Changing times and changing technology can sometime steal from us things we once had. And sometimes what they steal is hard to replace. Consider the means we have all had and used for knowing the world, and knowing what is real. The common expression is “seeing is believing.” The courts rely on witness testimony and reject as hearsay second-hand evidence. And in a range of moral and religious settings, we emphasize the importance of bearing witness.
Photographs today are from my favorite Chilean Puppet Theatre Group SILENCIO BLANCO. Make believe where it belongs: in art and on the stage.
There is surely no question that first-hand viewing of an event or a situation is enormously compelling. Consider a peculiar Gedanken-experiment: imagine that we have you stand at the edge of a roof, blindfolded, and we urge you to step off the edge. We race to reassure you, though, that you will fall only 18 inches, because there is a safe and secure net positioned so that you are in no danger. We tell you this. We arrange for your best friend to tell you this. We arrange for your spiritual advisor to tell you this. But no matter who tells you, surely you would be more comfortable if you could lift the blindfold and inspect the safety net for yourself. There really is no substitute for first-hand, visual evidence.
This reliance on first hand-experience, and the powerful visual evidence it provides, is at risk from multiple threats. In a recent NYT editorial on partisan perception, Paul Krugman lamented that in our insanely polarized world, we have to reverse the original aphorism, because now “Believing is Seeing.” In other words, people’s opinions and beliefs are so heavily entrenched that they are ready to discount, or reinterpret, or flatly refuse the evidence of their own eyes. We see this, for example, in people’s refusing to acknowledge the videos by eyewitnesses documenting the horrors and war crimes happening in Gaza, or the carnage wrought by Hamas on October 7th.
In some cases, people are so committed to their views, that they refuse even to consider, even to look at visual evidence that will challenge their view. In other cases people choose not to look, because seeing would be too painful. This is understandable, but means people underestimate, or fully fail to understand, the extent of the horrors. Importantly, in many cases, people flatly deny the truth of what they see and declare it faked. In still other cases, people are not permitted to see the visual evidence – a state or an agency monitoring what gets published, fully aware of the impact the prohibited visuals might have.
All of these points are fueled by the rapid advances in digital photography. Speaking as a well practiced montage artist, I, of course, have a sense of how easily images can be manipulated to make them show what you want to show. But what artistry allows is dwarfed by what digital technology makes available to anyone who wishes to manufacture bogus evidence for almost any claim they wish to advance.
Here is a short list what bad actors using AI have already managed to fake in order to influence the 2024 elections. We are stuck with a situation where multiple factors combine: videos are either true or false, and we are told that they are either true or false (irrespective of their actual truth content) and we ourselves have to decide if we trust them or not- a difficult task, magnified by our desire to believe those we generally trust and who tell us to adopt their claims.
(If you are interested in a deeper exploration of the legal issues around regulating media deep fakes in the political arena, the Brennan Center for Justice has a great overview here.)
What to do? The power and immediacy of first hand experience is likely hardwired into us, making us appallingly vulnerable to things like deep fakes. The apprehension that we encounter fake input and fall for it can lead to a different disaster, however: to avoid being duped, we end up trusting no input. The solution may require a set of new habits. When you encounter information, do what you can to check it against other independent sources. (This is, of course, increasingly difficult as Murdoch and Sinclair take over more and more media outlets.) When you encounter information, do what you can to scrutinize who it is that is supplying the information. Be wary of “semi-anonymous” reporting, with entries like “a new study has shown…” or “it is reported that.”
The deepest problem here, though, is that many people don’t have the skills, resources or the inclination to take these cautionary steps. And so instead, they simply latch onto a single source that they deem trustworthy. Unfortunately this choice may lead them to rely on lunatic propaganda. Furthermore, selecting different sources of input as trustworthy, with the young relying on social media videos coming directly out of Gaza, filmed by eyewitnesses, and the old relying on Fox news, or the main stream media that avoid showing videos of the suffering unfolding in Gaza in the first place, further feeds the political polarization (one only has to look at the generational divide in people’s taking sides in this conflict, which doesn’t come out of nowhere.) “Propaganda!” each societal subset shouts against the other.
The habit of seeing is believing cements in place views that may be based on incomplete or distorted input. Something that once was a valuable capacity can these days become an obstacle to the truth. I wish I had a solution.
Walk with me. A slow, short amble through a park modeled after old English country estates. Weather in tune, soft rains alternating with violent deluges, making me clutch the camera under my raincoat, seeking shelter under old fir trees, since the paths are too slippery to run back to the car. Or what goes for running these days.
Signs of early spring everywhere, snowdrops dotted with rain,
scilla peaking out among them,
aconite trying to pretend sun(s) still exist.
Camelias bringing some red to the palette
Crocci abundant, some hiding from the rain.
A fragrant edgeworthia paper-bush attracts the very first bee.
Center of my attention, though, were the hellebores, pummeled by the rain, bitten by earlier frost, struggling this year to develop their full glory. I had just learned some fascinating new facts about them (you might remember that I write about them almost every spring, so partial to them.) More importantly, these facts connect to something that modern science is beginning to explore: the relationship between our guts (literally, stomach and intestines) and that of our mental health. (I am going to summarize sources from here and here, and also a recent essay in the Atlantic discussing our preoccupation with gut health.)
Hellebores were linked to madness already in Greek mythology, not as a cause but as a cure, quieting the unruly, “hysteric” young daughters of a king. We find evidence for medicinal use in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as earlier writers, and the practice of using it to “heal” hysteria, epilepsy, mania and depression, lasted for centuries, documented across Europe, from early Romans to 18th century England. Paracelsus sang its praises. Wondrous cures were reported over and over again.
The plant contains helleborine and its derivatives are cardio-toxic glukosides, similar to digitalis. Ingestion even of only the seeds can prove to be fatal. The toxic compound protoanemonin, once swallowed by humans, causes “vomiting, inflammation of the mouth and throat, [and] abdominal pain and diarrhea that can be followed by severe ulcerations of the mouth and damage to the digestive and urinary systems.” The one saving grace might be that it induces vomiting so fast that not enough of the substance remains to kill you.
The roots were pulverized and put in a concoction that led to violent purging with excrements taking on a black color, interpreted to be the evil humors that left your body, the later now ready to heal, mind included. If dosage was mistaken, it led to death. The line between panacea and poison, miracle dram and murderous draught, was a thin one. But the psychological assumptions of emotions being lodged in the belly, and needing to be driven out, if maladaptive, were anything but thin: the perceived violence of Hellebore’s laxative action were seen as the necessary equivalent of the violence and perceived grossness of mental illness, to be forcefully exiled.
In the 17th century, doctors started to discuss the problems with something so potentially lethal, advocating for its use only in the most stubborn cases, and purging with less dangerous substances, like Senna, instead. The symbol of Hellebore was however also taken up by religious crusaders, talking about the need for sinners and “spiritually diseased” people to take the hellebore cure, thus intertwining moral with medical issues, with deranged emotions being at the core of both. Cleansing was necessary both to maintain health, but also to achieve pure spiritual interiors, free from demonic possession.
“Viewed in this light, a prescription of hellebore becomes about much more than just the removal of corrupted physical matter. The black substance voided from the bowels was the embodiment of the evil cast out, with the site of spiritual transformation being neither the soul nor the mind but the gut. Taking hellebore presented many of the same dangers as the condition it purported to cure: loss of control, internal corruption, and the very real possibility of death. By forcibly confronting sufferers with their own embodiment, it offered a temporary reprieve from the existential anguish of madness and melancholy. In doing so, it confirmed what many godly individuals already believed: that their bodies were vile and filthy vessels and that their best hope for deliverance lay in abasement before God.”
If we leave G-d and evil out of the discussion (although certain parts of our political establishment seem to bend over backwards to get them back in again…) what do we know scientifically about the gut-brain connection?
Gut and brain communicate through a number of pathways. There is the Vagus nerve, that sends info to the brain with neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine as messengers. Over 90 percent of the body’s serotonin—the neurochemical targeted by the class of commonly prescribed antidepressant medications that includes Prozac, Zoloft, and Lexapro—resides in the small intestine, facilitating multidirectional communication between the digestive tract and the central nervous system. If our gut’s fragile microbial balance is upended, it sends a message to the immune system, which may trigger gastrointestinal inflammation.
