Scarlett Johansson and Vermeer

Scarlett Johansson is featured in a recent issue of Vanity Fair magazine (December 2011), wearing haute couture clothes—Givenchy, Armani Prive, Alexander McQueen, Giambattista Valli—and talking about her work in film and theater.  I had forgotten how young she is (26 years old), as it seems as if I have been watching her for years—it says something about the impression she makes, about the solidity and sensual awareness that make her seem mature.  Her performances in Girl with a Pearl Earring (Peter Webber, 2003) and Match Point (Woody Allen, 2004) are strong—and Girl is a favorite of mine: it is about the painter Johannes Vermeer, his work and attempt to get another commission from a calculating patron, and how the painter includes a young housemaid in his work as studio caretaker and subject, to his wife’s intensifying discomfort.  The wife does not understand how an illiterate girl can be so entrancing, but the girl has an instinct for art, for the importance of light and scene-setting, and she helps with making the paint, before becoming a figure in a portrait that would become famous.  Johansson is the young woman and Colin Firth is the painter in a film with well-composed and informative images, a film that is pleasing in its exploration and fulfillment of its theme.

Peter Webber's Girl with a Pearl Earing presents a certain time in the painter's life, rather than a complete biography. Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) lived in the Netherlands, a Protestant married to a Catholic who gave him eleven children.  Vermeer painted historical and domestic scenes and was a respected painter, known for color, detail, and texture, for the quality of his work, but he was not very productive in terms of quantity of paintings, and faced financial difficulties.

Scarlett Johansson’s work in Girl with a Pearl Earring is very attentive and full of subtle responses—and it’s great to observe her character’s humility and self-respect, her practicality and idealism; how she responds instinctively to the rudeness and cruelty of children (with outrage, with hurt), and to the genius and manipulation of a man she respects (with admiration, with a distancing gesture).  Scarlett Johansson is a beautiful woman, a unique film object; and someone I have looked forward to seeing, although I do not see all of her work.  I like as well, in different ways and to different extents, Angela Bassett, Halle Berry, Diahann Carroll, Viola Davis, Kimberly Elise, Jane Fonda, Naomie Harris, Anne Hathaway, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Regina King, Jessica Lange, Sanaa Lathan, Nia Long, Thandie Newton, Natalie Portman, Zoe Saldana, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Charlize Theron, Uma Thurman, Kate Winslet, and Catherine Zeta-Jones.  There are others.  It is sad to think that I do not see most of them frequently enough.

Drawing

I looked at a video from North Light of artist Joy Thomas teaching how to draw the clothed figure a few days ago: she spoke about and demonstrated the importance of selecting a good model with appropriate and diverse changes of dress, and establishing the allowed time for a portrait (three hours?); of preparing the paper with charcoal dust (sprinkling, rubbing it in); of isolating the space on the canvas that the artist wants to use; of sizing the figure and transferring one's measurements to the canvas (a ruler or a pencil can be used to establish a canon--say how many human heads go into the total human figure from top to bottom, left to right: it's about seven or eight, depending on the effect one wants--ordinary or heroic); of identifying the structures in the portrait to be painted (the lines, the circles and squares, the shifts in form); and beginning with a preliminary sketch to warm up (something that can be easily erased with a certain kind of cloth); of trying to capture just enough detail to suggest the figure and allowing the viewer to complete the picture; of the importance of "marking" the positions of the model (with charcoal or with removable tape) before she or he takes a break, etcetera.  It was an illustration of how much thought and work goes into art, even into a simply drawn portrait.

Note on “Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century”

I have been reading Richard J. Powell’s study Black Art and Culture in the 20^th Century (Thames and Hudson, 1997), a book I first encountered several years ago: it’s a history of black diaspora visual culture, with a focus on African-American painting, sculpture, photography, and film, though it also comments on culture in Africa, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean.  It is a remarkably detailed and thoughtful discussion of both aesthetics and politics, but I really appreciate the illustrations of paintings, sculpture, and photographs from films, such as William H. Johnson’s contemplative, handsome self-portrait (page 48); Aaron Douglas’s graphic mural in tribute to Harriet Tubman, a blue and gray communal scene in which a woman holds up a broken chain (page 65); John Robinson’s self-portrait, in which his head and shoulders are surrounded by paintings, his profile and consciousness are inseparable from, and possibly indecipherable without, his work (page 86); Rose Piper’s simultaneous abstract and representational painting, “Slow Down Freight Train,” a stark depiction in which a red-shirted, black-trousered man looks out on a dark landscape (101); Bob Thompson’s jazz celebration, the colorful and idyllic “Garden of Music” (104); Raymond Saunders’ 1972 painting “Jack Johnson,” which features the famous boxer as a figure of near impenetrable blackness, and seems to predict the future work of Jean-Michel Basquiat (123); Sam Gilliam’s large red and black work “Lion’s Rock Arc,” which could be an explosion of roses or blood—or simply paint (126-127); Edward Clark’s abstract, mathematical “Ife Rose” (134); and Barkley Hendricks’ finely controlled, realistic (and witty) nude self-portrait called “Brilliantly Endowed” (153).  I like the talent, intelligence, and imagination in the work—and the same is true of the sculpture and photographs from film.  Edna Manley’s sculpture, a pale solid figure with a raised arm, “Pocomania,” from 1936, again a work that combines the abstract and representative, remains impressive (page 72).  Idealistic is the head of poet George Lamming in Barbadian sculptor Karl Broodhagen’s somewhat rough looking piece (88); and instantly recognizable is Martin Puryear’s work (165).  I love film, so the photographs from Cabin in the Sky (page 93), Black Orpheus (111), Looking for Langston (210), Sugar Cane Alley (217), and Daughters of the Dust (219) are easily seductive.  The man in a tuxedo walking toward a second naked man suggests desire, and possibly compulsion, as well as elegance and power, in the photo from Looking for Langston; and there is family and female strength and cultural pride in the group portrait of three women from Daughters of the Dust.

Occupy Wall Street

Many people spend their lives trying to reconcile their hopes for themselves with the world—indifferent, skeptical—as it is.  Yet, there are times when one feels either most optimistic or most threatened, and then one challenges that complacency, the self-satisfaction of the comfortable and the powerful.  The global economic crisis, rooted in deception, greed, and mismanagement of financial services, and the rise and fall of industries and the vulnerability of workers, has emboldened or frightened people in different parts of the world.  Some want to conserve what they have, refusing to share; and other know they require more, as others do.  Some look with disdain at the poor and suffering, and some look with frustration at the rich and determined.  People have begun to protest; and some have begun to riot.  It is important to remember that a protest is both an affirmation of citizenship and a statement of alienation from formal power; whereas a riot is a movement behind civic purpose.  In the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has been going on for weeks, people have gathered in downtown Manhattan, and other parts of the United States and Europe, to draw attention to the division between financial success and power on one side and, on the other, the rest of the world.  The common charge is that many of the corporations and people who have caused so much damage have been protected and rewarded, while ordinary people have lost jobs, housing, health care, and more.  The protesters have called for a more honest, vital democratic discourse with real world consequences benefitting the disenfranchised.  First, they were judged harshly by some, judged as lazy and resentful and self-indulgent, but the more people have heard of their complaints and demands, the greater the understanding and sympathy they have drawn.  Who are these people?  One early photograph printed in New York magazine showed a slim, slack-bodied shirtless young white man in shorts, holding up a cardboard sign, facing policemen, but when Time magazine filed a report, it presented a group more diverse in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, profession, and fashion taste.  The protesters are people with very different lives but whom have come to see common problems; and they do not want to be alone with their anger or their distress—and in joining with others, they are renewing their own hopes.

Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and Liberty: The Conspirator, a film directed by Robert Redford

The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford

Screenplay by James Solomon

American Film Company, 2010

(Released 2011)

Robert Redford’s film about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the trial of a boardinghouse owner, Mary Surratt, accused as part of the conspiracy, and the young lawyer who represents her, The Conspirator, is one of the most vivid films of history I have seen, and it achieves an independent life.  Mary Surratt and the others charged in the murder of the American president were given a military rather than a civilian trial, and not allowed to speak for themselves.  The situation does call to mind military trials established following the attack on the World Trade Center and the American war against terrorism.  Decision after decision is made against Mary Surratt during the proceedings, despite her lawyer’s best efforts to prove that the conspirators may have met in house but that does not mean she was involved.  The conspirators, of whom her son had been one, were southern patriots and northern traitors, refusing to accept the defeat of the south and appalled by Lincoln’s intention to recognize the rights of blacks.  They intended first to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for the freedom of southern prisoners of war, before John Wilkes Booth advanced a more violent rebellion.  Robin Wright plays a proud southerner and loving mother, Mary Surratt, whose son was a friend of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, and James McAvoy plays the lawyer, Frederick Aiken, who is repelled by Surratt’s probable guilt, then determined to give her the defense law requires, and then, appalled by the contrivances of the trial, sympathetic to her.  Robin Wright, dressed in black, has eliminated every shallow glimmer, and exudes grave awareness and concern, though the way she handles her black veil in certain acts expresses anxiety, self-protection, or resignation.  It is no surprise that there are rumors that Surratt spits in the faces of Union soldiers or wears human bones around her neck—a southern Catholic woman seen as different, a kind of demon.  James McAvoy, at Redford’s direction, is more still than usual, his face less flooded with emotions; and sometimes the way he is framed—against other men, in doorways, and within large plots of land—accentuates his lack of height; and yet he remains a compelling and likable actor.  The film’s casting and acting are formidable and persuasive in a film that has Kevin Kline, Danny Huston, Tom Wilkinson, and Evan Rachel Wood.  Kevin Kline is forceful as the nation’s secretary of war, Stanton, a man who wants to bury the turmoil of war and assassination with the conspirators, in one of Kline’s best performances.  Danny Huston plays the prosecutor as a cunning peacock, and Wilkinson is a fair-minded but pragmatic Maryland senator and lawyer, and Evan Wood the fragile but prickly Surratt daughter.

The Conspirator is a film of surprisingly fresh beauty.  Its locations are impressive.  Whether scenes were set in a private home or a large but bare prison, they had a visual richness that fed the senses, the imagination.  The contest between the American north and south, and then between justice and vengeance, come to life, though it is very strange that the black presence is so slight in the film, inclining at least one viewer to wonder if old Hollywood, however flawed, was better than contemporary Hollywood at dealing with African-Americans.  The blacks in Gone With the Wind are more interesting and respectable than those seen as perfect and perfectly quiet servants here; but then I do recall Beloved, Glory, Nightjohn, Sankofa, feature films that welcomed the African-American presence—and I was lucky enough around the time that I screened The Conspirator to find a documentary on African-American soldiers during the American civil  war, one that acknowledged the prejudice and brutality directed against Negroes and their struggle for rights and dignity, The Massachusetts 54^th Colored Infantry (2005), a film directed by Jacqueline Shearer and narrated by Morgan Freeman.  In the film, one sees the different kinds of work African-Americans did, some of it quite accomplished, and their willingness to leave work and family to participate in the war; and when they did join the effort, they performed with courage and pride, and earned respect.  (The fundamental importance of the war—to maintain national union, and end slavery—was apparent, but I am not fond of the idea that to earn citizenship one has to volunteer to die.) 

Seeing The Conspirator and The Massachusetts 54^th Colored Infantry, it is clear that information is available, and there are good intentions too, but the struggle continues to achieve a complex and truthful, as well as unified, American history.

Art and Environment: Manufacturing Landscapes, featuring photographer Edward Burtynsky

Manufacturing Landscapes, featuring photographer Edward Burtynsky

Directed by Jennifer Baichwal

Produced by Foundry Films and Mercury Films, 2006

(Distributed by Zeitgeist Films)

John James Audubon may have been a naturalist and a painter, but it does seem all that often that gets to contemplate both art and environmental issues, as with Manufacturing Landscapes, a film that presents the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who focuses on nature and how it has been transformed by industrial use, producing a different landscape, often one of devastation, yet one in which an unexpected beauty can be found.  The photographer, who feels implicated in the exploitation of industry for the photographic tools that he uses and for the transportation that allows him to travel, displays talent for color, contrast, form, line, and mood; and with skill and thought, research and preparation, he produces gorgeous pictures of terrible stuff.  His thematic concern has been the extractive industries, the mining for coal and oil, and he has followed also how metals are recycled and the computer industry.  The film director Jennifer Baichwal follows him as he does his work in China and Bangladesh; and we watch Burtynsky take test images then frame the final image he wants, before the director draws back to show us the context for that image, the surrounding land, the moving people—and then we see gallery goers examining the finished photographs, trying to make sense of them.

The film opens with scenes of a modern factory, its yellow-jacketed workers behind machines, their individuality blurred by the work and their clothing.  When they take a break, one of the supervisors reprimands his team for not properly labeling and separating faulty items.  Material comes from around the world, and the products are assembled in the once agricultural and increasingly urban China, which requires great energy for its growing productions.  (The Three Gorges Dam, thus far the world’s largest dam, was created to prevent floods, generate electricity, and facilitate transportation.)  The factory work we observe is, at once, dull, intricate, tedious, and impressive; and we watch trying to identify what exactly is being made—it seems the mass production of irons for pressing clothes.  We see the junkyards from which used metal is retrieved for recycling.  We see the computers taken apart for metal and parts, leaving toxic remains, poisoning the drinking water.  The garbage is disgusting and frightening.  Another company, its workers dressed in blue uniforms, makes electrical products, particularly breakers, that are sold in more than sixty countries; and we hear how the employees are proud of efficiency and sales, though there seems little concern for environmental or health consequences.  In a Bangladesh ship-breaking yard, where parts are salvaged, men chant as they work, some in traditional dress (a kind of sarong), and we are told that the work is hard and dangerous and the workers young.  Some grow too old and sick to do the work.

