, I was in Chicago with one Ladybeard over the recent holidays. Went to the Institute of Art because it’s damn near my favorite thing in Chicago. There’s a story about that that I’m gonna put after the jump.
As an experiment, I’m going to put the point here, then all the nonsense after the jump. It’s this: I was wondering why, when you walk through the Asia part of an art museum that has one (or the whole part of an Asian one), You see all kinds of Buddhas everywhere, but always in a reverent context. What I mean is, there’s nothing like a Buddhist Piss Christ that you ever see. Or that I’ve ever seen. I’m perfectly willing to assume that’s all this is. In fact, the only fact I’m really working with here, the only thing I really know, is that you can (and lots of people, in fact, have) fill thousands of museums with wonderful art that I don’t know about. But I wondered: has Asian art gotten around to travestying its relevant religions, or are even the artists still too cowed, or is it something else? Obviously, I’d consider that a major shortcoming of a culture, if it either hadn’t produced or couldn’t accommodate some good old-fashioned sacrilege. Then again, maybe religion has atrophied enough in Asia that it doesn’t provoke something as ham-fisted as Piss Christ and its ilk.
By the way, I liked the juxtaposition of the statue, the doorway and the art there on the steps. But I neglected to read what was spelled out by all them lights. Now who’s superficial, bitches?
Now, if you weren’t rolling your eyes/pissed off by that nonsense about a “cultural shortcoming,” then you’re part of the problem. If someone wants to regard things as inherently individual as art as referenda on a concept as broad and problematic as “culture,” they don’t have anything useful to say anyway. Also–and here’s the big one–”Asia” should really never be referred to in the singular, except by lazy cartographers.
Okay. But what the hell am I really talking about? Watch me flail and fail around after the jump!
So here’s why I started thinking about this: Walk through the European art sections and you see,starting with the Renaissance’s subtle, subversive humanism, a gradual move from the straightforward religiosity of a time when art was almost entirely dependent on the Church (via actual decorations for churches and the like or via the nobility’s need to make it clear they were still right with the lesser J.C.–the one who never sang with Pulp, to my knowledge). There’s the introduction of classical subjects and themes, then you start seeing the Christian stuff acting as no more than a veneer to the pagan and Protean, and above all anthropocentric. Then the Enlightenment, then the Romantics, naturalism of all kinds of varieties, then you wind up so far inside of the individual artist’s own huffing after his or her own perception that, finally, you wind up with the abstract expressionism that still rarely makes any sense to me. I’m willing to see this as a shortcoming on my part; I’m well aware that I haven’t done much reading about or looking at these paintings. I’m also aware that much of what’s been written about literature by way of critical analysis is so much jargon-strewn hoo-ha. And I’m more than a little inclined to expect the same out of any writing about the plastic arts, particularly so much of what I see in contemporary art museums/sections of art museums, which drips with more contempt and hostility toward the viewer than it does inspiration or talent. But then, usually, just as I get started with this, I round the corner and get smacked in the face by something truly astounding. In the case of the Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Contemporary Art, I didn’t even get in the door. Got this gigantic statue made, I think, out of stainless steel. Anyway, when I saw him, he looked slightly slumped over, naked, his mouth working in silence. Guy’s flat, barely in three dimensions, like he was stamped out of a giant sheet with a massive cookie cutter. Then the ambient sounds–including, for some reason, pop music piped into speakers spread all over the park ringing the reservoir–paused and I heard either the working of the motor or the rub of the metal, or maybe just the statue’s own soundtrack. Just this tuneless, infintely tired and sad moan. It spoke in its own language, which is the only reason I can think of for doing art in the first place: something needs to be said and this is the only way to do it. The trick here, as in just about everything, is figuring out which language or meta-language is being spoken. This guy, denuded, devoid of individual features, barely upright and only just mustering his complaint, spoke to some deep fatigue, out beyond horror and nearly beyond suffering, like the groaning of humanity itself under the weight of the near-ceaseless atrocities of the twentieth century.
But then, those were days when I tended to be gripped by things. The Millennium Tower in downtown Seoul, for example: seemed like nothing more fitting, for a building opened as the twentieth century finally gave us all a break, than its blank tower topped with twenty-storey pillars raising, by all appearances, a coffin into the sky.
You cannot step in the same river twice. I also could not step into the same painting of the sea twice. Memory can only save so much, and the rest of our lives are lost even while we're living them.
Or, a week or two before I first saw the Millennium tower (and a couple months before I saw the moaning man and wrote a rambling, incoherent bit of nonsense about art for my old MSN Groups proto-blog), this happened: The day I went to get my first visa for Seoul, a couple hours before my train left for Indy, I dropped the last dollar in my pocket to check my bags and take a spin. The picture over here to the left, a big Turner, stopped me dead in my tracks. Hasn’t happened that often, but happens often enough to make it ridiculous how rarely I go out and mill around in art and other museums. These people huddled together, trying to go about their business as the sky and ocean gather to send them into oblivion, to be forgotten, for all their hustling . . . I’m not sure. It was eight years ago. Something about the massive indifference, bordering on hostility, of the universe, the futility of living . . . I dunno, even the nobility of struggling along with it anyway. Then again, I’d worn a hole in one of my boots so my foot was soaking wet and freezing, I was too poor even to resole them, and I was trying not to juggle the mix of emotions produced by getting what I thought I’d wanted (escape from Indiana) by means I’d never really expected (going to Korea, of all places). I was susceptible to this sort of thing, is what I’m saying. Or I’ve lost something in the intervening eight years. Either way, whatever this painting did to me back then is no longer accessible and I found myself bewildered by my determination to see it every time I could possibly get there.
So, anyway, if you’re still reading here and you know of anyone who’s actually gone and used imagery from religions other than Christianity to do the good work of subverting the religious reverence, the worshipfulness–hopefully, even belief itself–I’m all ears. I’d like to see it. Like I said: the only thing I really know is that I know next to nothing. In this case, I’m aware of great, booming worlds of stuff I don’t know and would like a little direction toward the next place to chip away at the infinite granite block of my profound ignorance.
In the mean time, allow me to make fun of some paintings:
A thousand years before, this would have been worshipped. Two hundred years before, it would have been somehow made to be all Christiany. In the eighteenth century, it was a tourist destination. That's progress, and I'm not being sarcastic.
Scarlett Johansson takes you inside the passion and intrigue of Amish life in Red Barn Rising. Directed by David Fincher. Summer 2011.
Zeus wishes he was the god of keeping one's pimp hand strong.
The Black Tunic Mafia, as the two work house escapees called themselves, launched a brutal crossbow attack on a London orphanage. Copies of this painting were later found in their effects, as a wave of copycat killings spread like lightning over Europe in just 40 years. Art was temporarily banned, though the subject of the painting was never apprehended.
Nightlife has always and everywhere been lurid and disorienting. I wonder when Williamsburg will dig into late-nineteenth-century Paris for style cues. Couldn't help but be an improvement. And I bet American Apparel could make a mean organic corset. .
- American Apparel goes high-concept. But still uses only high schoolers.
Where the wild things were. Gentrification knows no shame . . .
- Before Redtube, porn used to be waaaay more expensive.