There is also an association (not a determined causal relationship) between gastrointestinal disorders and some psychiatric conditions, including bipolar disorder and depression. People who live with schizophrenia have higher rates of GI inflammation than the population as a whole. People who struggle with IBS [irritable bowel syndrome] are often also diagnosed with anxiety disorders.
This explains why we have an emerging field of nutritional psychiatry that teaches patients about the appropriate foods that might reduce inflammation — namely grains and plants rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber and pre- and probiotics. No need to buy expensive probiotic supplements that have sprung up like mushrooms provided by an industry ready to cash in; yoghurt, kimchi and sauerkraut all do the job just fine. Hellebore smoothies, however, will likely not be recommended!
Music today offers a bit of madness – demons and all, Faust riding with Mephistopheles, having sold his soul….
Full Opera (Berlioz’ The Damnation of Faust) here, with Solti conducting.
““I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos — and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo.”
Last week I visited Africa Fashion and Black Artists of Oregon at the Portland Art Museum, downstairs and upstairs in the main building, respectively. Downstairs was empty, upstairs was jumping, middle of a weekday, for a show that has been open since September. I started my rounds on top and my eye was immediately caught by a group of young women motionless, except for their heads.
What were they staring at? Bent over, studying, then four heads lifting in unison, looking at each other, then bending again, back and forth, like a silent dance. Once the young women left, I walked over to see for myself and found this:
damali ayo Rent a Negro.com (2003) You can listen to the artist explain the evolution of this work here.
What reaction would an interactive piece like this, riffing on the commodification and objectification of Black labor, elicit in high school students who are most likely not (yet) too familiar with conceptual art? One of the first satirical pieces of internet art, damali ayo‘s Rent-a-Negro is an ingenious take on the system that has progressed from purchasing and owning the Black body to leasing it (although prison labor needs to be considered a form of slavery, if you ask me,) to using token Blacks to satisfy demands for “diversity.” How would it be processed by the Black high-schoolers in contrast to those like me, old White folk? Rage and revulsion by those whose ancestors were subjected to exploitation and oppression, ongoing even? Shame and sorrow by those whose forbears might have wielded the whip and ran the auctions, with patterns of discrimination not a thing of the past?
Julian V.L. Gaines Painfully Positive (2021)
Ray Eaglin Maid in USA (1990)
Fanon’s insight that someone like me will not be able to understand certain forms of art as they would be by those from whom it originates, popped up in my head with urgency. And this leads to one of the elephants in the room that needs to get aired: how does a White woman review exhibitions of Black art with the depth and understanding they deserve, while aware that the racial, potentially distorting, lens cannot be abandoned? It is naive, bordering on ignorant, to assume that art can be seen, understood, felt in some neutral fashion, when our implicit stereotypes guide our interpretations, and when our lack of knowledge specific to the history of a community affects our comprehension.
Tammy Jo Wilson She became the Seed (2021)
Al Goldsby Looking West (ca. 1970)
Furthermore, any reviewer aware of their implicit biases and wishing to be an ally to those who are burdened with historical or ongoing discrimination, will walk on eggshells. You want to avoid harsh criticism, or piling onto stereotypes, or being overly deferential, despite all of that being already a form of unequal treatment, born from awareness of culture constructed around race. You so want to avoid putting your foot in your mouth and appear arrogant.
Or racist.
Thelma Johnson Streat Monster the Whale (1940)
Mark Little Despondent (1991)
Isaka Shamsud- Din Land of the Empire Builder (2019)
I vividly remember a lecture I gave about the psychology of racism on invitation by PAM in the context of a Carrie Mae Weems exhibition over a decade ago. I talked about the Implicit Associations Test – IAT – the psychological measure that confirms how many of us hold stereotypical assumptions associated with racism. It is a test that looks at the strength of associations between concepts and even the most liberal takers have gasped at their scores. Mind you, it does not mean you are a racist; it just tells us that we have all learned associations between concepts that involve stereotypes associated with Blacks. Some in the audience erupted in anger, astute, educated, intelligent docents among them. That could not be true! They fought against racism all their lives! I clearly failed in getting the point across: there is a difference between consciously acting on your stereotypes and unconsciously being affected by them. But even the latter was denied by these well-meaning citizens.
Jason Hill Lion King (2019)
In any case, one can have read brilliant work like Franz Fanon’s about the Black psyche in a White world, racial differences, revolutionary struggle and the effects of colonialism until the cows come home, it will not ease the task of reviewing exhibitions like the one currently on view. Not that that has kept me from doing so, most recently with Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems in Dialogue at the Getty and Red Thread/Green Earthwhich showed work of several members of the Abioto family at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.
But it has made me aware of how much I already censor in my head, how worried I am about the reception of my takes, and the damage they could do, how my approach to work are colored by the political context, something that would not happen if I just walked into any old show of a collection of artists, race unknown.
Ralph Chessé The Black Women Work (1921)
Bobby Fouther Study in Black (2023)
***
The current exhibition was curated by Intisar Abioto after years of research into the spectrum of Black artists in Oregon, some famous, some locally known, some hidden in the embrace of their community. She put together a remarkable show, and her line of thinking as well as the expanse of the art is fully explained in a in-depth review by my ArtsWatch colleague Laurel Reed Pavic, who talked to the curator and listened to her podcasts about the exhibition. (You can listen to the podcasts yourself – they range from general introduction to a number of interviews with individual participating artists.)
My first association to the upstairs show was the contrast to what is exhibited downstairs, African Fashion. Previously shown at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, the latter was hailed as a vital and necessary exhibition by eminent art critics. It felt to me, however, like one of those luxury fruit baskets filled with luscious and exotic goods, wrapped in cellophane with a glittery bow – something that often does not live up to its visual promise when you are actually starting to peel the fruit.
Contrast that with the show upstairs: like a farm-to-table box dropped off at your doorstep, stuffed to the brim, packed to overflowing, with produce you sometimes don’t even recognize, but all locally grown and, most importantly, invariably, truly nourishing.
Katherine Pennington Busstop II (2023)
Latoya Lovely Neon Woman (2019)
Packed is the operative word here, 69 artists and over 200 objects, sorted into categories like “expanse, gathering, collective liberating,inheritance, collective presence, and definitions. The art is competing for space, focus, time and attention, with those limited resources not meeting demand. I assume it was a conscious curatorial decision. If you have, finally, a public space willing to open up to a neglected or even excluded collective of artists (collective in the sense of a shared history rather than a shared goal,) you might as well grab the opportunity and allow every one in the community a shot. This is particularly true when you don’t know what the future holds and which opportunities emerge in times where the racial justice backlash is raising its ugly head ever more prominently. Yet you do early-career artists, no matter how promising, no favor when placing them among the hard hitters.
Henry Frison African Prince (1976-79) with details
Alternatively, the inclusion of so many art works might have been a conscious attempt to demonstrate the diversity that is offered by a community long segregated from traditional art venues, never mind neighborhoods. It might be an attempt to shift what psychologists call the outgroup homogeneity bias, our tendency to assume that attitudes, values, personality traits, and other characteristics are more alike for outgroup members than ingroup members. “They are all the same! Know one, you know them all!” As a result, outgroup members are at risk of being seen as interchangeable or expendable, and they are more likely to be stereotyped. This perception of sameness holds true regardless of whether the outgroup is another race, religion, nationality, and so on.
That bias certainly affects what we expect (particularly, when our expectations are driven by other cognitive biases as well.) Our unconscious expectation of less diversity in the creative expressions of the art were certainly put in doubt with the plethora of work put up by Abioto. In confirmation of the bias – and thus the value of her curatorial decisions – I certainly caught myself regularly looking for a common thread of political statements, however indirect, commenting on the experience of being Black in Oregon, a notoriously racist state.
