JOHN ZEAMAN

Contemporary

Pierre Matisse Gallery

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In 1977, I went to see a Balthus show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. It was a weekday afternoon, midway through the run of the show, but the 57th Street gallery was packed —mostly with young artists. Nobody could afford to buy anything, yet there was no sense —as you sometimes get in uptown galleries—that the crowd with the paint-splattered jeans wasn’t welcome.

“Nude at Rest,” 1977, by Balthus

The gallery had an air of noblesse oblige. It dealt in legends, the big European names of the century: Joan Miro, Alberto Giacometti, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, Balthus, Jean Dubuffet, and, of course, Henri Matisse, the artist’s father. Although many of the artists were part of history by that time, there was still a sense of a living connection, of being closer to the source than was the case in a museum.

Balthus, for example, was a touchstone for many artists at that time, a painter who had found a way to reconcile the great figurative tradition of the past with a modern sensibility, in works that were elegant, mysterious, and sexually charged.

Being an art dealer when your father is a famous artist might seem to solve several problems – name recognition, for example, or access to blue chip art. And to some extent, Matisse did benefit from his connections. But Matisse was determined to carve out his own identity. He chose his own turf, leaving France for New York in 1924, and after some apprentice years, opening up his own space in the Fuller Building on 57th Street.

Between 1931 and 1989, Matisse organized hundreds of exhibitions. Artists whose names are golden to us today owe much of their glitter to Matisse’s patient burnishing. In 1945, he was the first to exhibit Miro’s “Constellations” series; in 1948 he mounted the first retrospective of sculpture by Giacometti, and in 1949 gave the world its first look at his father’s famous cutouts.

The Morgan Library, which normally deals with books and drawings, organized “Pierre Matisse and His Artists” because in 1998 it was given the gallery’s archives. So, in addition to about 60 paintings by gallery luminaries, there are letters, show announcements, checklists, photographs, and other memorabilia that provide glimpses into the workings of the gallery.

The show is unusual for its focus on a dealer. Art dealers tend to get much less attention than the impresarios of theater and dance, even though they do the same thing: find talent, develop it, bring it to the public, and change people’s tastes.

Matisse was known for his remarkable eye and his low-key salesmanship. He never relied on theory or fashion to tell him what was good. He embraced the refinement of Balthus and the harsh primitivism of Dubuffet, the whimsical abstractions of Miro, and the obsessively analytical portraits of Giacometti. Clients guided by his taste included Walter P. Chrysler, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., Edward G. Robinson, and James Thrall Soby. Two of his collectors endowed their own museums, Joseph R. Hirshhorn and Duncan Phillips.

His face peers out at us from several paintings, filtered through the lenses of his artists’ sensibilities. The earliest, by his father, is a charming oil of 9-year-old Pierre, wearing a pinkish cap. With a few sure lines, the elder Matisse captured his youngest son’s slightly divergent eyes and the serious expression that he would carry through his life.

A 1938 standing portrait by Balthus is the epitome of panache and sophistication. The handsome young dealer with the thinning hair, the soulful brown eyes, the stylish clothes stands with one foot up on a chair, revealing – like the bold touch of color in one of his father’s paintings – a bright red sock.

Dubuffet, the art brut visionary, depicted his dealer as a greenish light bulb with a worried expression.

Relationships with artists were fraught with tensions. There were issues over contracts, monthly stipends, the scheduling of exhibits, the setting of prices. Sculptor Alexander Calder, for example, quit the gallery after a dispute about money. Calder refused to part with his works at the prices Matisse wanted to sell them for, although they weren’t moving well at the higher prices. Matisse wrote back, “I always thought that prices were raised by the demand!”

Balthus managed to take offense when Matisse didn’t enthusiastically agree to sit for another portrait, writing to his dealer: “The very spontaneity of your reaction made me realize … that you are really no longer interested in my work, apart from its business potential.” Matisse managed to patch this one up.

How much the finances of the art world have changed can be seen in a 1943 poster for a summer exhibition that trumpeted, with uncharacteristic commercial zeal, “Modern Pictures Under Five Hundred,” with a list of names that included Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Bonnard, Chagall, Andre Derain, and Matisse.

The war years depressed prices for art, but they also sent more European artists Matisse’s way. A 1942 “Artists in Exile” exhibit featured, among others, Chagall, Piet Mondrian, and Yves Tanguy.