 

As a photographer Edward Burtynsky has found a way to share his experience and knowledge of environmental change and also to create genuinely aesthetic work.  The film by Jennifer Baichwal tells some of the stories behind that work.  The photographs are worth seeing for themselves, but Burtynsky is a particularly thoughtful artist, and Baichwal an imaginative but restrained filmmaker.  The film increases the viewer’s awareness, and asks us to make choices knowing the consequences.

Fields of growing fruits and vegetables have an orderly beauty that bleached, deforested, filthy, and poisoned industrial sites do not have, but, apparently, for a country like China, agriculture does not produce the wealth that modern industry does.  It may be ironic that food is more necessary than a lot of expensive machinery, but does not produce great wealth.  What is to be done?  It is hard to believe that developing countries, such as China and India, will stall their development for the niceties of protecting the environment: Britain and the United States did not.

Andy Warhol and Elizabeth Taylor

The October 2011 Vanity Fair has a photograph of Andy Warhol and Elizabeth Taylor, actually two photographs of Andy Warhol with his painting(s) of Taylor, one a color photograph, and the other black-and-white.  I find these images comforting.  I know that sounds strange, if not, well, hilarious, but it's true.  I look at these images, look away, and return to them--calm, pleased, reassured.  Why?  It's not simply t hat I like both of them, as there are other famous people I like and I do not attach this kind of comfort to all of them, nor draw it from them.  I think it's that both Warhol and Taylor embody individuality, talent, success, and popularity.  They represent a time when the famous were different, and not expected to be easily accessible or understood: they were freaks; Taylor being a freak of beauty and Warhol a freak of sensibility: special.

The Drama of Death: Steven Soderberg’s film Contagion

Contagion, a film directed by Steven Soderbergh

Starring: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Ehle, and Sanaa Lathan

(Screenplay by Scott Burns)
Warner Brothers, 2011

There may have been a time in which the arty folk and the money folk were in different casts and crews in film, but that time is not now: some of the best artists are to be found in large-scale entertainments, giving depth and weight to work that might have been easier to dismiss without them.  Contagion is a disaster film at the core of which is infectious disease; and it is genuinely informed by science and politics, and features talented actors such as Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, and Laurence Fishburne, directed by the gifted, idiosyncratic Steven Soderbergh.  The disease occurs at the connection of three different species; it spreads quickly and terribly, inspiring government response and public panic, while plowing through very particular lives.  Human commitment and vulnerability are acknowledged, are part of the story we see, as doctors work to understand the disease and find a treatment, and families are torn apart by sickness and grief.  It often feels very real, but, of course, this is a movie; and so some of the dialogue is obvious—a scientist (Fishburne) tells his wife (Lathan) to come to him but do not reveal the urgency to anyone, and she subsequently tells a friend who tells everyone; another scientist (Ehle) is a good daughter and a selfless doctor, and is told so more than once; a janitor (John Hawkes) reminds the well-placed male scientist that he too has family he is concerned about (disease and fear move across class and ethnicity).  Jude Law plays an internet journalist spreading false information, exploiting the epidemic for fame and money; and, possibly too crudely, is given bad teeth as evidence of his flaw, although he is both appalling and fun to watch.  Some of the resolutions of the story are surprising, such as the death of two well-placed women; but others are not, as in a protective father’s acceptance of a young man in his daughter’s life, and a powerful man’s sacrifice for a poor boy.  The film reminds the viewer that the global reach of industrial and marketing practices is subject to the wildness of nature, and something dangerous can be born; and shows how humanity is likely to respond with reason and science, with greed and hysteria, with compassion and selfishness.  The film is a major effort, and looks good, but I did not think of it as beautiful; and while I can admire all the actors in it, some of whom are among my favorites, I was not surprised that Gwyneth Paltrow, an actress of charm and cool temperament, of intelligence and instinct, was the alpha and omega of the film.  She is a complicated figure; and, here is a figure of both joy and destruction, an emblem of intimacy and danger, a manifestation of the endless human puzzle. 

Tragedy and Transcendence

Gertrude Stein, in her plainly declarative, repetitious, elaborating, embracing sentences, said of painter Henri Matisse: “This one was certainly a great man, this one was certainly clearly expressing something.  Some were certain that this one was clearly expressing something being struggling, some were certain that this one was not greatly expressing something being struggling” (“Portraits and Other Short Works,” Library of America's Stein: Writings 1903-1932, page 281).  Stein gives a picture of a man whose work was interpreted by different persons, some of whom understood and appreciated what he was doing and some of whom did not, the traditional story of an artist, especially an experimental one.  It is important to remember that some of the best loved and greatest artists suffered for their difference, for their craft and passion and vision; important to remember as it is part—though not all—of their truth and it may make us a little more tolerant, if not understanding, of the artists we ourselves come to know.  That the general public and sometimes family, friends, and lovers do not understand the commitment, content, and design of an artist’s work intensifies the difficulties of being an artist, of bringing new work into the world while also dealing, badly or well, with the usual demands—of citizenship, of love, of survival—in the world.  The individual artist, reminded of the confinements, pressures, and priorities of society, is often engaged in a struggle to achieve something that is both personal and impersonal, original and inflected with response to established and respected tradition, of the moment and for all time.  The artist, taking materials available to all, materials that do not interest most, is involved in a unique quest, a search of transformation and transcendence.

In reading some of the description of Gertrude Stein’s life, and how she came to be an art patron—a friend to artists, an owner of their work, a facilitator of relationships—I was impressed by how intimate and simple were the lives of now famous artists, how vivid the memory.  One artist spreads news of the work of another artist, Pissarro talking with others about Cezanne; or one gallerist, Vollard, introducing Cezanne, Daumier, Manet, Renoirs, and Gauguin to those who might appreciate them.  We are told of Henri Matisse and his wife that “The Matisses had had a hard time.  Matisse had come to Paris as a young man to study pharmacy,” before becoming interested in painting and influenced by Poussin and Chardin,” in the cultural history and memoir that is “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” (Stein: Writings 1903-1932, page 695).  “Under the influence of the paintings of Poussin and Chardin he had painted still life pictures that had considerable success at the Champ-de-Mars salon, one of the two big spring salons.  And then he fell under the influence of Cezanne, and then under the influence of negro sculpture.  All this developed the Matisse of the period of La Femme au Chapeau” (695).  Description of the cost and effort of a Matisse painting—of fruit that had to be bought and preserved for the time it took to complete a painting of it—and the strain and stress of that is given.  “Matisse worked every day and every day and every day and he worked terribly hard” (696).  It is always significant that how hard an artist works is emphasized, as much of what he does can look like leisure or play to people who do not understand it.  Many people still think work is only of the body, or only what one is forced to do, or paid to do; what begins outside of oneself, for reasons apart from oneself. The artist works with imagination, and insight and intellect; he or she works for and within the inner life, an inner life that can bring hope or despair, clarity or confusion, to the world.  The cruelty and ignorance of the world continue everyday due to the paucity of compassion and knowledge that is found in art; an absurdity or a tragedy, or both.

