Committing to art

Two years ago -- from late December 2009 to March 2010 -- I spent a few exhausting but rewarding months in the Guggenheim from eight to sixteen hours a week working as an interpreter for Tino Sehgal's artwork "This Progress."  I say "working," but making the piece come into being felt more like an intense form of play.  There are plenty of descriptions of Tino's work (the Times review of "This Progress," for instance) so I won't bother recounting it here.  What I'm interested in this New Year's Day is recapturing why, for me, making art is so laden with meaning, insight, and pleasure.
Each December I carve and block-print holiday cards.  I've done this for years.  This summer for the first time I began to paint with a brush, usually cards I use to thank dinner hosts and the like.  Most of my designs are simple arrays of stripes and polygons, half-conscious responses to work by Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, or Donald Judd.  But not long after starting to experiment with painting on sketchbook pages, most often rough, blurry abstractions drawn from memories of hiking in the White Mountains or walking in the Botanical Garden, I had the epiphany that I suspect happens to most painters when they're about twelve years old: I realized the complexity of the flow and drip of the paint on at the tip and up and down the edges of the paintbrush, how little I understood about controlling it, and how stimulating it was to feel that for an instant I had controlled it, that I'd managed to get a line or an arrangement of lines and color right.  The deep sense of rightness, which I experience both as a capacity of reflective judgment and as an instinctual reaction, is much stronger when working with the paintbrush than when carving and stamping printing-blocks, especially when multiple colors are in play along the brush-hairs--or brush-tines, as the case may be, since I am so unskilled that my paint clumps, making my paintbrush look rather like a paint-fork.
In his review (abstract) of the enormous De Kooning show up through next week at MOMA, Peter Schjeldahl noted that when you look at a De Kooning painting you feel "anchored." That word captures something at the heart of my sense of rightness (or wrongness) when I paint a line.  Something about the relation of line to line (especially in my Stella-like stripes) reinforces my sense of myself in relation to the object.  But this does not, importantly, lead to egocentric self-reflection: I am not feeling more myself.  I am feeling myself in relation to something else whose motivations I need only pause and reflect upon (if I'm willing and able to devote some time to it) in order to grasp.  Which makes me leap to the question -- what values and expectations go into creating that sense of anchored questioning?
Jeremy Tanner, an art historian I met this summer at a conference on aesthetics in London, commented in his TLS review of Richard Neer's study The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture on the "informing polarities" that Neer sees in Greek image-making: "surface/depth, presence/absence, body/soul."  This year I want to dig into the informing polarities of image-making in both politics and art, and I think I will gain insight into them by making more art.  

End of 2011

A couple years back I read a survey about first-time bloggers: something over 70% stop blogging within 90 days.  That was about as far as I got last spring, so my identification with the demos is secure!  Between administration, teaching, writing, and recovering from my February skiing accident, last spring went by in a flash.  And this fall was just as hectic, as I worked on teaching, wrapping up my book Talk About Virtue, and various Morse Academic Plan (NYU core curriculum) projects and programs.
The highlights of the fall in the MAP were lunchtime presentations to the MAP faculty and graduate students by Richard Arum, my NYU colleague and the author of the terrific, terrifying, and inspiring Academically Adrift; Louis Menand and Alison Simmons came to speak on the re-shaping of the Harvard core; and Menand spoke a second time on topics addressed in his insightful book The Marketplace of Ideas.
Another highlight of my fall--though I'm not sure every student would agree--was teaching my large Texts and Ideas course, part of the core curriculum, for which this blog is named: The Deliberating Citizen.  More on that later.
Finally, I must mention Occupy Wall Street, a movement I was initially very skeptical about but which has become a central interest.  More on that later, too.
Now it's New Year's Eve, my particular friend is preparing pasta Bolognese, the champagne is chilling, and doubtless like thousands of bloggers around the globe, I commit to trying again with this blog in 2012!

Esa Pekka strikes again

Another glorious evening (with one dry spell: badly rehearsed Haydn with a very dull first violin) at Avery Fisher tonight as Esa Pekka drew a stunning performance of Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle out of the enormous orchestra, along with a radiant Michelle de Young and a brooding Gabor Bretz.  Yes, these are cliches when applied to a soprano and a bass, but in this case, they were realized on stage with real power.  De Young was seductive, playful, frightened, repulsed, intrigued, hopeful, and loving in turns -- not only in her expressions, but in her voice; and Bretz was tragically woeful, anxious, and sexy, violent bass version of Tony Leung.  (I'm a fan of Wong Kar Wai, and I'm reading "Three Kingdoms," so I have wuxia films on the brain.)