Matisse was oriented toward European art, but he was also a New Yorker and not so Old World as not to appreciate art rooted in his adopted city, such as Raymond Mason’s funky sculptural tableau of St. Mark’s Place, circa 1972. The scene, a view from a coffee shop window, is a parade of characters and grotesques – winos and panhandlers, flower children and aging hipsters, people in turbans and plumed helmets – set against perfectly rendered store facades with the squalid tenement windows above.

Matisse took chances on new artists and, once committed, worked to boost their careers to the next level. The sale of a major painting by the young Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam to the Museum of Modern Art was a huge breakthrough, worthy of a telegram to the artist.

There are some beautiful individual works in this show. The Balthuses are great, including several of dreamy, somnambulant girls and a window-framed view of the French countryside with a magical, almost granular light. Miro’s blue-field “Constellations” are pure joy, and there’s a wonderfully elongated Chagall acrobat in harlequin-patterned tights.

But, this exhibit is mostly valuable for the way it illuminates the sensibilities of an art dealer who enriched the cultural life of New York City for more than half a century.

 The Morgan Library

2002

 

Scary Art

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Scaring people has always been one of art’s primary functions. Aristotle said it had to do with the need for catharsis. Think Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, the gothic novel, melodramatic opera, and film noir. In the visual arts, the tradition goes back to the Middle Ages: paintings of dragons and other monsters, visions of hell and last judgments, beheadings, crucifixions, and other grisly martyrdoms.

But, where fear continues to be a dominant emotion in other art media, it petered out in the visual arts. When was the last time you left an art gallery in the wake of an adrenaline rush? Fear came to be something that was beneath art’s intellectual dignity. Leave the serial killers and the supernatural to the books and movies, seemed to be the thinking. And yet, well, something was lost. Fear is a fundamental human emotion. In surrendering its claim in that area, art risked becoming sterile.

The trick for today’s artists has been to rediscover fear, while adhering to modernist principles. Few wanted to go back to painting skeletons flogging naked souls in Hell.

The various ways this problem was resolved can be seen at “Danger,” an exhibit at Exit Art in Soho, which comes up with about two dozen artists who set out to startle, alarm, horrify, or frighten.

Chris Burden after being shot in the arm in 1971.

The most effective strategies fall into two categories. The first traces its lineage from Chris Burden, whose 1971 film “Shoot” became something of a performance art classic. The film, on continuous showing in the video portion of the exhibit, shows Burden being shot in the arm with a 22-caliber rifle. He flinches at the bullet’s impact – a flesh wound to the upper arm – then walks forward briskly, as if he had somewhere else to go. In an interview, Burden said he staged the event to interject some reality into a culture that viewed countless faked shootings in movies and on television. There’s a big difference, he emphasized, between a shootout on TV and “looking down at your own arm with a smoking hole in it.”

The piece made Burden famous, and he moved on to other extreme performances. He had himself nailed, crucifixion-like, to a Volkswagen, crawled naked through a pile of broken glass, and stuck himself in a locker for five days. Other stunts involved near drowning and electrocution.

As the exhibit demonstrates, Burden spawned a genre, albeit one that came to be dominated more by masochistic exhibitionism than deep evocations of fear. We see Mexican artist Ximena Cuevas applying a fresh serrano chile pepper to the rims of her eyes, as if it were eyeliner.

Slaven Tolj mixes vodka and whiskey in a gesture symbolic of globalization and the trauma of rapidly changing politics in Eastern Europe. A video shows him stoically downing the drinks until he passes out and has to be taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

With fireworks shooting out of the top of a metal helmet, David Hall, a Minnesota performance artist, transforms himself into a “living pyrotechnic” – a forgotten art form from the 16th and 17th centuries. Out in Los Angeles, Skip Arnold clung to the hood of a moving tractor trailer for a video titled “Hood Ornament.”

Burden was once derisively called “the Evel Knievel of contemporary art,” but artist David Leslie, the so-called “Impact Addict,” embraces the role in enthusiastic parodies, sparring with boxer Riddick Bowe, being pummeled and kicked by martial arts masters (while wearing a padded suit decorated with twinkly lights), and attempting to launch himself over a mountain of watermelons on a Soho street (he plunged head first onto the watermelons – but emerged from the wreckage with macho flair).