When Matisse put on exhibit at a salon the painting “La Femme au Chapeau,” it was “derided and attacked and it was sold” (697)—and sold to Gertrude Stein, beginning a friendship.  It was a picture that defied conventional presentation, in which a woman’s face showed different colors and forms.  It was hard for some observers to consider that maybe this painter did not want to see or say the usual thing in the usual way.  It is often hard for people to understand that.  I recall seeing my first Matisse in person at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan many years ago; I think it was a large red painting of pink people dancing in a circle, a strange work, a strangeness I welcomed, as I wanted what was different, free, new, thoughtful, work that separated the individual from the dull and the familiar and brought a new vision, a new world.  I still welcome strangeness.

I have been talking, via electronic mail, with a friend about writing, the kind of conversation in which there is as much misunderstanding as understanding.  I have been focused on fiction and he on memoirs; I on writing, he on teaching.  He is a responsible adult, with a wife and child, regular work and a house; and when he declared that he preferred essays to fiction, and teaching to writing, I told him that I was sorry about that, and thought that there was something deep in that to be explored.  He was disappointed in my response.  I explained that I used to love to write different things as a very young person, but as I got older, it became easier and easier to become alienated from creative writing—from fiction and poetry—as the world has ways to distract and discourage us (for instance, with talk of duty and practicality).  It is easy for a man or woman to be seen as derelict or monstrous for insisting on one’s own creativity and value as an artist—it may be possible, with time, to become a derelict or monster.  However, I did not say that we can be afraid of our own passions, our own imagination, our own will to freedom; and we can betray ourselves.  I said to my friend that I thought fiction allowed more freedom and imagination than essays; a freedom and imagination for which we are sometimes punished in the daily world.  He said that he did not think he had the talent for that kind of work, and did not see the point of it without hope of doing it well.  Later I thought that he had a very precise, possibly too precise, idea of what fiction entailed (work that is easily smooth, moving naturally, highly emotional), rather than an effort involving discipline and thought and a wide range of expressive forms.  Sometimes, rather than following an established idea for art, one has to allow oneself to go where one is inclined, however strange that might be. 

When Gertrude Stein asks Alice Toklas what she thinks of Picasso’s work and Toklas says it is ugly, there is this useful Stein insight about originality and imitation: “Sure, she said, as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it” (681).  It reminds that me that often the initial reception given to important works—whether books or dance or film or music—is marked by comments about how awkward and contradictory and rhetorical and wild they seem.  One is either lacking in manner, or too mannered.

Sometimes the world gives us a fact more brutal, more strange, more tragic than what we have been inclined to imagine; and, for many people, that happened on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked by plane, and another hijacked plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field.  The arts—dance, fiction, film, and music—have been taking aspects of the experience, of the surprise and terror and grief and anger and healing—and expressing and transforming it; and now at the site in downtown Manhattan where stood the twin towers of the World Trade Center there will be a commemoration of the loss in the form of two pools of water that reflect absence, an embodied contradiction.  That is what art does: express the difficult.

The Leading African-American Literary Critic of His Generation: Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his book Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora

(Commentary)

Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Civitas/Basic Books, 2010

When I heard about Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s book Tradition and the Black Atlantic, I was excited: it sounded as if it might be a return to the kind of early work Henry Louis Gates did that had impressed me, and made me think of Gates as a significant literary and cultural figure, someone of generational and iconic weight and value: Black Literature and Literary Theory, Figures in Black, and The Signifying Monkey.  In years past I thought his republication series focused on the work of black women writers was rare and important, though I was not inclined to read it, and I had liked some (not all) of the journalism Gates had done for The New Yorker, as well as some of his special projects (a feminist anthology, a global culture dictionary, a web site), but found aspects of his more populist work (defending sexist and violent hip-hop, and doing television programs on genealogy) less interesting, if not dismaying.  Gates’s devotion to the realization of W.E.B. DuBois’s encyclopedia project was more than a feather in his cap; it was the whole damn bird in his hands.  Those are the kinds of accomplishments I associate with him, even as I expect more. 

The short text Tradition and the Black Atlantic comes wrapped in the praise of Gates’s associates, colleagues, and friends: Cornel West, Arnold Rampersad, Paul Gilroy, and Anthony Appiah.  Yet, when I got my hands on the one-hundred-and-sixty-three or so pages of Tradition and the Black Atlantic, padded to be longer with notes and index, a work published through Gates’s imprint, Civitas, with Basic Books (Perseus), and I began to read it—I read the book quickly in little more than an afternoon—I thought that the book did have elegance, intelligence, and wit, and that it touched on subjects that once had interested me very much, and still interested me somewhat.  In his introduction (page xii), Gates admits, “The four chapters of this book in their original form were written between 1989 and 1992 in an attempt to organize my thinking about the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and the American ‘culture wars,’ which were raging within and about the academy at roughly the same time…”  Tradition and the Black Atlantic is a book written in much of the language of that era, a language inflected with references to deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and political economy that was considered high cultural theory, though it was not particularly connected to high culture—to classical music, ballet, opera, or painting—except that it was used to describe and explore popular English and European (and some American) fiction and poetry that with time and study had begun to be taken seriously as literature; and it became a language used to examine history and modern social issues, especially regarding class, gender, and ethnicity.  I always thought such a language made more sense for Europeans, with those hundreds of years of cultural history, with a genuine knowledge of and relation to high culture, much more sense than for most Americans (notoriously moving from barbarism to decadence without reaching civilization); and yet it was easy to see how such an analytical tool—looking at the roots, styles, values, and contradictions in the play of poetry and power—would appeal to minorities who wanted to dissect and reconstruct social identities.  Reading Tradition and the Black Atlantic was like listening to old songs, or looking at old photographs; that’s nice, but how directly relevant is it?  

Some of the issues in Tradition and the Black Atlantic—identity, how it is experienced, perceived, discussed, and represented in culture and repressed in politics—remain important to one extent or another, but the figures and topics have changed.  Gender and sexuality no longer have the same subversive or theoretical charge as they did twenty years ago (discussion of them in society now tends to be very practical, having to do with more women seeming to keep their jobs during the recent economic recession than men, and the fact that more men are taking responsibilities for household chores; and with the momentum for same-sex marriage, which seems to be steamrolling conservative opposition).  Ethnicity may be another matter. 