MOsley WOtta Baba was a Black Sheep (2023)
The history can be found here in detail. Simply put, Oregon had not one but three separate Black exclusion laws anchored in the Oregon Constitution and it took until 2001 to scrap the last bit of discriminatory language from the records.
We are one of the nation’s whitest states, and had at some point the highest Ku Klux Klan membership numbers nationally. Of our 4.2 million Oregon residents only about 6% are Black, and many of these have been displaced within the state over and over again, making room for construction projects and/or gentrification of neighborhoods. Nonetheless, Black leadership and organizations providing support for education, including the arts, are resilient and effective. (A recently updated essay by S. Renee Mitchell provides a thorough introduction to these achievements. Another informative article about Black pioneers can be found here.)
Arvie Smith Strange Fruit (1992) Detail below
Much of the art reflects the history, referencing the pain and injustice of lived as well as inherited experience. But there were also pieces that simply depicted beauty, documented landscape, revered what is. No message necessary or intended. It is a conversation I would love to have about all art, at this moment in time, how our ability and willingness to make art outside the need to bear witness, or instruct, or frighten, or alert to social change needed, is obstructed by multiple internal and external forces – but that has to wait for another time.
Sadé DuBoise Collective Mourn (2023) with detail
For this exhibition there was more art on display than could possibly be processed during a single visit. But all of it was nourishing, even in passing, as I tried to express in my initial description – food for thought, yes, as well as a feast for the eyes.
Natalie Ball Mapping Coyote Black, June 12 and 13, 1987 (2015)
Natalie Ball Mapping Coyote Black , June 12 and 13, 1872 (2015) (Artist new to me, enchanted by the work.)
I felt at times as if I was, if not an invited, surely a tolerated guest at a family reunion – meeting of long lost friends and relatives, happy to run into each other, artists introducing each other. It was a vivid, social experience during a time where I am still socially isolated due to the pandemic, even if I was standing double-masked at the margins, observing so many people truly engaging with art, potentially new to them. Twice (!) I was asked to take photographs of people who had met at the museum by chance and talked to each other in front of this or that piece.
I left the museum more hopeful than after any of the recent shows I’ve been reviewing (and the last year included some real winners!). The vibrancy of the work on the walls and the liveliness, even giddiness of the social interactions of many visiting generations all conveyed a sense of resilience and optimism that somehow rubbed off onto me. I might not get the songs of the Congo, but I do have an inkling, provided by this exhibition, of what local Black art stands for: a community that refuses to let go of history, no matter how painful. A community that believes in a more just tomorrow as well, forever willing to fight for it, no matter how hard that is made by the rest of us. A community standing its ground, with art that reflects that strength.
Let’s treat ourselves with something amusing, if slightly moralistic, at the end of this week: a short animated film about the strenuous efforts of parental love. Enjoy the clip while you can, because much darker contemplations follow in short order…
Would a parent risk their own life, like we’ve seen in that charming animation, if that pregnancy was violently imposed on them, created by rape, and secured by laws that demand forced birth? You probably have seen the same statistics as I did this week, horrifying enough that I could not just ignore them.
Since the SC Dobbs decision revoked the rights and protections offered by Roe vs Wade not so many months ago, some 64.500 pregnancies resulted from rape in the 14 states that now have complete abortion bans. (If that number is not horrifying enough, think about this one: it is estimated that 5% of all rapes result in pregnancy. That means that you have a 20 fold number of rapes that occurred in these states, within less than two years.
Friderike Heuer Jupiter’s Moons (2023) Figures by Paula Modersohn Becker (1876 – 1907)
What do we know about children born from rape? Psychologists have identified a number of factors that severely impact the development of these secondary victims of the crime. Risk factors are pregnancy and delivery, bad parent-child relationships, stigmatization and discrimination, identity issues, and, last but not least, significant numbers of infants being farmed out to foster care where they often enter a cycle of violence themselves since that system is not in good shape or under supervision.
The post-traumatic stress experienced by the mothers who were raped can influence the development in utero of these babies, as does the frequent intake of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications to deal with the horrors of PTSD, or self-medicating with alcohol and/or drugs, substances that affect embryonic development.
For many mothers it is hard to love a child that was forced on them twice, first by the rapist and then the state depriving them of bodily choices. According to the research literature, communities treat children of rape with disdain and families, communities and the children themselves are hyper-vigilantly looking for negative traits that might have come down to them from the criminal.
Many of these children, later on trying to get a handle on their identity, want to know their fathers despite the harm those brought upon their mothers, and that leads to internal conflict and a sense of guilt, particularly if these rapes occurred during war times.
These combined factors, exacerbated by the rape victims’ shame and/or anger, predict serious mental health consequences for the majority of children born this way.
Friderike Heuer Aphrodite (2023) Portraits by Helene Schjerfbeck (1862 – 1946)
As I said, I could not avoid touching on these issues, given their political importance in a country that is trying to take rights and decisions away from women, and willfully ignores what happens to their children as well.
Let’s have music that might lift the mood a bit, again related to some sort of animation. When was the last time you listened to Peter and the Wolf? There is a reason it has had such staying power.
Today’s photomontages are from an ongoing series that attempts to bring painters I cherish into my contemporary world. The two on offer happen to depict women protecting their children in landscapes I photographed in the US and in Europe.)
A scientific paper I recently encountered set off an intriguing line of thought about our reactions to art and artists. Let’s start with the obvious fact that artists are people, and so some of them are lovely folks with good values; and some are jerks. Should our assessment of the artist as a person color how we think about their artistic productions themselves? The article I read starts with a striking finding. The authors, Joe Siev and Jacob Teeny of the University of Virginia and Northwestern University respectively, surveyed 634 cases in which university faculty had been punished for some type of sexual misconduct, and went through an elaborate rating process to assess, first, how serious the transgression was, and, second, how serious the punishment was.
Helen Frankenthaler Skywriting (1997)
Skipping all the details, the blunt finding is this: at whatever level of transgression you choose, the artists received more extreme punishment than scientists. Specifically, the average level of punishment for the artists included the fact that they were suspended, or placed on leave, or their contracts were not renewed. For the scientists the average level of punishment was less severe. Honors were revoked or salaries reduced, but they were less likely to lose their jobs on average.
Helen Frankenthaler Free Fall (1992-93)
What is going on here? The authors of the paper offer the suggestion that, for artists, we cannot easily separate their professional output (their paintings, sculptures, compositions, etc.) from who the person is. This notion is rooted in the idea that artists’ output is, in important ways, a reflection of the artists’ emotional makeup, their perspective on the world, and their personality. For scientists, it is proposed that we can more readily separate who the person is from what they do professionally. Presumably this is a reflection of the assumption that scientific work is more likely to be objective, more likely to be governed by rigid rules about procedure and analysis, and in all of these ways just less personal. The authors therefor propose that a process referred to as moral decoupling, the ability or willingness to sever the work from the person, applies to scientists more readily than to artists.
Helen Frankenthaler CEDAR HILL (1983)
I worry that this explanation to some extent mythologizes how scientists work. I also worry, that there may be other ways to think about the data. (The article lists multiple follow-up experiments designed to exclude alternative explanations, something I do not have the space here to discuss.) And note: the contrast between artists and scientists disappears if the moral transgression is directly related to their work, for example an instance of outright plagiarism or fabrication of data. These work-related offenses costs scientists as well.
Yet the upsetting fact of differential punishment for the respective professions remains, and is troubling in a number of ways. As one concern, it raises questions about inequitable treatment, when some professional commits some moral offense. But the result also invites questions about whether we can, or should, separate our evaluation of the artist from our evaluation of their work.
Helen Frankenthaler Spoleto (1972)
One famous example is the huge condemnation of Woody Allen for his misdeeds, a condemnation that has led essentially to a boycott of his movies by many people, myself included. It is interesting to ask, whether this condemnation leads people to believe the movies themselves are less good, or whether the experience of watching a movie by Allen has itself become distasteful (I come down on the latter explanation.)