Our patience with these stunts does wear a bit thin as we watch the helicopter rescue of Allen Tombello, who had purposely stranded himself on the side of a mountain.

The other strain of scary art might be said to have evolved out of minimalism. In that style, artists strove for a geometric purity with simple forms, such as cubes or pyramids. Many of these pieces tended to be big and heavy, however, and were seen as threatening. Some artists capitalized on this, such as Richard Serra, who played with heavy slabs of iron and steel, tilting them at precarious angles. One such piece, in fact, crushed the leg of a worker who was helping to install it.

So, unlike scary movies and books, which act purely on the imagination, art could be scary by its mere physical presence, by its implied threat to the viewer. In this show, such works include those of Robert Chambers, whose sculptures have a menacing industrial character, with whirling blades and blaring horns.

Chico MacMurtrie’s robots are the most visually exciting pieces in the exhibit, although they are less scary than playful. Assembled from rusted rods, pipes, and metal discards, they are activated by computer and made to wave and jiggle and ejaculate steam in the direction of what is supposed to be a helpless female robot.

Artist Arnaldo Morales has the distinction of creating a work that was deemed too dangerous for “Danger.” His original piece consisted of two circular blades synchronized to just miss hitting each other as they spun above the viewers’ heads. Morales’ substitute work is a high-tech surgical-style instrument with a very nasty blade at one end and a pneumatic trigger-grip at the other. Visitors can squeeze it to produce a menacing vibration.

Other pieces in the show are more about danger than dangerous themselves. These include Keith Sanborn’s video installation, which makes use of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, and Susan Seubert’s photographs of things that correspond to various phobias: fear of beds (clinophobia), dolls (pediophobia), horses (equinophobia), snakes (ophidiophobia), and being tied up (merinthophobia).

Whether the artists here succeed in being dangerous or not, Exit Art deserves praise for putting together an exhibit that investigates a theme and allows for comparisons across various genres and artistic strategies. There’s too little of this in art nowadays. Artists and galleries are too often content to mystify, rather than putting their ideas to the test.

Exit Art gallery, NYC

2001

 

Digital Art

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We live in a time of unparalleled technological optimism, when it is assumed that applied science will transform every aspect of our lives, including the arts. A new exhibit at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan, “BitStreams,” asserts that digital technology is the biggest thing to come along since photography, that it has revolutionalized the ways artists work and perceive the world.

Really? Are we truly in the midst of an artistic revolution? Or are the claims being made for digital media something akin to the Internet stock bubble, a faith in change that is so strong – a sort of evangelical futurism – that it gets way ahead of reality?

This and its companion exhibit, “Data Dynamics,” on Internet art, are by no means as far out as they could be. You’ll find none of technology’s flashier tricks – virtual reality or holograms – here. Anyone who has ever played with the paintbrush tool on a computer, or watched the toasters fly by on their screen saver, will feel comfortable. There’s a lot of bleeping and blinking. Plasma screens display chips of color flying about like bees in a hive. Light grids flicker in patterns to suggest movement and form. There are headphones to put on, dark rooms to go into, and mice to click.

Underneath it all are bits. Bits, paradoxically, are what hold this show together. Bits are what make things “digital.” A quick refresher: Computers reduce all information to a series of zeros and ones, a binary code. A “bit” of information is one digit in that series. String them together and you get a set of instructions for the words on this page, or music, or images.

There are lots of different media in this show: videos, audios, computer graphics, installations, prints, even sculpture. But beneath the surface is the hidden digital structure, the “bit stream.” Dipping into it, and fiddling around with the signals, is theoretically what digital art is all about.

It’s the ease of manipulation that gets people excited. Digital is an art of flux, of transformations. Nothing is fixed. You don’t like a photograph? It can be altered. Don’t like two dimensions? Add a third. Want to turn sights into sounds? No problem.

All this power is dazzling, so much so that it seems a little unfair to point out that the art generated by it seems a little, well, feeble.

Some of it is no more than digital doodling, such as the artist who drew the letter N with a mouse, expanded it with a series of concentric lines, then multiplied the image into a wallpaper-like pattern. Or the one who transforms letters into cute, bug-like characters.