Hip-hop, with its partying and crude sexuality, with its materialism and violence, with its misogyny and homophobia, more than ever dominates the black public image, despite Barack Obama, Colin Powell, Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington, Wynton Marsalis, Beyonce Knowles, Alicia Keys and the like: hip-hop’s mix of rapping and music, with its sampling of older musical work, gives it a vibrancy of form that makes attractive its frequently reactionary and retrogressive content; endowing it with international appeal, enlarging the embrace of some of the worst imagery ever associated with blacks.  Why have critiques of such destructive content had little effect?  (Is it that the frivolous and ignorant think of hip-hop as fun and true, and that the educated, like the powerless but aware, receive it as symbolic rebellion?)  That, I would love to know; and also, to offer just a few examples in a different direction, I would love to have more commentary on the work of writers such as Percival Everett, Martha Southgate, David Bradley, Henry Van Dyke, Hal Bennett, Carl Phillips and Reginald Shepherd, and the music of Billy Strayhorn, Betty Carter, Cassandra Wilson, Lizz Wright, Cecil Taylor, Don Byron, Christian McBride, Jessye Norman, Awadagin Pratt, and the films Losing Ground, Sidewalk Stories, Chameleon Street, Eve’s Bayou and, among others, The Great Debaters.  The paintings and sculpture of African-American visual artists could use more attention too, as could the better work of certain folk artists in different fields and genres.  In England, writer Zadie Smith and actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and rock singer Kele of Bloc Party have made their own giant splashes, as had the androgynous singer Ephraim Lewis, before he died; and Ejiofor played a cross-dressing designer in Kinky Boots, and Kele is gay and alludes to that experience in his songs.  I do not recall Gates mentioning any of these persons in Tradition and the Black Atlantic.  Each year, each decade, offers new subjects, and ever more human and humane content. 

Has Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a literary critic and scholar, for instance, made the case for new additions to the literary canon (which is different from anthologizing or celebrating already accepted, revered, or historical writers)?  In Tradition and the Black Atlantic Gates writes about Stuart Hall, Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, as well as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Raymond Williams, Edmund Burke, Fanon, Derrida, and Lacan, in these dated pages that have been augmented with some contemporary asides, attempting to make current comparisons and connections (the election of Barack Obama, the shifting American political landscape, and the resulting anger and paranoia among some citizens are noted: Tea Party, anyone?).

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is concerned with identity and problematic social position and, like anyone, is to be commended for appreciating complicated identities and the tensions among them, though it would be much more fascinating to explore the many examples of people doing diverse, new, and wonderful things.  The career of Henry Louis Gates Jr. alone is proof of the good that can be done even in an imperfect world.  It could be illuminating to identify the attitudes, ideas, principles, and strategies in successful African-American lives, and to use that as the basis of a progressive social theory (what I see when I look at Barack, Oprah, Jessye, Wynton, Beyonce, and Henry Louis himself is a commitment to craft, cultivation of the self, and thoughtfulness, as well as a sensitive, sensuous response to experience and the finer things in life, much of which translates into adaptability and sociability, with a respectable degree of public responsibility); and the resulting theory could not be any worse that what has been created before, some of which has enlightened us, but none of which has liberated us.  Gates himself notes the insights, kindness, and attention to local phenomenon of professor and writer Stuart Hall, to whom Gates dedicates the book Tradition and the Black Atlantic (I suspect kindness registers with Gates because Gates—Skip, to his many friends—himself is kind; and he may recognize it as something both familiar and rare).  Gates probes the work of film director Isaac Julien, appreciating the multiplicity of black male identity in Julien’s Looking for Langston, his modernist artistry, his critical politics, and the sensuality and softness of his imagery.  Yet, it is impossible for me not to think that Denzel Washington’s career is many times more significant than all the black British film artists Gates writes about, just as James Baldwin—who broke ground in Another Country by simultaneously dealing with art, class, race, gender, sexuality, and the pain, potential, and deceptions of individuality in New York and Paris—is more important than the black British writers Gates salutes.  Has Gates considered dedicating himself to a prolonged study of either, and sharing the results?  Has Gates written about Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, or Toni Morrison’s Paradise, books that present dynamic black communities, full of connection and conflict?  I respect academic work, but I am ambivalent about it too, as many academics have the habit of ignoring much of the broader world beyond the academy, until elements in that world form a controversy or fashionable trend, as had the work of black British artists and thinkers, work with art-house styles and theoretical references.  Too often popular culture is ignored, unless it has the aura of the downtrodden and low (that nastiness gets called authenticity), such as with hip-hop.  Beauty, when it is popular, is suspect; as are intelligence and eloquence, when they are popular—it can be hilarious to watch an academic demur when a popular cultural figure is cited with respect, the academic’s face averted, and feet moving backward, instinctively achieving distance.  However, I am curious, as well, to know more about how Gates sees the larger world, not merely the African-American or black British world.  Much of the commentary by Gates in Tradition and the Black Atlantic is sophisticated and suave, and somehow both far-reaching and limited in focus (like fumigating an entire house after seeing a few ants—or putting out a few potted plants and being convinced that one has constructed a garden).  I may be guilty of comparable, if less elegant, gestures in these notes, which are not exactly a proper review, page by page, idea by idea.  Although now, months after reading Tradition and the Black Atlantic, I could not bear to read the whole thing again, I did look at a few pages that actually said some things—not especially complex, but certainly true—that I consider interesting:

“If Looking for Langston is a meditation on the Harlem Renaissance, it is equally an impassioned rebuttal to the virulent homophobia associated with the Black Power and Black Aesthetic movements in the sixties” (57).

“To the extent that black British cinema is represented as an act of cultural politics, it then becomes vulnerable to a political reproach as elitist, Europeanized, overly highbrow.  As a black cultural product without a significant black audience, its very blackness becomes suspect” (64).

“For as we know, the history of African Americans is marked by noble demands for political tolerance from the larger society, but also by a paradoxical tendency to censure our own” (67).

“So the very newest generation of black British cultural critics are brave, resourceful, and dialectical when they seek to recuperate everything that was right about the 1960s movements of ethnicist self-affirmation” (68).

“The hermeneutics of the 1970s killed the author; the politics of the 1980s brought the author back” (74).

“The old leftist critiques of the commodity have a usefully confining tendency: The critiques set up a cunning trap that practically guarantees that the marginalized cultures being glorified will remain marginalized.  The authors of these critiques knew just how to keep us in our place.  And the logic was breathtakingly simple: If you win, you lose” (78).

Notes on the television program “Roots,” Black Narratives, the new King monument in Washington, D.C., and Barack

On Who and What We Choose to Be and Do

“Darling, in you I found strength where I was torn down.”

—Ashford and Simpson, “You’re All I Need to Get By”