Though I'm exceptionally busy teaching, writing a proposal for the American Philological Association, and preparing two lectures to give in Canada this Thursday/Friday, the few hours of listening at Lincoln Center were exemplary of the kind of otium Cicero finds most refreshing:

Quaeres a nobis, Grati, cur tanto opere hoc homine delectemur. Quia suppeditat nobis ubi et animus ex hoc forensi strepitu reficiatur, et aures convicio defessae conquiescant. An tu existimas aut suppetere nobis posse quod cotidie dicamus in tanta varietate rerum, nisi animos nostros doctrina excolamus; aut ferre animos tantam posse contentionem, nisi eos doctrina eadem relaxemus?

You're asking me, Gratius, why I take so much delight in this man (the poet Archias, whose Roman citizenship Cicero is defending).  Because he provides me with a place where my spirit may be refreshed from the noise in the lawcourt, and my ears, worn out from arguments, can relax.  Do you think that speaking daily on such a wide variety of topics can come easily to us if we fail to cultivate our souls with learning?  Or do you think that our souls can bear such heavy strain, if we do not relax them with this same learning?    

Perhaps Haydn, Ligeti, and Bartok aren't doctrina, exactly--Cicero is speaking of literary pleasures--but I persist in thinking that his point applies.   

Hungarian Echoes and contemporary music

Last Thursday I got on the subway very ready to listen to some music.  It had been a busy, appointment-filled day -- largely administrative meetings rather than wrestling with conceptual problems -- and while those days leave me tired out, my brain isn't "full" in the way it can feel after a long afternoon reading Arendt or Horace.  Also, we had bumped into Esa-Pekka Salonen on the plane from Chicago last Sunday (though I didn't approach him to say how happy I was that he was conducting in New York, since he had that harried, Sunday-evening-flight look on his face that I know intimately from the mirror), so there was a small touch of close-brush-with-celebrity excitement in play as well.   I've liked Esa-Pekka for years, mainly because he has always struck me as the real thing, not only a strong conductor with an ambitious vision and good taste who, as I understand it, helped make the LA Philharmonic a great hall but an accomplished composer and (always important for me, I confess) an attractive, charismatic presence on stage.

While I was anticipating a satisfying evening, my expectations were overturned -- not the moment the concert began, with Haydn's sixth Symphony (Le Matin), which the orchestra played perfectly well -- but with the opening chords and bangs of Ligeti's Piano Concerto.  I didn't know a thing about modern music when I was young, but now I can't imagine life without it, and the gloriously well-constructed yet explosive hotch-potch of ideas and sounds in the Ligeti reminded me how much I have come to rely on musical experiences to reveal something important about the modern world.
The concert ended with Bartok's Concert for Orchestra, more familiar than Ligeti, rousingly played, the waves of passionate sound produced by the massive string sections at some points just grazing a resemblance to the best possible film music.  (That's a compliment, in this case.  I'm not talking about Howard Shore!)

Busy month of recovery

In mid-February I took a nasty fall on the slopes of Squaw Valley, California, and suffered a severe concussion that's made keeping up with the blog (let alone the daily work-pile) very challenging.  I'm now more or less back on track and have plenty to say, starting with my reading over the past few weeks -- more de Beauvoir, Christopher Isherwood, and Robert Pippin on movies, as well as Esa-Pekka Salonen's marvelous concert series "Hungarian Echoes."  Now, dinner followed by a concert of new music in Brooklyn.  Until soon!    

A delightful moment in Adams

Opera rarely summons up a grin quite like the one I had on my face at this moment (4.20 in the clip).
And here's the scene I mentioned yesterday, where Pat Nixon comes into her own:

I'm finding that Nixon in China has an unexpected capacity to resonate with things I'm thinking about (mass communication, the nature of civic art, tyranny and self-absorption in Seneca's Thyestes) as well as the quotidian practices of life (planning trips, choosing clothes to wear, interacting with people of different ethnicities, running meetings, dealing with the unpredictable and irrational behaviors encouraged by certain types of institutional hierarchy).

DuBois and Cicero

As I rush to finish up a paper for a conference publication on panegyric that concentrates on Cicero's praise of Caesar in the Pro Marcello, I turn to W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk -- which Jim Tatum's and Bill Cook's terrific book African American Writers and Classical Tradition led me to reread a couple of months ago, and which a new paper in progress by Sharon Krause on non-sovereign freedom reminds me of again today -- in particular, DuBois' painfully acute insights into "the sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." Cicero's speech is painful to read for related reasons: it is a proclamation of self-abnegation and obedience in a voice that insists on responsibility, volition, will, and agency even as it marks how these things are withering away--worse, how the very effort to recapture them is advancing their destruction.  What gives Cicero a heroic stature in this flattery-filled speech is his insistence on seeking a way forward through the experience of self-loss.  