I wrestle with these issues in my own approach to certain art works and artists. For example, I took off my walls work by Emil Nolde, someone I had revered since childhood and had personal connections to, once his moral transgressions as a supporter of the Nazi regime, NS philosophy and virulent anti-Semitism became clear. (I wrote about all this previously here.) Even though my assessment of his work product, his art, has not changed – I still consider it brilliant – the man and the work have been canceled in my house. I simply refuse to be reminded of the betrayal.
Similarly, I had recently written a long diatribe in these pages in favor of canceling Salvador Dali, unable to decouple his work, still considered amazing, from the moral failures of that artist.
Helen Frankenthaler Westwind (1997)
Then again, I continue to listen to Wagner, even though he embraced Nazi ideology and was generally a pretty wicked human being. It is a guilty pleasure, listening to something that should be ignored if I were only true to my own standards. Not exactly a principled approach.
The possible connection between artist and their output was also felt in my reaction to the works on display in today’s photographs, the prints of Helen Frankenthaler currently on view at OJMCHE. Let me hasten to add I know of nothing she has done wrong, in sharp contrast to Nolde, Dali or Wagner. I just know that she was in a 5 year relationship with a critic who I despise for political reasons. I also know that she very much tried to make her mark as a woman in a field then dominated by men, even though her talent towers high over many of them. These bits of background information colored the way I read her prints, and how I experienced her work in ways that struck me as a tad too demonstrative and intellectually constructed (with one exception, a flowing print I really liked, below.) (For a positive, learned, detailed review of the show by my ArtsWatch colleague Laurel Reed Pavic, go here. I should also add that Frankenthaler’s work is incredibly beloved by most viewers. I seem to be the odd person out.)
I wonder how I would have reacted to the work if I had no idea who produced it.
Helen Frankenthaler Flirt (2003)
In sum, I wish I had a clear vision of why I canceled Nolde, but continue to regard Wagner’s music as tolerable even if listening to it has to be acknowledged as a guilty pleasure. These are mysteries to contemplate. In the meantime, and consistent with the article I discussed, it’s plain that, at least some times, I am unable to separate my views of the artist from my reactions to the work. Why this happens, and why there is inconsistency in how this plays out, remains to be answered.
Helen Frankenthaler Untitled From What Red Lines Can Do (1970)
Music today is in memory of a brilliant talent who died today 8 years ago. No guilty pleasure here with his last album, just pure, unadulterated longing that David Bowie could have lived and made music a little longer.
“Art must be an integral part of the struggle. It can’t simply mirror what’s taking place. It must adapt itself to human needs. It must ally itself with the forces of liberation. The fact is, artists have always been propagandists. I have no use for artists who try to divorce themselves from the struggle.”
–Charles White in Jeffrey Elliot, “Charles White: Portrait of an Artist,” Negro History Bulletin 41, no. 3
Part of this quote greets you when you visit MoMa’s artist page for Charles White. I had tried to figure out which visual artists managed to do the impossible: find ways to depict how to pursue change, as a society, as a nation, as individuals, rather than reminding us of the existing woes. Painting historical events is an indirect way of doing so. Those works show us the injustice, or the suffering, or the might of those who rule, potentially appealing to our conscience or raising our consciousness, or both. Important and valuable. But how do you show the way forwards? White seemed an appropriate starting point. One of his early lithographs suggested to us that hope is possible, and a motivating factor, some 20 years before the Civil Rights Movement brought some change. (And some 60 years before that change is on its way to be reversed…)
Charles White Hope for the Future 1945
If I look at the image, Hope is not the first thing that comes to mind. A dead tree with a noose hung from it, a baby in medium distress, walls closing in with wooden isolation. Yet there are those huge maternal hands, offering strength and protection. They are also notably angular, square. Squarely: in a direct and uncompromising manner; without equivocation, tells me the Oxford Dictionary. These hands are placing blame squarely on racism.
What about the face, though. Do you see hope there? Maybe the shape of the waning moon on her forehead, signaling a hope for he decline of racism? The expression itself struck me as, frankly, angry. And since I still haven’t figured out the answer to my question of how art should depict progressive utopias or the ways to get there, let’s turn to the depiction of anger in women instead. (You know me, thoughts jump around.) Female anger is not exactly a ubiquitous topic in centuries of painting, but one that at least spoke of disruption of rules, since the display of anger was historically considered unfeminine. Verboten, really.
Anger is a somewhat under-researched topic in my field. We define it as an emotion characterized by antagonism toward someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong. Psychologists are more concerned with aggression or other hurtful behaviors, which is separate from anger, although the latter can lead to the former. Just ask yourself, how often are you angry without aggressive behavior? But also, has anger ever morphed into a somewhat violent act? My guess is the former happens often, the latter rarely for most of us, though it does on occasion. If it happens all the time, then you have a problem.
Giotto L’Ira 1306 (Fresco)
Excessive anger has physiological consequences that harm you, including increased blood pressure that damages the heart, and it interferes with decision making, often leading to long lasting consequences. And of course violent outbursts can and will harm others.
On the positive side, non-violent anger can be an extremely motivating factor to find solutions to the perceived problems and initiate change. It also influences the way you approach or evaluate something or someone. If you are unwittingly cued by angry faces in association with something, you value that something, any given object, more. When you show pictures of angry men, rather than sad ones, they elicit more support. Men who display anger rather than sadness in negotiations are more successful in their demands – people yield to someone perceived to be dominant. (Ref.)
All of this is not true for women, even though they are cross-culturally shown to experience equivalent amounts of anger, both in frequency and intensity, compared to men, clearly a biologically built-in emotion. Anger conforms to display rules – the norms of a given culture what can or should be publicly shown – and women, in almost all cultures, do not act on their anger as men do. Importantly, they also are not perceived more positively when displaying their anger, in fact the opposite is true. Most modern psychologists subscribe to a bio-sociocultural interactive model to explain this fact. There might be biological gender differences that allow women to curb their angry outbursts to begin with – the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in controlling aggressive impulses, is much larger in women. Good thing, too, given that women would easily be harmed by the physiologically stronger males, if they attack them. All kinds of evolutionary explanations have been offered. (For details on biological differences, here is an in-depth review.)
It is always hazardous to indulge in evolutionary story telling, though. For example, it seems entirely plausible, that, over evolutionary time, mothers who were particularly nurturing might have had greater reproductive process; therefor nurturing, not anger, would be favored by evolution. But it is equally plausible, that, over the years of evolution, mothers who were particularly ferocious in protecting their young would have had an evolutionary advantage. This contrasts highlights why many scientists, with a nod to Rudyard Kipling, refer to these evolutionary notions as “Just so stories.”
And speaking of angry mothers: one is Medea, about to murder her children out of rage over her unfaithful husband… note, how we are not even allowed to see her face frontally, and the presumably glaring eyes in particular are even further recessed into shade.
200 years earlier we see a raging Judith, slaying Holofernes, the general of Nebuchadnezzar’s army threatening Judith’s people. Two versions, one by a man, one by a woman painter, see for yourself who is actually expressly raging, spurting blood on her chest. These are of course depictions of a biblical story, so viewers can be amenable to be reminded of the tale.
Caravaggio Judith Beheading Holofernes c. 1598–1599 or 1602
A different approach is to serve culturally-based display demands by orienting the viewer to the (invisible) victim of a woman’s anger: the poor man.
Carl Dornbecher Poor man, 1919
Just a few years earlier, the intensely weird, academicist painting below was meant as a commentary on the new medium of photography, seen by the painter as a positive development: “It has opened our eyes and forced us to see that which previously we have not seen.” Riffing off Democritus’s aphorism: “Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well,” this fury appears with a whip instead of the usual mirror in her hand, revealing the “naked” truth all right. (I fear I’ll never be able to photograph that, even if I was inclined to capture aphorisms…)
Jean Léon Gérôme, Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, 1896
One last, contemporary offering from the sparse menu of angry women in art: Pipilotti Rist’s still from a video of a woman unhesitatingly smashing car windows, extremely feminine in her red pumps, fluttery summer dress and make-up.
Pipilotti Rist Ever is Over All (still), 1997
Here is the video where she is actually smiling and bouncing along. A total disconnect between displayed emotion and enacted behavior, as if even during the outburst you still have to keep that grin on your face. The best part: a police woman walks by, smiles back and salutes her. Worth a few minutes of your time, if only for the sound track!