We do not have to choose between remembering the past or living in the present, any more than we have to choose between knowledge and love, or purpose and happiness, although sometimes we are encouraged by personal pain or certain people to do so.  I know that the original broadcast of the television program “Roots,” based on African-American writer Alex Haley’s imaginative reconstruction of his family’s history, was an important cultural and historical event, presenting at once to all of America a history—the history of the capture and enslavement of Africans—that had been referred to but rarely discussed at length or widely; the program was a sensation and a corrective to political amnesia; and it inspired many people to research their family history.  It presented one family, beginning in Africa with a manhood ritual, and moving on to the capture of a young man and the ocean journey—with more than one-hundred and fifty persons chained together in a ship—and their hard work and humiliating treatment in America over several centuries.  The servile manner dictated, the splitting up of families, the rape of women, the whipping and killing of men, and the selling of children are all here.  So is the tension between those blacks who remember the past and Africa, and those who accept their present life in America; and between those who attempt friendship and those resigned to bitterness.  The drama is enacted by some of the popular performers of the day, including Cicely Tyson, Ed Asner, Ralph Waite, John Amos, Madge Sinclair, Leslie Uggams, Chuck Connors, Ben Vereen, Richard Roundtree, Sandy Duncan, Ben Vereen, George Sanford Brown, and Lloyd Bridges.  Ralph Waite’s natural acceptance of the way things are—slavery and its immorality—as a shipman on a slave ship is perfectly smooth and startling for that reason.  He, like many of the other performers here (particularly Sandy Duncan and Lloyd Bridges), had a likable public reputation, and to have him play such a role must have been a rewarding exercise of his talent as an actor even as it encouraged the (possibly shocked) viewer to remember that those involved in slavery as slave-catchers or owners were human too, though they were morally reprehensible.  The performances that impress me now are probably the same ones that impressed me and others upon first viewing: Levar Burton as young Kunta Kinte, Madge Sinclair as Belle, Leslie Uggams as Kizzy, and Ben Vereen as Chicken George (though the Stan Winston makeup on some of them—or how that is photographed—is sometimes distracting; for instance, Vereen has a brown-in-black complexion, like black coffee, but the aging makeup gives his skin a black tone with some gray in it).  Someone like Chicken George, a man who enjoys and is good at training and fighting roosters, and likes wearing good clothes and bringing presents to his family, stands out for his independence and skill, for his individuality despite the times.  I like that we see some masters try to be decent, and I was pleased as well to see a young Brad Davis as a poor, loving young white man who is befriended by, and befriends, the blacks; and, though I am not sure his performance is entirely consistent and rooted (he is very sweet for someone who has had a hard life), watching him I thought of James Dean.  The program, which is driven by dialogue and plot rather than aesthetic beauty or reverie, was moving; and it remains a necessity, as that history is still not as known or as understood as it could be, though creative writers such as Margaret Walker, Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones have explored the subject, as have film directors in works such as Glory and Sankofa and Nightjohn (and, of course, scholars, too).

It was possibly surprising that the writer Charles Johnson, who wrote Middle Passage and Oxherding Tale, two novels exploring the enslavement of Africans, has written that it is time to create narratives that move beyond the fact of slavery and the history of segregation and its abuses to embrace the new opportunities and facts of success in African-American lives, individual and collective lives.  In a piece in the journal The American Scholar on the subject, and available online now, Charles Johnson aligns storytelling with philosophy, acknowledges the longtime paradigm of the victim through which the African-American experience has been interpreted, and, recognizing the ongoing travails of class, affirms the diversity of African-Americans and states, “In the 21^st century, we need new and better stories, new concepts, and new vocabularies and grammar based not on the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored present…These will be narratives that do not claim to be absolute truth, but instead more humbly present themselves as a very tentative thesis that must be tested every day in the depths of our own experience and by all the reliable evidence we have available, as limited as that might be.”  I would like to read those new stories, but it would do us well to remember that there has been in the African-American modern realist novel—Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Alice Walker’s Meridian, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, and David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, to name but a few and not the most current works—a grappling with the individual in society, with his (her) personality, potential, and problems.  There has been more than one way of seeing and storytelling, which is not to deny the validity of Johnson’s point, that the state of the victim has been a consistent subject in many African-American works; and that new realities exist to be explored.     

The movement from enslavement and disenfranchisement to civil rights was facilitated by men such as W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the efforts of ordinary men and women living their lives with dignity and purpose, but the vision of African-American humanity has been kept alive through the decades also by caring, intelligent artists.  It was interesting to see “Roots” and then to contemplate the new monument to the preacher and activist Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington.  I have not walked around the monument itself, but have seen a photograph of it in the September 5, 2011 issue of Time magazine (available the week of August 22, 2011).  The magazine’s writer Richard Lacayo declared that “As a work of art, the stiffly modeled sculpture of King at its center has its problems.  But as a work of visual rhetoric, a device for summoning feelings about one of the greatest Americans, the first monument on the National Mall devoted to a man who was never President—and the first for an African American—gets a lot of things right.”  Lacayo describes the sensation of walking around and through the site.  It is an impressive looking work, of course; and it is easy to imagine it becoming a destination for many.  It is a work that adds something to the telling of the American story, but it is impossible not to think of how long it takes public knowledge and manners to catch up to the creativity and liberty in individual human hearts.  

Liberty survives in human hearts.  We do not have to choose between remembering the past—Africa, enslavement, segregation and discrimination, struggle and slow progress—or living in the present, with its quickened speed and opportunity and frustration.  The statue of King, erected during the term of the first African-American, Barack Obama, as president, has historical and sentimental appeal; and we can look at it and think of the past, of its troubles and accomplishments, and of the problems that remain to be solved, whether those problems are in employing, health care, housing—or in human hearts and mind.  The election of Barack Obama is a sign of progress. 

I did not, and do not, expect everyone to like or admire Barack Obama.  How could they?  He is a very particular man with a very particular agenda, one that may be in part or whole opposed to that of others, but I did anticipate that it would be instructive to have him as president.  I think he has been a good president, though not a great one; for him to be great in my eyes, he would have to end the country’s wars, and regulate Wall Street and its financial practices; and then begin to advance his more progressive programs and ideas with greater momentum.  Yet, I have been surprised by the extreme, hysterical, and negative opposition to him in certain quarters, public and private; and surprised by the inclination of others to misinterpret him, though he is among the most articulate, clear, and logical of men.  I have been displeased to read, hear, or see that some people—who consider themselves progressive—criticize him for not being ideological (narrow-minded) or militant (vicious) enough, not focused primarily on African-American issues or more obviously determined to destroy his conservative political opposition.  The president is a pragmatist, an insightful one; and many of his critics are deluded, dangerously deluded. 

I used to admire the theologian Cornel West, and I admired him for a long time, but Cornel West and television journalist Tavis Smiley, two black men, two public activists, whose disrespectful and insidious speculation about the president's character and motives have forced intelligent citizens to question their integrity; two men who have proven themselves again and again to be vain and spiteful in regard to the president, less concerned with programs and projects and progress than with taking offense at what they see as the president’s inadequate regard for their masculine and self-centered pride.  They seem to expect a conformity to their expectations and views that would be, in fact, nothing more than a form of spinelessness, if not idiocy.  Why do they expect conformity?  (I do not.)  Of course, I do not know or like every black person, nor the perspective or philosophy of each; I never have and I never will—and to say that is but a fact of human society, of life.  When a friend recommended a piece by West that appeared in the New York Times (“Dr. King Weeps From His Grave,” August 25, 2011), I read it and immediately saw that it was a piece that took the celebration of the King monument as another chance to state, “The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy.”  I thought about what West wrote, but, more than that, I thought of my own hope for the kind of work an African-American intellectual might do, remembering that I thought once that Cornel West and literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. would do that kind of work; and I wrote, quickly and roughly, to my friend:  