Another group is fascinated with erasing things from photographs. Jon Haddock takes famous news photographs from the Sixties – the woman kneeling over the slain Kent State student, Vietnamese children running from a napalm attack – and removes the people. The empty landscapes, still vaguely recognizable, demonstrate how indelibly imprinted these photos are on our minds.

Inez van Lamsweerde erased her boyfriend. The result is a large self-portrait, a woman passionately kissing an invisible man.

With other artists, such as Carl Fudge, it’s a scrambling game. He scanned a Japanese cartoon character, gave her a digital makeover, and wound up with a kaleidoscopic jigsaw puzzle of circles, diamonds, and other symmetrical shapes. It’s not a bad abstraction, but the appeal is mostly in knowing what it used to be.

One of the most curious effects in the show belongs to Robert Lazzarini. He laser-scanned a human skull, stretched the three-dimensional digital image, then hand-sculpted a skull from the distortion. Gazing at this frozen special effect can give you vertigo, because the mind is being given the cues for an object in motion.

Bit streams ignore the traditional boundaries of art and music, and so does the Whitney in deciding to include 25 “sound artists” in the show. They are eased into the visual environment through a listening “Sound Channel” in which visitors don headphones while leaning against a padded wall. From outside, the partially visible listeners create a row of bodies and gaps that echoes the sequence of ones and zeros in a bit stream.

The Sound Channel at the Whitney Museum.

Many of the sound artists use an old avant-garde trick of incorporating real-world noises into their compositions – street sounds, rolling coins, sloshing water. But that’s only the beginning with digital music, which can alter those sounds in unlimited ways, play them backward, and layer them over other sounds. They can even turn visual imagery into bits and reconfigure those bits, so that they are translated into sounds.

The Iranian performance artist Sussan Deyhim weaves her own guttural cries and incoherent incantations with shortwave radio broadcasts from Turkey. The San Francisco group called DISC scratches CDs, then plays them, so that the skips, screeches, and stammers produce music they call “glitchwerks.”

“Data Dynamics,” the Internet show, has only five works. In Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg’s “Apartment,” visitors type words that are then translated into bizarre three-dimensional rooms, in which the vaguely recognizable walls of the rooms are distorted pictures drawn from the Web. A similar idea is at work in Maciej Wisniewski’s Netomat, which hunts the Web for associated texts and images in response to words the visitor types.

Calling these works “art” is something of a stretch. All they tell us, really, is that there are a lot of images on the Internet.

But, in a show such as this, guided by a fervent futurism, the technology itself is the message. That art will come from it is a matter of faith. Artists, we are led to believe, are just beginning to tap the expressive power of computers and digital media. This is the wave of the future. The old methods – putting paint on canvas with a brush, that sort of thing – will go the way of the typewriter and the slide rule. It’s inevitable.

There are some good arguments for why this may not be true. One of the show’s questionable assumptions is that artists respond to new technology by adopting it. Take the example of photography, touted as the last great innovation that transformed art. Some artists picked up cameras, it is true. But from an art historian’s point of view, art’s most important response to photography was modernism. The artists people love the most – the impressionists, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse – ran as far from photography as they could get.

Second, much of the art based on new digital technology is an art of movement, an art expressed in videos, animation, music, and combinations of those. It’s an art driven by mouse clicks. This art may have a place, but it ignores what brings people to museums in the first place. Art fulfills people’s need for the handmade object. Objects provide a special type of experience, just as music or books do. Computer screens and videos don’t provide objects, but events. And, even when the product of the digital manipulation is a photograph or a print, the intervention of the machine is felt. Art is about a direct communication between people. It’s intimate, like conversation. With Internet art there isn’t even a human being at the other end – just information.

It seems unlikely, therefore, that the picture frames in museums will be housing plasma screens any time soon. Certain things are fundamental to human nature and aren’t going to change, not until the next phase of evolution at least.

Whitney Museum of American Art

2001

 

Sol Lewitt

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Sol Lewitt

 

Confronted with the works of Sol Lewitt, whose career has consisted of doing instructions for artworks rather than making the actual art, I’ve decided, instead of a review, to write the instructions for one. Here it is:

  1. Go to museum.

 

  1. Look at art.

 

  1. Return to office.

 

  1. Start to write.

 

  1. Resolve to find a new occupation.

 

  1. Finish writing.

 

If I might paraphrase Lewitt, this is “the machine that makes the art review.”