Of course we all know, if this had been the black child from Charles White’s litho in the beginning, the story would have a different ending. Hope for the future? You tell me where to go from here.
Angry, but beautiful music by Bartok today. In addition to Bela Bartok there is a bonus Schnittke…
Walk with me, in the wetlands around the Tualatin River, during almost 90 degrees at 10 am on a quiet Sunday morning. That was before we had 104 degrees. Wetlands? Dry lands, with a bit of water now shared by creatures in close proximity.
Some still have the energy to show off in front of a mate.
Much of the water is covered by a carpet of duck grits, or algae, enough to reflect the shadows of adjacent vegetation, greeting you with the most saturated chartreuse imaginable.
A lot of plant life is dry, on verge of crumbling, leaves, grasses, a wistful beauty.
Birds still out to find that morsel, before the full heat of the day. A Cedar waxwing, a brown creeper, perfectly camouflaged and an osprey showing off above me, flying from his perch directly to the space above me, so I get some footage even with the small camera, since I couldn’t schlepp the large lens in the heat.
Yet the views I was most enthusiastic about were the thistles. At this time of year you have all stages visible at once, still some blossoms, some flowers, and then all going to seed. The ground is carpeted with the fluff. It flies in the air, like little ghosts swarming the fields. It shimmers silvery, I believe gossamer is the word, something delicately spun, not by spiders, but by the plants that use air currents and weightlessness to propel their offspring to new worlds where they can settle and sprout. The next cycle begins.
In German I would say: “sie begeistern mich,” a word indicating an enthusiastic approach to something or someone. Literally translated it means, they fill me with ghost(s), but it is used in the sense of something touching your soul, or activating joy. Incidentally, you could also say “ich schwärme four see,” I adore them. The term literally means to swarm, like bees forming a swarm or swarming out – just like these seed fluffs do. The medieval usage turned from the verb associated with insects to one describing the ways of religious sects, deviating from the pre-determined church requirements to think along traditional paths and becoming free thinkers instead, around the 16th century. In the literary developments of the 18th century, the term became a commonplace for all kinds of wild enthusiasm and phantasmic thinking.
Why do I bore you with the etymology of German words? For one, because it is quite similar for English, when you look at the roots for the word enthusiasm. The original meaning had to do with religion, transferred from the Greek enthousiasmós, from enthousiázein “to be inspired or possessed by a god,” around the 17th century. Secondly, because I have been wondering what it means to be strongly, enthusiastically preoccupied with, in my case secular, matters all the time and expressing those feelings with abandon. Since childhood, really, I was easily excited about so many things, adored them, absorbing them as well as treating them with enthusiasm. Does that make you less critical? Impede judgment? Is it going to be interpreted differently by others, because I am a woman, seen as overly emotional rather than in possession of a trait that has components of both, affect and cognition?
As it turns out enthusiasm predicts satisfaction in life and positive relationships. If you’re up for it, here is an extensive but well written review of what we know about the cumulative effects of experience, interpretation, and regulation of positive stimuli and emotions that ultimately lead to the experience of happiness, life satisfaction, and wellbeing. The paper gives an overview of how wellbeing and happiness were defined across the centuries and how contemporary psychology is now looking at the underlying physiological processes that are at work – or that are missing. “Experiencing positive emotions (likeenthusiasm) benefits psychological and physical wellbeing in numerous, intersecting ways, including modulating neurophysiological correlates within the central and peripheral nervous systems.”
So there. I enthusiastically photograph thistles, marveling at their beauty. I also enthusiastically welcome the latest news out of a courthouse in Georgia. I enthusiastically watch the video clips of a grandchild learning to crawl. I enthusiastically count the hours until the thermometer lands on something under 90 degrees. (Luckily I can count that high. Turns out, enthusiasm is also a prime motivator for learning, so having had that in my tool kit for various forays into schooling was not a bad thing.)
Then again, I unenthusiastically read what Merriam-Webster had as an example for the use of the word enthusiasm on their website:
The criminal charges appear to have done little to dampen Republican voters’ enthusiasm for Trump, who remains the leading candidate for his party’s 2024 nomination for president.—The Salt Lake Tribune, 8 Aug. 2023
Let’s enthusiastically hope that on this August 16th things have changed! (Fat chance.)
And here is a passionate piece of music. Hard to believe it was composed during WW I, in 1916.
Housekeeping first: I am taking part of next week off from the blog, need to spend some time photographing, something that has gotten short shrift over all the writing.
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I had to laugh at this headline found yesterday in an article in VOX:
“Especially the “if true” part” – UFOs, dead alien pilots, reverse engineering, secret government programs… the rumor mill is at it again, this time through a whistle blower, a former government official named David Grusch, who has worked in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, who gave public testimony before a House of Representatives committee Wednesday.
No evidence provided, just more talk of hear-say. But what I find interesting is this eternal preoccupation with a world “out there,” instead of saving the one we’re currently wrecking, or at least loving it for what it is. I have written about the psychological function of alien narratives previously. Today I will just turn to the tried and true, a poet with whose views I agree more often than not, and whose remarkable ways of getting a point across with seeming ease belying masterful construction always puts me in awe.
She is content enough with our sleepy backwater…
The Ball
As long as nothing can be known for sure (no signals have been picked up yet), as long as Earth is still unlike the nearer and more distant planets,
as long as there’s neither hide nor hair of other grasses graced by other winds, of other treetops bearing other crowns, other animals as well-grounded as our own,
as long as only the local echo has been known to speak in syllables,
as long as we still haven’t heard word of better or worse mozarts, platos, edisons somewhere,
as long as our inhuman crimes are still committed only between humans,
as long as our kindness is still incomparable, peerless even in its imperfection,
as long as our heads packed with illusions still pass for the only heads so packed,
as long as the roofs of our mouths alone still raise voices to high heavens —
let’s act like very special guests of honor at the district-firemen’s ball dance to the beat of the local oompah band, and pretend that it’s the ball to end all balls.
I can’t speak for others — for me this is misery and happiness enough:
just this sleepy backwater where even the stars have time to burn while winking at us unintentionally.
Photographs today are of some of the more alien looking flora I’ve come across this year in this sleepy backwater. Wish it would stay sleepy and not burn up….
Here is a track – Of Beauty – from Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (THE SONG OF THE EARTH). Beautiful music about a beautiful world.
IT SEEMS TO BE the rule these days: every time I visit a new exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE,) my brain picks up speed and my heart gets either heavier or lighter, depending on what’s on display. The most recent visit changed my mind as well. Last month I had declined to review the opening exhibitions in celebration of OMCHE’s expansion and addition of a new permanent gallery dedicated to Human Rights after the Holocaust. I did not want to mingle with crowds, which I very much hoped would be there to honor the museum’s continuing growth. I was spoon-fed on Rembrandt as a child and was not sure I needed to see yet another etching of biblical lore in my life time. And, most importantly, the recent loss of Henk Pander, a close friend, still felt raw. I had written an in-depth review of his penultimate exhibition, The Ordeal, while he was still with us and was not sure if I had anything more to add.
Well, here I am, reviewing after all. The exhibitions were just too interesting and raised important questions while I walked through a thoughtfully curated show during an afternoon when the galleries were empty, trying to put a lid on my unease. Taking in The Jews of Amsterdam, Rembrandt and Pander, as well as But a Dream, Salvador Dalí, turned out to be a challenge on multiple levels, if a rewarding one. That’s what good museums do, right? Make you think and feel and learn, even when some of the topics are difficult to deal with, as has been the case for the majority of the exhibitions I have reviewed for OJMCHE over the last years.
Want to stick with me then, while I’m thinking out loud? (Alternatively, here is a detailed OR ArtsWatch review of the museum re-opening, including Bob Hick’s conversations with museum director Judy Margles explaining some of the choices made, and Bruce Guenther who brought his perceptive touch once again to the selection and arrangement of exhibits.)