I just read the Cornel West piece, and I was not impressed.  West and Gates have genuine gifts and great opportunity; and both could have been as great as Freud or Marx, producing original, transcendent, world-changing visions, but that is not what either has done.  In different ways, to different degrees, they, like Baldwin, began to pander to black people and lazy white liberals--people who expected easy answers and a lot of flagellation of supposed enemies.  Self-transformation begins with the self, but everyone, especially the downtrodden, must begin that work; and then the public work begins, and it is not easy, it is not quick, and it is intellectual, spiritual, and political.  Barack Obama is president, but he cannot do everything alone.  What remains true is how little genuine thought and how little genuine activism exists now in America; and there is nothing new or invigorating, as far as I can see, in Cornel West's opinion piece.  It's the same old recycled rhetoric (and a key to that is the line about King crying in his grave--when a philosopher says something so truthless and melodramatic, everyone should be on guard: this is the language of a demagogue)... I'm just disappointed in West, and tired of his whining about Obama.  He has made his point, good or bad, and it's time to move on with something more productive and useful...It must be noted that I have been a "fan" of both West and Gates since I was young--in the 1980s; and I expected great things from both.  They have good public reputations, but I don't know how much of their work will genuinely last or is genuinely important...And, it is suspect when the only thing a black man is expert on is on being black.  Freud and Marx did not make being Jewish their subjects; they wrote about the human condition, about society at large...

Why do West and Smiley speak and act as if all are—even a president with more knowledge at hand, and more responsibility than both of them have ever had—expected to agree with them?  Why do they expect conformity?  How is it that these two men, who no doubt consider themselves sophisticated, have continued to maintain such deep and hateful provincialism?  Is it that their view of the past has narrowed their view of the present?  Is it that they cannot see beyond their own mirrors?  They seem to have forgotten that we do not have to choose between remembering the past and living in the present; nor do we have to choose between personal growth and cultural solidarity, or between cultural solidarity and political sophistication.  The president, who has claimed his human inheritance and is preparing his own significant legacy as an American of African descent and a public servant, is proof of that.

Query on Art and Criticism

I wrote to some artists and thinkers in different fields and posed some questions: Which arts are important to you and why?  In what ways do you find discussion about art and artistic criticism useful?  How often do you consider philosophical or spiritual questions when contemplating art?  What do you consider your most significant engagement with art--in terms of thought, emotions, or work?  What do you look forward to?  And thus far, have received a few responses, here below.

Dege Legg
Writer-Musician, (bands) Santeria and Black Bayou Construkt


Solitary Walker: Which arts are important to you and why?

Dege Legg: Every day is a work of art.  I admire people who create art out of the seemingly mundane elements that compose their daily lives.  Garden.  Walk through room.  Stop.  Stare at cracks in sidewalk.  Say hello to a cow.  U-turn on the highway.  It’s improvisation.

In what ways do you find discussion about art and artistic criticism useful? 

Art talk is only useful when those involved have a sense of humor. And heart.

How often do you consider philosophical or spiritual questions when contemplating art?
 
Constantly.  The two are intertwined.  Creativity is a spiritual practice for those without an orthodox religion.

What do you consider your most significant engagement with art--in terms of thought, emotions, or work?
 
N/A.  Not sure.  It’s all one big/strange/long blur. Discovering Gabo Marquez was pretty significant.



James Wagner
Art World Observer, JamesWagner.com


Solitary Walker: Which arts are important to you?

James Wagner: All of the arts, without exception.

Why are they important?

They are all equally important to me because I have always believed it is the arts that make life worthwhile; or to put it another way, I believe that once we have looked after the material requirements of the body and our need for love and for sexual satisfaction, except for the need to remain open and responsive to the needs of others, it is art which animates our human being.  I believe this is true for everyone.

I understand that not all men and women believe in art as I do, some maintaining, beyond my understanding, that they just are not interested in it, but I suggest they have just not allowed themselves to see or hear or imagine what they might.  Some argue that they just do not have any time for the arts, and certainly there really are unfortunates who are on the very edge of simple survival who really cannot make or enjoy art, and when we find them, their condition tests our faith even in art.

But I believe nevertheless in the supremacy of the arts above all other human consciousness or endeavor.
In the best of all possible worlds (admittedly a world which will never be), our own basic needs, and the needs of others, would finally be secured; at that point there would be no truly human function remaining but art.  In the meantime our best occupation is working to that end.

In what ways do you find discussion about art and artistic criticism useful?

I am not a good judge of the usefulness of art criticism, since I have always read very little of it, preferring instead to look at or read art first hand.  But perhaps by way of partial explanation I should reveal that I have absolutely no academic experience of any of the fine arts.

How often do you consider philosophical or spiritual questions when contemplating art?

Let me say first that I have absolutely no use for religious spirituality except as a subject of historical study (but having escaped parochial school for secular, then become apostate, maybe I seem to protest too much); I am not even certain that I can approach religious spirituality in a purely aesthetic fashion, but I also do not think of myself as a particularly materialistic person.  I'm pretty rational and intelligent, but I'm easily moved by work that is moving.   So, yes, I do bring philosophical and spiritual insights into my experience of art, but while I have a substantial background in philosophy, ethics, history - and aesthetics (that one self-taught), I think these tools are now so much a part of my being that I can't separate their separate contribution from my overall experience while contemplating of art. 

What do you consider your most significant engagement with art--in terms of thought, emotions, or work?

I am taking a chance on being wrong about myself with my initial response to the question, but my first thought is that, because of my attraction to, even passion for, the avant-garde in all the arts, in even the most shocking form, and on account of my life-long engagement in social and political issues as one (imagined and tiny) tribune for the powerless, my strongest responses to works of art in any medium are generally a consequence of experiencing works that are both strikingly original and somehow socially or politically engaged, however subtly.

What do you look forward to?

Two things: The successor to the current political world, which will serve justice, opportunity, transparency and the diversity of both people and peoples; and the increasingly-connected social world, which will find all people and all peoples engaged in the arts as never before, and all interacting on a scale and with a civility unimaginable today. All of the problems which the planet's existing systems of government have created, in the stupidity, greed, power hunger and secrecy-obsession of their operators, problems which appear unavoidable or insurmountable (as these governments want them to appear), can be resolved when this comes to pass.  It will take a while; I don't expect to be here. 

 

Strange Culture's Lesson: Beware of Ignorance and Power

Strange Culture, a documentary film directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson

about Critical Art Ensemble artist Steve Kurtz, featuring Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan

Docurama Films, 2007

Governments do not have to censor or circumscribe, prosecute or persecute, but out of a concern for their own power, and to protect moneyed interests, and sometimes to ensure public safety, they do.  One such occasion seems to be that of artist Steve Kurtz, whose work with Critical Art Ensemble, a five-person collective, investigated the relationships among industry, science, the government, and the public, especially regarding the introduction of genetically modified food, without proper labeling, to the consumer market: people literally do not know what they are eating, or what the long term effects are likely to be (they are walking experiments).  In addition, with the current and increasing inclination of corporations to patent life forms, greater monopoly threatens.  In Strange Culture, we see how two events converged in Steve Kurtz’s life to profoundly detrimental effect.  As Steve and his wife Hope Kurtz and their colleagues prepared for a large exhibit focused on experimental produce, as part of his work Steve acquired through an internet purchase bacteria that he prepared in glass-enclosed cultures (he was consulting scientists too); and in May 2004 when Kurtz awoke in bed to realize that his wife Hope—an editor known for her gift for identifying patterns and anomalies—was not breathing, he then reported that, and the people investigating the sudden death saw his arty science work, the equipment and chemicals, and they feared bioterrorism—and Kurtz’s prosecution, or persecution, began.  The justice authorities knew nothing of contemporary art, and the broad range of domains art explores or the analytical practices it engages; and they did not care to listen as Steve Kurt tried to explain.  Ignorance and power were aligned against Steve Kurtz.