Were it not for a nagging conscience, I’d be done, now.

Lewitt, the subject of a big retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, doesn’t seem troubled by conscience. But, then again, he writes better instructions than I do. They are so precise that he could mail them to someone on the other side of the world, and that person could, with no other guidance, produce the work.

Here, for example, are the instructions for “Wall Drawing #46, 1970”:

“Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall. Black Pencil.”

Here is another:

“Ten thousand lines about 10 in. (25.4 cm.) long, covering the wall evenly. Black Pencil.”

Ten thousand lines sounds like a lot of work and arouses in us the kind of admiration we reserve for such oddities as models of world landmarks done with toothpicks. Although it’s an apparent point of pride with Lewitt that he doesn’t put his own hand in these pieces, you have to wonder if it’s an issue of expedience as well. Would he find the idea so worthwhile if he had to draw the lines himself? No matter. He has an “installation crew” of young, idealistic, and probably inexpensive workers to do that.

Another unusual feature of these wall pieces is that they have only a temporary existence. Most art is made for the ages, but Lewitt’s are painted over at the end of the show. It has to be that way, or Lewitt couldn’t make his point that it is the idea that is important, not the object.

Lewitt developed his detached, cerebral style in the early Sixties, partly as a reaction to the “hothouse emotionalism” of the abstract expressionist style, which saw painting as an existential act in which each frenzied stroke, each drip was an end in itself.

The other source of inspiration was Lewitt’s job as a graphic designer for architect I.M. Pei. Architects, he noticed, didn’t go out and put up buildings themselves. They issued the plans.

Lewitt’s been issuing his own plans for nearly 40 years now. With each decade, it seems, he has made greater concessions to the normal human appetite for decoration and visual stimulation. His previously austere vocabulary of obsessively drawn, faint lines has given way to sculpture, bold color, odd geometric shapes, and curvaceous stripes that cover gallery walls from edge to edge. The result is a visually pleasing, almost happy style – art as a fun environment.

But, it’s a little hard to see where fun fits into Lewitt’s conceptualist philosophy. Cheerful decorative art, with its direct appeal to the senses, would seem to sit at one end of a continuum and the airy philosophies of conceptual art at the other. It’s hard to avoid concluding that the playful color is anything more than eye candy, a kind of bribe to keep the audience from drifting away.

The core of Lewitt’s art is the notion that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” His art often seems to have some kind of built-in self-replicating program, like crystals, or a virus. The geometric forms he plays with in two or three dimensions – the squares, rectangles, triangles, and rhombuses – beget other similar forms, and, if the edge of the wall weren’t there to stop it, we feel, it would go on ad infinitum.

Unfortunately, the addition of color, variety, and a third dimension to Lewitt’s wall designs doesn’t enhance their claim to be art. The patterns are sometimes pleasing, as are the muted, fresco-like hues. But too much is missing here, too much is sacrificed for the sake of the machine-like character.

It’s one thing to point out that art is built out of ideas, and it’s another to think that the demonstration of this principle constitutes art. What, for example, would the instructions be like that would allow me, or anyone, to create a Vermeer or a Rembrandt? Or any image that consists of more than grids and quadrants and diagonal lines from one corner of a wall to another? Somewhere, deep in the structure of the Vermeer, there are lines such as these, but without all that’s built on top, these underlying geometries are practically meaningless.

In fact, the more one thinks about it, the more it seems that what Lewitt has done is to invent an art form that, by its very nature, excludes all the good stuff, the stuff that makes art art.

Whitney Museum of American Art

2000

Dead White European Males

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Dead White European Males

 

Just when you thought those Dead White European Males were packed off for good, they come sneaking in the back door.

First it was Shakespeare. Then the Greeks. Now, all the rest of them – Dante, Milton, Keats, Tolstoy – that whole “Great Books” crowd.

For about two decades now, they’ve been banished from the core requirements of just about every major university. Students have been able to get through four years at an Ivy League school without reading a single one of them.

No longer did being an educated person mean having at least a nodding acquaintance with these thinkers, whose works are known collectively as the Western canon.

The arguments for what was wrong with the canon were summed up in the phrase Dead White European Males, which translates into sexist, racist, Eurocentric, and no longer relevant to the contemporary world.