Let’s start with the Dalí. It was a bit surreal to enter an exhibition of 25 works, “Aliyah, the Rebirth of Israel,” commissioned by Shorewood Publishers in 1966 for the 20th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel and mounted in observance of the state’s 75th birthday, when I had read just hours earlier a statement by former Israeli Prime Minister and decorated military officer Ehud Barak in Haaretz: “The moment of truth is upon us. This is the most severe crisis in the history of the state. … with the upcoming vote… we are hours away from a dictatorship.”
Aliyah literally means ascent, but has been the term used for the return of Jewish people to a land they claim their own. Seeing the internal divisions, violent protests, an increasingly desperate fight for democracy and a country accused by B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others, of practicing apartheid against Palestinians, one can’t but think of descent rather than ascent. Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, warned of civil war as Netanyahu rejects compromise. Organizers estimated 365,000 people have come out in cities around the country on one day alone to protest the government’s attempted judicial overhaul.
All the more a reason, one could argue, to present a vision of Israel that helps us understand its history, depicts its travails, and confers hope and admiration about the resilience of a people. And how better to accomplish this than with photolitographs based on masterfully executed mixed media paintings, grouped around relevant Zionist history and elucidated by biblical citations at times? (The paintings were displayed at the Huntington Hartford Museum in New York City originally, and then sold; the current whereabouts of many of them are unknown.)
There is just one problem: the artist, Salvador Dalí, was an abominable human being, and his expressed admiration for figures like Hitler and Generalissimo Franco at least indirectly suggest racist and authoritarian preoccupations. Whether he actually was an antisemite is a matter of debate, one the museum, to its credit, does not entirely shy away from. David Blumenthal who, together with his wife, lent the current exhibits to the museum, engaged in serious scholarship around the question of Dalí‘s relationship to Jewish themes, laid out in an essay here. He went through a number of speculations to reject most of them in favor of the conclusion below, with a lingering doubt about motives nonetheless:
So, what was Dali’s commitment to “Aliyah, The Rebirth of Israel”?
It seems to me that it was not an obsession with moneymaking or a desire to develop the “Jewish market.” Nor was it a need to rectify his reputation as an antisemite that brought Dali to use Jewish themes. It seems to me, too, that it was also not a quirk of his or Gala’s ancestry, or sympathy with Jews, Jewish culture and history, or the Jewish State. Rather, as I see it, this was a commission and Dali executed it seriously. Shoreham had commissioned this. Dali had Jewish friends in New York who helped him with the material, though we do not know who these friends were …This, it seems to me, is the most reasonable explanation for Dali’s work on “Aliyah, the Rebirth of Israel” – that this was a serious execution of a serious commission, authentic even if not experimental — though the argument of crass exploitation cannot be ruled out.
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SHOULD WE SEPARATE the art from the artist? Can we?
On the one hand, we have decisions like Israel’s to deny public performance of Wagner’s music, a composer associated with expressed anti-Semitism and admiration of totalitarian rulers, who adored him in turn. On the other hand, if you look closely, antisemitism was such a run-of-the-mill sentiment across continental Europe that we would have to throw out half of all famous writers and composers, just thinking of Bach, Beethoven, Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Carl Orff. In literature we couldn’t read Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”, Dostoyevsky, the poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, to name just some who come to mind readily and all of whom are performed in Israel or read in Hebrew translation. It is, of course, not just a question specific to antisemitism, but one that extends to any repulsive behavior. Do we patronize the movies of a Roman Polanski or Woody Allen, or watch Bill Cosby or Johnny Depp? Do we listen to music by people who have been convicted of various forms of abuse? Do we buy our grandchildren books authored by newly rabid transphobes, even if the literature enchanted entire generations of our own kids?
In some ways, we have to do our homework to decide if a given artist held odious attitudes, or whether there was a deeper, darker impulse at work that really could be tied to evil that manifested in expressed cruelty, both verbally and behaviorally. (Read George Orwell for the details.) For Dalí, some still re-interpret his glorification of fascism, whether Hitler or Franco, as a defiant provocation of his surrealist peers with whom he competed (it did lead them to exclude him from their group, clearly seen as more than just big talk.) But if we look at the witness reports on his violent beatings and sexual assaults of women, torture of animals, necrophilic longings and, expressed admiration (“Hitler turns me on to the highest, Franco is the greatest hero of Spain”) in his book The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, there seems to be enough to decide that he was not just trolling, and thus we do not want to give him and his work more exposure. In fact, read his previously unpublished letter to Andrew Breton, and I bet you will never look at this artist with the same eyes again.
So why do we give the artist a platform? And I don’t just mean the museum folks who make decisions about what would fit into a particular exhibition series embracing art with a Jewish theme, or celebrating Israel’s birthday, or attracting visitors with the lure of famous names, visitors who then learn about Judaism, or truly intending to open the debate about art vs. artist. I also think of the rest of us, who flock to see the famous artist’s work. The simple answer might be: we are interested in the art, admire it, so who cares about the artist, live with it! There are more complicated answers, though. One potential reason could be that our own attraction to spectacle, our hidden desire to make excuses for wanting to witness violence or narcissism in action, can be satisfied if we have something that “justifies” the behavior we observe or unconsciously lust after (think crowds at lynchings, for example.) This something, in the case of artists, can be the belief that “genius” excuses a lot. In a new book, Monsters. A Fan’s Dilemma. author Claire Dederer argues that “genius” is a construct that implies that the artist channels a force larger than him/herself. We give them a pass because that force, the artistic impulse, is so overwhelmingly positive that it makes up for the rest of the sorry picture. This presumed force larger than someone can, of course, be attributed to multiple origins, like when you believe that certain powerful people (and I won’t mention any names) are sent by a deity or fulfill biblical prophecies, and thus have carte blanche to overstep moral boundaries for that very reason.
Another possibility arises from brand new research findings from psychologists at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. The research team tried to explore empirically how people’s knowledge of abusive behavior by an artist would influence their aesthetic judgement of a piece of art as well as their electrophysiological brain responses. The shortest summary of a very complex and smart experimental design I can offer in our context: receiving negative-social biographical information about an artist will make you like their art less. Yet at the same time the work is physiologically more arousing to you, particularly if the art itself contains a reference to the negative behavior, when you look at our brains’ first spontaneous reactions. Reverberations of disgust? Or the kick of a voyeur?
Independently, we also have to differentiate between those who suffered from an artists’ immorality, Holocaust survivors who had to play Wagner in camp orchestras, or domestic violence survivors who watch a movie star strutting with impunity, compared to those of us for whom this is more of an intellectual enterprise. I have no answers. I know some of the art I love most or that has formed me in my understanding of art was created by people I dislike or even abhor. Dalí‘s art does not belong to the former, but Dalí the person surely resides amongst the latter. I would not ever go to see an exhibition solely presenting his work, being firmly convinced of his embrace of fascism among the rest of his abominations. I was in luck, then, that the remainder of the afternoon provided a much brighter picture, with The Jews of Amsterdam, Rembrandt and Pander.
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“A new and astonishing poetic secret arose from the idea of juxtaposing related, as opposed to unrelated, things.” René Magritte, 1932
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WHEN I ENTERED the gallery showing Rembrandt (1606 – 1669) and Henk Pander (1937 – 2023) – neither one of them a Jew, so the title needs a bit of stretching – I couldn’t help but think of Magritte’s 1932 painting Les Affinités électives (Elective Affinities). What triggered the memory was the spatial feel of Rembrandt’s etchings contained in a small, compact space, with little room to breathe, surrounded by the proverbial as well as literal walls of Pander’s paintings lining the perimeter, just like the egg in the cage.
But the combination of the two artistic oeuvres also fit perfectly with Magritte’s musings above, by all reports offered when he had finished this painting after having woken from a dream in a room with a caged bird. The typical surrealist approach of combining unexpected and unconnected subjects to surprise effects had been replaced by a play on relevant relations. The notion of elective affinitieswas originally coined in a novel by Goethe (Die Wahlverwandschaften), but more likely read by Magritte, sympathetic to the communist party for most of his life, in Max Weber’s 1905 book The Protestant Work Ethic and Capitalism. The term was loosely understood as a process through which two cultural forms – religious, intellectual, political or economical – who have certain analogies, intimate kinships or meaning affinities, enter in a relationship of reciprocal attraction and influence, mutual selection, active convergence and mutual reinforcement.
