Ours Is The Fury

I'm sometimes overwhelmed by paintings. It's not that I'm a fussy aesthete... or OK, it's possible that I am, but that's not directly relevant here. Ask me about Tolkien and I'll pose it up rather shamelessly with all kinds of worldly snatched-at insight and a sweeping drive-by expansiveness the work neither wants nor fits. If you want me to perform artsy-farts, given the right subject matter, I'm your Meryl Fucking Streep. But then I'd say Meryl's overrated, what you really want is Laurie Metcalf, because anyone who knows anything knows Roseanne's sister Jackie is secretly the singular actor of her generation; you just like Streep because she's good at accents, which is like a magic trick for people who don't travel.

But I'm not that precious about painting, first of all because I tried painting. I got just far enough with it to realize, despite some small ability with pencils and line drawing, composing with paints on a two-dimensional surface confounds me entirely. I can write, I've sculpted a little* and, like most people who have heard a Smashing Pumpkins song, I've decided I can sing at least better than some inexplicably successful professionals. Painting, however, strikes me with a lightning bolt of earned humility that I've never really successfully been able to dodge when it comes looking. It's the drunk recently-ex girlfriend at the party you weren't sure about going to in the first place: you know at some point, it's going to be you who has to reckon with it.

There's a fantastic collection of portraiture at the Huntington Library here in Southern California. I've heard complaints about portraits, that they're thuddingly prosaic, inherently aristocratic and therefore cold, ironically lifeless despite their dedicated brief to capture life. But for me, they're intensely personal, immediately transportive the way a landscape or especially and abstract might be. The artist (and the artisans in his or her workshop) had to take in and understand the subject, work dozens of studies and tests of individual body parts and poses in pencil and chalk, construct a setting befitting the commission and finally understand the subject as a whole before committing her or him to oil (or whatever) on canvas (or whatever). And do it in a way that pleases their patrons at least long enough for the last check to clear.

Standing in front of it then I can't escape the immediacy of the idea that a painter at some point stood probably as far from the exact same painting as I usually am (I don't see good), creating a living face, torso, limbs and shadow onto an off-white screen that once carried no meaning outside of its utility, it's potential. And the older the painting is, less of it is graspable as an idea in context, as an object comprehensible to itself, in itself, in this odd setting of a walkable collection, sometimes punctuated with excellent padded leathern swooning benches. It's both human and utterly obscure at the exact same time.

Art is supposed to work that way. Generated to be received. Not consumed, because it survives the encounter generally, in the opposite way modern "content" is consumed, partially digested, regurgitated and reconsumed in a cow's stomach kind of cycle.

Places like Notre Dame de Paris are difficult to lose because a cathedral is a time machine. It's a reliquary for ghosts of artisans: wood carvers, stone masons, tilers, mosaicists, glaziers, painters, choir-masters and even priests, the filthy buggers. And yes, it's also an instrument of domination and control, a naked exercise in power, as all excess is. But it retains its grandeur and pomp, both maturing over time as its political influence wanes into something amusing and small.** Even now, though, as a work of astounding craftsmanship and skill, it's not interested in your mere human understanding of time or space. Objects large enough will bend both of those. A cathedral swallows you entirely (or whole villages really) and projects itself directly into, well, your dirty mortal soul. It won't brook dissent or ESPECIALLY not indifference. It will be reckoned with.

What's become interesting in the last few decades is that the entire purpose of art has stopped almost entirely becoming received. Instead all art is bespoke, demanded into being by an audience who you already know liked two things similar to the thing you might be proposing.*** Nothing makes it to the marketplace without a request. And even the things that do have to reckon with**** the end-user experience, some of those get a kicking up the arse by the angry young men will brook no deviation--DEVIANCE EVEN!--from the full-throated reiteration of their primacy.

There's no art that isn't politics anymore, but I guess the case could be made that there was never a period where the two had separate airings.

But I imagine that's the norm now. We're living in a world of subjective objectives, where everything's a variable including the answer to whether or not things are variables. Where things don't actually say what they clearly do say. Instead we get them (weakly and with the insult of little or no effort) pre-experienced for us because our agency has been spent in the direction of securing Avengers spoilers.

I'm not sure how worked up I can get, though. Game of Thrones is back, man! For at least five more weeks, impeach the guy, whatever. I have HBO Now now. After this is straight into binging my way through Ballers and then The Wire again. I need to bone up on my analogies for when I write my GoT reviews later. And we all know there's nothing a middle-aged white guy loves more than a Wire reference in a piece that is certainly not about The Wire.

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*I was told my man-with-elephant-face figurine I made in 9th grade art class out of modeling clay had a solid shot at being considered for the class 50th percentile in terms of presentability. I'm not sure what the 50 is out of, to be honest though. Probably not 50.

** The kind of thing that comes with an attached gift shop.

***It's like Die Hard but on a train!

****See how the river flows up the mountainside here now