Strange Culture is an intelligent and useful film, demonstrating how several cultures acquire and disseminate knowledge, specifically the art world and the justice system.  It allows experts to speak, and it presents evidence.  We even see some art—some of which is expectedly odd, and some of which is obvious tribute to tradition.  The center of the film is Steve Kurtz, a long-haired blond, blue-jeaned artist and teacher, with dark circles under his eyes and a soft, humorous manner.  He talks directly to the camera; and other times he is impersonated, quite effectively, in scenes by actor Thomas Jay Ryan, who projects sensitivity with intelligence, an indirect sensuality, and a certain impatience.  Several ironies occur: the work of Kurtz and his associates was about the nature of social justice, and the impact of ignorance and knowledge on the public, and Kurtz came to feel the force of law (knowledge did not protect him); and when police authorities—the local police and then the Federal Bureau of Investigation—did their own work, driven by a supposed suspicion of bioterrorism, they were careless and clumsy with the materials they handled and the garbage they left behind.  Kurtz’s case embodies his worry, exemplifying the warning in his work; and the manner and methods of the policing authorities defied their own announced standards and concern for possibly hazardous materials.  Both the police and the FBI autopsy Hope Kurtz; and heart failure is found as the cause of her death, but they persist in pursuing her grieving, stunned husband.  Steve Kurtz is described as an open and giving collaborator and teacher, someone who is missed as he becomes involved in the legal case against him; and his students, who are fond of him, are afraid of signing a petition on his behalf.  The students do not want to be on the FBI’s radar.  It is sad to think that a benign gesture could threaten one’s own security (it makes an individual wonder about whether the genuine complaints one has lodged, or the legitimate protests one has joined, are part of a file that—ignobly, maliciously—will be used against one).  Why should an individual be punished for seeking justice, especially by the justice department?  Kurtz does get a vigorous defense from a lawyer named Cambria who has worked with the American Civil Liberties Union; and that defense is necessary, as Kurtz realizes that a persona and crime are being constructed by the prosecutors that bear no real resemblance to who he is or what he has done.  Government investigators ask those who know Kurtz about Kurtz’s politics, sexual habits, and drug use, questions that seem both crass and stupid.  Why is such an effort being made?  More than one person says that this is an attempt to broaden the reach of the (George W. Bush) government into academe and art, achieving the ability to silence dissent.  Making civil issues a criminal matter could do that; and agencies and laws—and the power they create and employ—survive the change in administrations.  First, silence the artists and thinkers.  An auction at the Paula Cooper Gallery is held, with writer Wallace Shawn’s participation, and many in the art world seem to rally and more than one-hundred-and-sixty thousand dollars are raised for the defense of Kurtz and the ailing scientist who is charged with him, Robert Ferrell.  One might think the case could be dropped completely when the public health commissioner declares that Steve Kurtz’s work did not provide or provoke a threat to public safety, but then prosecutors simply shift gears, charging him with wire fraud connected to how the bacteria he used was acquired.  (Someone says it is a unique fraud charge, in which no one directly involved—buyer or seller, museum or artist, or anyone else—has complained of being defrauded.)  The film Strange Culture was made before the case was resolved, and shows us some of the artists and lawyers who were actually involved in this real world event but it also features dramatic scenes with Tilda Swinton (smart, quick, shrewd, honest) as Hope, and Thomas Jay Ryan (casually comprehensive and responsive) as Steve.  It is one of those real world matters that you have to see to believe and even then it seems fantastical—or, more precisely, nightmarish.

Other Films

Documentaries, new, recent, and old, are not the only films worth considering; however, a film such as Strange Culture contains much that does, or should, concern us.  There are some films that I think might be great, films certainly worth discussing: The Dry Land, The Exploding Girl, Wendy and Lucy, and Winter’s Bone.  The Dry Land, starring Ryan O’Nan and America Ferrara, focuses on a young couple after the husband returns from war, having forgotten a painful event there, in which his compassion rather than his violent impulses led him astray; The Exploding Girl, about an epileptic girl played by Zoe Kazan, and her best male friend, two college students who return to the city while on break, as her boyfriend moves further from her and her best male friend considers that he and she might become closer; Wendy and Lucy, about a quietly desperate and nearly destitute girl (actress Michelle Williams) who is traveling with her dog; and Winter’s Bone, about a young woman (actress Jennifer Lawrence) who must find her absent, drug-making father who is out on bail, or face being evicted with her mother and siblings from the family home, which has been used for the father’s bond, and to find her father she must seek out dangerous relatives, crazy country people.  These films, with exceptional writing and cinematography and acting, present portraits of America that are true: we recognize both experience—the brutal confusion of war, the struggle for survival, the drift of youth, and the desire for friendship and love—and what we know about experience.

As well, I liked Columbus Short in Armored, as a caretaker for his younger brother and a man who takes a security guard job and is induced to participate in a robbery; and Omari Hardwick as a bisexual husband to a controlling magazine editor in For Colored Girls, the recent film interpretation, also featuring Kimberley Elise and Whoopi Goldberg, of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem theatrical production.  Short’s acting is full of emotional detail—concern, fear, outrage, pride, and shrewdness; and Omar Hardwick has the cool surface and nagging tension of a man balancing desire and responsibility.  I liked the rakish Ewan McGregor in The Ghost Writer and as a gentleman in Miss Potter.  I admired Natalie Portman’s performance in both The Other Woman and No Strings Attached, two films with different spirits (in the former, about marriage, adultery, and grief, Portman plays an angry young woman, and in the second about friendship and sex, with a deeply charming and effective Ashton Kutcher, Portman is both alienated and free).  I thought the musical Burlesque, featuring Cher and Christina Aguilera, was amusing and sweet, an achievement in a treatment of a subject that could be tawdry (and Aguilera’s voice is genuinely amazing); and City Island, about a prison guard father (starring Andy Garcia) who discovers his abandoned son in prison and takes him home, had a similarly light spirit.  I enjoyed Sherlock Holmes; and Somewhere.  I could note that I did not particularly like Precious or The Social Network (the characters and the situations were mostly repellent), though I appreciated Paula Patton in the first and Armie Hammer in the second; and there are things—positive and negative, I think—to be said about Beastly, Big Fan, The Company Men, The Fighter, Love and Other Drugs, The Next Three Days and other movies.  Yet, a film like Strange Culture is not only about the world we live in, but it is about how the world came to be and continues to be what it is.