Henk Pander Intersection in Amsterdam East (Set back in time) 2022
There you have it: The painters’ works do relate, converge and reinforce each other, no matter how far apart in style, historical content, execution. Central to both is, in my opinion, a shared focus on what Robert Frank so famously called “the humanity of the moment.” (For him this was a requirement for a good photograph, and he went further: “This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough – there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.”)
Beyond the shared location of Amsterdam, both artists’ output is undisputedly visionary, creating imagery that stands for key moments in the exploration of humanity’s history, whether guided by the episodes derived from the belief system of the (mostly) Old Testament (Rembrandt,) or the photographs taken of his Dutch surround and rendered into historical narratives that represented the desolation of a town under Nazi occupation (Pander.) The humanity of the moment is captured by Pander most vividly in the absence of same, not a person in sight, just left-over detritus hinting at deported burghers, violent actions and hasty departures, (and conveniently setting scale, so that the already ominously lit buildings, some seemingly on fire, take on an imposing height that intensifies the sinister mood. (I am adding a contemporary photograph from some tourist website that shows how small the houses actually are.)
Henk Pander Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam (2022)
The humanity in the moment that is not directly accessible in the pictures because it belongs to the artist more than the subject, is Pander’s homesickness while he painted the streets he once roamed, (a homesickness that one has to assume was shared by the deported Jews who survived the Holocaust.) Henk suffered recurring waves of Heimwee, the Dutch word translated as the aching for home, better capturing a real sense of almost physical pain, rather than a general malaise. It was not nostalgia, after all his childhood had been harsh under German threat and occupation, hungry and consumed with fear. It was not Verlangen, longing for an imaginary golden past that never existed. It was the loss of a sense of place and familiarity with that place, familiarity with a culture, language and certainly the spot in a family tree of many generations of painters descending from the old Masters. He was proud of having come into his own as a mature artist with his very own ways of expression, but also felt like a stranger in a strange land, no matter how much recognition he received or how truely in love he fell with the American landscape of the West.
I vividly remember an occasion where I tried to come up with an interpretation of one of his large oil paintings (not in the current set.) After repeated failures he said, with that impish grin of his’, “it’s just a painting, Friderike!,” which it was and yet wasn’t. They all were, in the sense that often some visual exploration, purely guided by aesthetics, started to take over, intermingling with or even overshadowing the original concept. But there was always a concept, a thought, a communication of something that deserved our attention. A day later I sent him a postcard of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Dutch Proverbs as a tease, a painting capturing some 120 concepts all in visual guise, conceptualization on steroids. We explored it together, during one of the long waits in the clinic where I drove him for early cancer treatments long before the pandemic ensued, and were able to identify many of the proverbs which are very similar in German and Dutch. Heimwee descended on both of us, knowing that no-one in our immediate vicinity would know even a few of the proverbs, which were such cornerstones of our childhood.
May his memory be a blessing.
Pieter Brueghel the Elder The Dutch Proverbs (1559) Oil on Oak Panel, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
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Voor de wind is het goed zeilen – it’s easy to sail ahead of the wind – If conditions are favorable it is not difficult to achieve your goal.
The little boat in the upper right corner of Brueghel’s compendium embodies this proverb, and it applied to Rembrandt van Rijn’s life and career for many years. Until the winds shifted, when he ended up losing his patrons due to changes in public taste, losing his house and belongings in bankruptcy, and after some more artistically productive years was eventually buried in a pauper’s grave near Amsterdam’s Westerkerk in 1666. As is so often the case, the decline was overdetermined, with multiple factors at work, including financial miscalculations of not having paid debts and overspending for his compulsory collecting of art and antiquities.
Much has been written about the artist, with unlimited admiration or sanctimonious scorn. A genius outsider, for some, making his way from humble origins to the embrace of a wealthy merchant class, a misogynistic exploiter of women, for others, who confined his aging lover who had raised his orphaned son to a prison-like asylum when she started making demands while he was already bedding a 23 year old replacement. Myths about him having secretly adopted Judaism abounded. Hitler and his charges tried to make him into an Aryan hero (and looted his art during the war), to the point where they appointed the horrid propaganda film maker Hans Steinhoff (Hitlerjunge Quex)to make a movie about him in Amsterdam in 1941 with a script appointing three “evil Jews” as the cause for his downfall, with Propaganda Minister Goebbels covering all the cost. (The Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam had a fascinating exhibition about Nazis’ attempt to incorporate the Rembrandt into fascist ideology in 2006.)
Ephraim Bonus, Jewish Physician (1647)
The best introduction I can think of, one successfully arguing that the artist was simply a man of his times, acting within an era-specific and location-determined set of conditions, is historian’s Simon Schama’s book Rembrandt’s Eyes. (For those of us with a shorter attention span, here is a link to a talk he gave that really sums up a lot of information. It is open source and you can download the whole thing.) Schama stresses the general attitude toward Jews in the Amsterdam of the 17th century as one of “benign pluralism.” Of the 200.000 inhabitants in 1672, only 7500 were Jews, with the minority of very wealthy Sephardic Jews (Marranos, forced converts to Catholicism) who had fled the Southern Inquisition at the beginning of the century concentrated in one area, and 5000 much poorer Ashkenazis who by 1620 fled the programs in central and Eastern Europe, speaking Yiddish and keeping to themselves.
The Jewish Quarter, where Rembrandt lived for some twenty successful years had a 40/60 % mix of Gentiles to Jews, with the Sephardic Jews enjoying social equality (although not intermarriage) while enormously contributing to the country’s economy. It was, early on, an exceptionally tolerant age and society, of which Rembrandt was no exception. Again, it is somewhat surreal that I write this while the Dutch government has collapsed over issues of asylum seekers and immigration policies, with a fragile 4-party coalition under Prime Minister Mark Rutte, lasting, in this round, less than 18 months. An extreme right wing party, the Party for Freedom under Geert Wilders, and a populist Farmer-Citizen movement, headed by Caroline van der Plas, are eagerly waiting in the wings for the potential November election. Tolerance for immigrants is at an all time low, making the 17th century look ultra-liberal in comparison.
Rembrandt used some of his Jewish neighbors as models, although it is debated how often, and was often interacting, perhaps even close friends, with Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel, an emphatic proponent of reconciliation between Jews and Christians who commissioned multiple works from the artist, some displayed in the current exhibition. Some might have simply been observations outside his window. It is now claimed that the setting of the artist’s 1648 etching, Jews in the Synagogue (1648) – is not a synagogue but, rather, a street scene in the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam. It shows only nine Jews, one less than the requisite minyan, but it also centers an isolated figure, potentially remarking on the separation between the established Sephardic Jews, and the Ashkenazi newcomers.
Jews in the Synagogue (Pharisees in the Temple (1648)
Rembrandt’s tolerance or even desire for inclusion extends beyond the Jews to people even lower in the social hierarchy of the times: Blacks. I think this is important to acknowledge, since it describes the artist’s willingness and need to depict the world as it was, forever searching for veracity and empathizing with the human condition.
He created at least twelve paintings, eight etchings, and six drawings in which Black people play roles as spectators or participants in biblical scenes, models likely taken from the street or the household of his Jewish neighbors. (Ref.) As it turns out, the Creole were former slaves on the plantations of the wealthy Marranos, brought back as household help and now just servants since slavery was prohibited in the Dutch provinces. The rich Portuguese Jews were quite involved in the sugar trade, colonial exploits pursued by the Dutch West India Company (WIC) that by 1630 fully engaged in human trafficking to ensure there were laborers for the mills and plantations in the colonies. (Quick aside, I know it’s getting long: acknowledging the specter of colonialism and slavery, museums and art historians have ceased to talk about the era as the “Golden Age.”) Rembrandt must have known this, particularly since he had portrait commissions of some of the most influential Marranos who owned plantations in Brazil. But the fact remained, he depicted his Black subjects without disdain or mockery and gave them central roles in biblical narratives that might have emphasized the possibility of conversion (proselytizing then often used as a justification of slavery.)