Nixon in China

Though baritone James Maddalena (singing Nixon) was not in good voice, the Met's debut of John Adams' Nixon in China was thoroughly engrossing.   Since last night my thoughts have returned repeatedly to three moments in the opera, which I'll just mention quickly for now in the hope of elaborating further on them tomorrow.  First, Nixon's's lines at the start (perhaps among the best known of the libretto):    
News, news, news, news, news, news, news has a kind of mystery, mystery, mystery
When I shook hands with Chou En-lai
On this bare field outside Peking
Just now, the world was listening, listening, listening
These lines are sung in a staccato that conveys Nixon's excited self-importance but that also hints at a stutter, recalling to me themes of anxiety, guilt, fear, and self-censorship from Melville's Billy Budd (which I'm rereading right now for other reasons).
Second, the repetitive hum shot through with fleeting lyric fragments accompanying many busy scenes filled with people--Americans, Chinese, soldiers, dancers, diplomats, banqueters, street-cleaners.  No sound in an opera house is, I think, so utterly demotic.
Third, Pat Nixon's remark (beautifully sung as wry, comical, and sympathetic all at once) "This is prophetic," lifted from her recorded comments during a tour of Peking: the line ripped her character out of the playbook I'd at first thought she'd been plugged into, the reluctant First Lady, and gave her an heroic, almost biblical dimension.
Just a start, since I'm still on post-concussion hours.  

  

Howard University, the pleasures of survey, and reading notes

Now more or less post-concussion, I'm getting back to work with Helen Morales, with whom I co-wrote a letter to TLS a few weeks ago, on the possible rescue of Howard University's Classics department.

When I teach the graduate survey of Latin literature, as I'm doing this term, I find it difficult to take it seriously as work: it's too close to sheer pleasure.  The imperial canon is fascinating, the state of scholarly criticism is generally high, and the students (invested in doing the reading as preparation for their exams) have interesting things to say.  Unfortunately the concussion has put some pressure on that preparation, and put a serious crimp in my other reading, so along with Seneca's Thyestes, this week I did little more than indulge myself with watching one of the very few television shows I take real delight in, no doubt in part for its slash value (see my earlier comments on Patrick O'Brian).

On a more adult note, I made notes for future reading: Jane Kneller's Kant and the Power of Imagination; Nightingale and Sedley's Ancient Models of Mind; and Jim Porter's huge new book on Greek aesthetics.

Tonight: John Adams' Nixon in China.

Concussed but recovering

I fell or was crashed into at Squaw Valley last week; I have no memory of the event or the subsequent ten hours or so, but after a week of concussion-caused brain fog and exhaustion, I'm well on the road to recovery.
Recent reading includes the last of Patrick O'Brian's glorious sea novels, Blue at the Mizzen, which I read with real regret that there are no more to come (I will not read "21," tugged out of O'Brian's notes).
I vividly recall my first encounter with O'Brian in a used bookstore on Valencia Street in San Francisco in 1998 or 1999: the book (Master and Commander) caught my eye, in one of those happy accidents you come to wish with all your heart had happened years before; I pulled it off the shelf, crouched on my heels to get out of other customers' hair, opened the book, and over an hour later realized that my knees were close to permanently locked in their deep bend -- so utterly had the book pulled me into its world.  (I reacted the same way a couple of years later to J.G.A. Pocock's Machiavellian Moment, when I lifted it out of its Amazon box on the floor of my study, a few blocks away from that bookstore, and came up for air in a state of shocked excitement hours later.)
Fellow discoverers will recognize that first thrill of meeting the Aubrey/Maturin pair (which I am far from the first to write about).  Put all thoughts of the movie out of your head:

The music-room in the Governor's House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet.  The players, Italians pinned against the far wall by rows and rows of little round gilt chairs, were playing with passionate conviction as they mounted towards the penultimate crescendo, towards the tremendous pause and the deep, liberating final chord.  And on the little gilt chairs at least some of the audience were following the rise with an equal intensity: there were two in the third row, on the left-hand side; and they happened to be sitting next to one another.  The listener farther to the left was a man of between twenty and thirty whose big form overflowed his seat, leaving only a streak of gilt wood to be seen here and there.  He was wearing his best uniform--the white-lapelled blue coat, white waistcoat, breeches and stockings of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, with the silver medal of the Nile in his buttonhole--and the deep white cuff of his gold-buttoned sleeve beat the time, while his bright blue eyes, staring from what would have been a pink-and-white face if it had not been so deeply tanned, gazed fixedly at the bow of the first violin.  The high note came, the pause, the resolution; and with the resolution the sailor's fist swept firmly down upon his knee. He leant back in his chair, extinguishing it entirely, sighed happily and turned towards his neighbour with a smile.  The words 'Very finely played, sir, I believe' were formed in his gullet if not quite in his mouth when he caught the cold and indeed inimical look and heard the whisper, 'If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead.'
              Jack Aubrey's face instantly changed from friendly ingenuous communicative pleasure to an expression of somewhat baffled hostility: he could not but acknowledge that he had been beating the time; and although he had certainly done so with perfect accuracy, in itself the thing was wrong.