Figuration, Line, and Paul Klee

On a recent trip to the Art Institute of Chicago I became perplexed before this Paul Klee piece entitled "Fleeing Ghost." 

I don't know if I was drawn to it with a sudden sense of awe because I immediately thought of its relation to my work in a similar vein, I'd like to think, of how Walter Benjamin used the same artist's "Angelus Novus" to explain his philosophy of history (that there is a constant building of events, disasters, occurrences that we--as humans--aren't privy too but that the "angel of history" can see). But perhaps I'm trying too hard to have a sense of the critical work I'm engaged in. Either way, here's how I'd look at the painting.

I'd first point out how the ghost's subjectivity is figured by line. Line itself demarcates the apparent wood grain from which the specter arises. The line gives the painting a sense of cheapness, a sense of a hurried job. I suppose that's one of the things I like about the painting.

I'm being completely unintelligible right now, but I suppose that's ok--this is a blog. The Klee painting, to me, figures figuration such that all the lines, colors, and assemblages that we say constitute the subject are always fleeting. Soon, the ghost will evaporate, as all bodies do, and the progress of history--referenced, I suppose, by the arrow at the bottom of the page--will continue, as if the evanescent manifestation of being was simply an exhale.

I'm still staring at the painting. My mind transports to the Art Institute and I'm standing in a well-lit room, rocking back and forth before this Klee. I reflect on the impossibility of the moment, the ridiculous circumstances that led me to approach paint-on-wood as something worthy of contemplation. I'm speechless. I sit down and pretend my body is a statue.

Paper idea...

John Ames Mitchell

I'm thinking of writing a seminar paper on John Ames Mitchell, the founder of the magazine Life, in addition to being a novelist, artist, and architect. He's an interesting figure that I don't know much about, and he seems to be the type of conflicted figure that I enjoy writing about. He's both a product of victorian morality, and yet he's trying to reshape that morality through his writings. I wonder how much control he had over his magazine. The other day I read through several volumes of the magazine, but I couldn't develop a coherent sense of how the magazine works ideologically. 

Aesthetically, it is easy to get a sense of how the magazine works. It tries to be humorous, without pushing too many boundaries. Apparently a lot of Mitchell's friends and family didn't want him to stake his inheritance on middle-class entertainment, fearing that it was too far "low" for genteel readers. 

I just finished his novel The Last American, and I'm completely confused as to how to understand its political work. On one level, it seems quite misogynistic and nativist, yet the narrative's humor seems to disavow stable political stances and positions. There are a lot of descriptions of things that are "interesting," which made me think of Sianne Ngai's essay about the cute, the zany, and the interesting. She basically argues that we need to figure out how critique has created certain aesthetic categories. I'm fascinated with the idea of Mitchell--through Life--gesturing toward certain aesthetic categories that weren't entirely formed in the late nineteenth century. 

For one, the novel The Last American seems to be invested in understanding the cultural consumption of commodities as having a constitutive influence on subject-formation. In the novel, a group of Persians from the year 2951 journey by boat to America, discovering a decayed landscape with festering buildings and such. Everything from the sculptures to the literature are marked as being inferior artistic endeavors that malignantly affected Americans, destroying them. In this light, the Americans died because their culture was sick and inferior. 

Yet the irony of the story arises in the Persian's inability to understand the cultural objects they come across. They think a statue of a Native American is a god and wonder why it is in a commercial place and not a "Temple"; they find the remnants of the Brooklyn Bridge and can't understand its purpose. The bridge stands as a monument to the historical unknowable--the recognition that once one is in the past one cannot speak from the dead, nor with certainty expect the future to represent the dead as things were. 

The story ends with horrifying violence when the Persian man named Ja-khaz (yes, that's supposed to be funny) tries to kiss "the last American"'s apparent partner. A gruesome fight ensues, yet the violence of the moment is covered under the guise of humor. People's heads get hit with clubs and swords, causing a resounding sound of hollowness or woodness reverberating throughout the chamber. That's supposed to be humorous. To understand the novel, I'd need a good theory of late-nineteenth century humor--one that can account of doubleness, inconsistency, and whatnot. 

Wither historicism?

Always performing as a great provocateur, Walter Benn Michaels at a recent conference on campus asked: "Why should anyone care about what has happened in the past?" This question is loaded, because it indexes his critique of the way identity politics have been positioned to assert that the solution for latter-day inequalities can only be found through understanding the past. While Michaels focuses on how identity politics has failed to produce economic equality, I think he misses the boat in terms of how identity politics enables an ethical recognition that, in fact, presupposes economic equality.

Yet I would give to him the insight that contemporary identitarian discourses capitalize on difference in such a way that produces unequal systems of recognition. But, at the same time, I think it's important to realize that racism and sexism can be so systemic that an explicit discourse needs to be fashioned that will intervene in the body politic to see to it that bodies and individuals are respected.

In summary, on the level of theory WBM's ideas are great; but on the lived, embodied, and always embattled level, his attempt to get post-identitarian is hauntingly problematic.

Image/Text (and probably more to come)

I'm stuck. Or rather, my eyes are trapped within the broken confines of this Pere Borell del Caso painting. The flesh looks living. The shadows on the painted frame enhance the trompe-l'oeil sense of reality. The boy's look of wonder is the physiognomy of utter shock, mimicking the moment Pinocchio realizes he can move without Geppetto's strings. Made from the hand of del Caso, the painting interacts with my eyes with a livingness that the artist couldn't create but could only gesture toward. Yet still my eyes are trapped. 

The face that I look into evades my gaze and resists the association with mimicry. There's no representation here--the painting is wont to say--but rather a gesture towards the way images capture the eye with their faux-sense of reality. 

And so I reflect, here, on how my eye gets drawn to faces--both painted and embodied--and how the phenomenologically different experiences of gazing at texts and gazing at bodies needs some analysis. Sometimes I'm trapped by language, words enveloping me in an imaginary world. Is this world experientially different from being captured in the frame of a trompe-l'oeil? 

I wonder: how does language work and what are the limits of its being modeled via the visual?