If you look at the intimate, small depictions of biblical scenes, or Jewish citizens engaged in religious practice, one thing is clear: not only are people naturalistically depicted, truly as they looked, but they are always caught in a narrative moment that draws the viewer completely in with its drama and impending resolution – the humanity of the moment. That moment is one where things turn, either for good or for bad, the moment before the sacrifice of a son,
Abraham and Isaac (1645(
the moment of receiving forgiveness,
The Return of the Prodigal Son (1636)
the moment of the take-off of the angel, barefoot, no less, and with a gravity-proof robe
The Angel departing from the family of Tobias (1641)
the moment a dangerous seduction might or might not happen.
Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (1634)
Rembrandt and his compatriots focused in this work on the fragility of our existence, caught in the very moment where something irreversibly changes, never to be the same again, often raging at the claimed inevitability of it all. As I wrote previously while reviewing Henk’s work, the Dutch have a name for that circumstantial reversal, staetveranderinge, a term derived from the Greek word peripeteia, and a concept embraced in Dutch paintings since the 1600s. The change could be in any direction – from anguish to praise, like in Rembrandt’s versions of The Angel appearing to Hagar, but most often captured when circumstances shifted irrevocably to disaster, like Jan Steen’s Esther, Haman, and Ahasuerus from 1668, below.
The preoccupation with “state change” corresponded with the rise of Calvinism, a religion that dominated the Dutch provinces and led to long religious wars against Catholic nations but also to boundless prosperity, shaping the evolution of commerce and empire. Henk Pander certainly inherited and made good use of this narrative concept across his life time, but Rembrandt knew to convey it to perfection. This is how he captures our rapt attention, since we know and fear these situations and are curious to see how they will be resolved, unless we know the biblical stories or re-tellings of mythology by heart, which have, at least in some instances, a good ending, something that hooks us as well.
Selection of illustrations for Menasseh ben Israel’s “Piedra Gloriosa” (1655)
Story tellers, the both of them, across time and historical settings, working magic with light, shadow or color, willing us to be a participant in the solving of the narrative. Simon Schama’s assessment that Rembrandt managed to engage us by upping the intensity of the story through combining the ordinary with the extraordinary holds for Henk Pander as well.
See for yourself. The exhibition will last until September 24, 2023.
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OREGON JEWISH MUSEUM AND CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION
724 N.W. Davis St., Portland
Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays
Lefty’s Cafe museum deli hours: 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays
Admission: Adults $8, students & seniors $5, members and children under five free
Last week I came across a short interview with some notable writers all focused on the climate crisis. Rebecca Solnit, Thelma Young Lutunatabua, James Miller and Jay Griffiths were asked multiple questions concerning their own relationship to the crisis, their levels of engagement, their hopes and fears. When asked about the efficacy of the written word for a fight against the climate crisis, their responses ranged from hope and enthusiasm to doubt. One answer lingered with me: “I embrace all forms of storytelling, and I think all are necessary in this struggle. We have to tap into people’s imaginations and show them that another world is possible.”
That is of course one of the many functions of art, showing possible worlds, next to creating beauty, communicating ideas, raising consciousness, being the canary in the coal mine. I want to focus today on how photography can serve as a window into a different, private world that allows us to see people who are perhaps different from ourselves and yet utterly familiar in their mundane settings, poses, and demeanors. With that it creates the possibility of empathy if not bonding, in a way that writing about the subject never would (at least not immediately), words relying on facts and persuasion, rather than the direct emotional involvement created by the narrative of imagery.
The photographs, a century apart, depict queer folk, and I want to stress that today’s musings are not about the issue of transgender origins, medical procedures for transitioning, or transphobia, although all warrant close examination in an era that has made the topic into a tribal rallying cry for exclusion and worse. The intensity of the debate echos other preoccupations with the “order” of things, the retention of existing hierarchies or the need for simple binary truths in this world, an either/or thinking that avoids engagement with choice and uncertainties. (And of course a backlash against the enormous progress made in the area of sexual orientation, including the right to marry a same-sex partner.)
That said, here are the biological facts. Biological categories do exist – have some objective reality in the sense that if, for example, your genetics have an xy pattern, it is enormously likely that you have an anatomy associated with males and a biochemistry associated with males, and if you are biologically xx, the same applies for women. But that reality sits alongside of the undeniable fact that there is a substantial number of people who don’t fit this pattern. Biologically some have traits that are strongly associated with male and female. And in still other cases they have biological traits that are neither typically male nor typically female, and so for example their genetic pattern is entirely different, having xo or xxy chromosomes. One more step: if this is undeniably true at the level of biology, it would be astonishing if it wasn’t reflected in people’s psychology, with one example of many, some people feeling they were born into the wrong body, and often having these feelings from a very young age.
But again, what I am after today, is how photography, in the depiction of something or someone who is different, can create a sense of familiarity nonetheless, and can convey a shared humanity. It does so by offering a narrative that invites the viewer into daily routine, anything other than the exotic fantasies contained in the stereotypes held by those feeling disgusted, alienated or threatened by queerness.
The first selection is the work of two Scandinavian women photographers, Marie Høeg (1866 – 1949) and Bolette Berg (1872 -1944), who met in Finland and lived in Norway, as business partners and as a couple. They were suffragettes and quite engaged in feminist politics on the local level, while making a living by conventional photography, studio portraits and the like. Høeg founded the Horten Branch of the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, the Horten Women’s Council and the Horten Tuberculosis Association. Berg worked more behind the camera. The photographs were part of some 400 glass plates found in a barn of their farm decades after they had died. Marked “private,” they contained images that played with gender roles, cross dressing, mimicking behavior reserved for men (arctic explorers in fur coats,) showing the androgynous protagonist as well as a number of their friends joyously defying gender norms.
The work has a home at Norway’s national photography museum, the Preus Museum in Horten. It is currently shown at the ongoing Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, PHotoEspaña, in Madrid until September.
As you can see, the couple poses like a traditional heterosexual couple at home, going out in the boat (or sitting for a photographer in these studio props that were known to anyone at the time,) interacting with their pet, and having fun at drinking, smoking and playing cards with friends (behavior reserved for men at the time) independent of gender.
A few of the photographs show a male friend not averse to cross-dressing.
Fast forward to 120 years later, and a different part of the world. Camila Falcão has been photographing Brazilian trans women (women born into male bodies), encouraging them to pose as they wish, in their own environments. (All photographs are from her website.) Brazil’s 2019 law that considers transphobia a crime has done nothing to lower the murder rate of Brazilian queer people: it is the highest in the world, for the 13th consecutive year, with a 30% rate of 4000 killings in that span of time.
The title of Falcão’s series, “Abaixa que é tiro” refers to the reactions of the portrayed and their friends, who started commenting ‘Abaixa que é tiro!’, celebrating being shown to the world. “The expression is used widely among the Brazilian LGBT community to address that something really awesome/fabulous is about to hit you. More in general, however, it could be said that “Abaixa que é tiro” signals a paradoxical relationship between fear and empowerment.” (Ref.)
Again, notice how an attachment to pets immediately confers familiarity.
Women are tired, women break arms, women have friends.
Women are barely out of childhood,
could be on a winning gymnastics team,
a first grade teacher,
or the smart, uncompromising sister who sets you right.
Work like this can help to deconstruct stereotypes, although it will be a long road until increased visibility leads to a decrease in violence against this population. The photography world is noticing. We have now venerable institutions calling for work to show what unites us in times of division, like, for example, the British Journal of Photography, having judged exhibitions of Portraits of Humanity. Every single image that manages to shift our consciousness and beliefs is worth it, even if not all of us can have Falcão’s talent, access or courage as an ally to a demonized minority.
Music today is sung in Portuguese by Joao de Sousa, but created by a Polish collective, Bastarda, that has the most amazing modern Jewish music in their repertoire. Check them out. I have been listening to Fado non stop for weeks.