There were other arguments, some stemming from French philosophies such as post-structuralism and deconstructionism, that, depending on your point of view, were either exquisitely subtle or completely obscure.

Despite all this, those Dead White European Males, or DWEMS, have proved remarkably resilient. They keep popping up where you least expect them.

Consider Shakespeare.

Students may have escaped him in the classroom, but he caught up with them in the movie theaters.

For the past five or six years, Hollywood has been cranking out Shakespeare movies with reckless abandon. Some are semi-faithful to the originals, some loose adaptations with offbeat settings, but all recognizable as Shakespeare.

We’ve seen Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo, Mel Gibson as Hamlet, Laurence Fishburne as Othello, Calista Flockhart and Michelle Pfeiffer in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Even Anthony Hopkins in the gruesome “Titus Andronicus,” a play that even most graduate students don’t read.

Hollywood as the savior of high culture? Not quite. Some of these movies have been pretty awful. But they have preserved much of the language and, more important, some sense of the life and vitality of these plays.

And the whole thing is just so…ironic. While academics probe Shakespeare’s plays for signs of sexism or aristocratic biases, or spin theories that Juliet was having a lesbian relationship with her nurse or that “The Tempest” is a text on colonialism, Hollywood makes “Shakespeare in Love” and turns the biggest DWEM of them all into a heartthrob.

 

***

 

Then there are the Greeks.

Although they lived 2,500 years ago, they are central to today’s culture wars.

“They are seen as the originators of the entire Western tradition, so that if you believe in that tradition, you point to them as shining examples of what is great about it,” says Peter Collier, publisher of Encounter Books in California and a critic of higher education.

“But if you don’t believe in the tradition, if you want to discredit it, then you must find fault with the Greeks, to show that they are not so great, after all.”

And so it has gone, for more than 15 years now, longer than the Trojan War.

The traditionalists continue to point to the miraculous accomplishments of the Greeks: democratic government, the foundations of philosophy, history, science, and medicine; influential styles of art and architecture.

From the opposite side comes the argument that the Greeks had slaves and denied some rights to women, that they were warlike and that they oppressed and exploited weaker societies around them. Even their sexual practices came under close scrutiny.

Other revisionist scholars have argued that the “Greek Miracle” is actually a myth or, at the least, an exaggeration. Linguist Martin Bernal, in his controversial trilogy “Black Athena,” the first installment of which came out in 1987, argued that the true roots of Western Culture were in ancient Egyptian and Phoenician cultures, and that the Egyptians were in fact a race of black Africans. This view was embraced by Afrocentrists, who went on to claim that Socrates and Cleopatra were black.

All these disputes have politicized formerly staid classics departments.

In “Who Killed Homer?,” professors Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath argue that politics and postmodernist theorizing have made havoc of their field.

“Ancient texts don’t exist just so that someone can round up all the victims and decide who was oppressed and who wasn’t,” complains Hanson.

Barbara K. Gold, a classicist at Hamilton College, disagrees. She says feminist scholars such as herself, and other theorists, have enlivened the field.

“We pay more attention to the females, the slaves, the marginal characters,” she says. Gold says non-traditional approaches to the classics – involving psychoanalytic theory, deconstructionism, and issues of sexuality and exploitation – have attracted more students.

Hanson thinks the opposite: “How will students learn to love the classics when their professors write incomprehensibly about a world they hold responsible for all the neuroses of present-day society?”

As with Shakespeare, however, the academic arguments seem to run on one track and the popular culture on another.

While Hanson and Heath lamented the death of Homer, and scholars such as Gold deconstructed him, NBC made “The Odyssey,” a 1997 miniseries that attracted millions of viewers. Disney got into the act with the animated “Hercules,” and, most recently, PBS did a three-part documentary, “The Greeks, Crucible of Civilization.”

Series producer Anthony Geffen, who is British, says one of his reasons for doing the series was to counter the bad rap the Greeks were getting in American colleges.

“The Greeks are not so popular in the schools and colleges here today,” he says. “I hope the series teaches about a society that in 200 years gave us what is the foundation of our lives today.”

Combined with a companion book, an extensive Web site, and suggested study assignments, “The Greeks” is practically a college course in itself, but a very upbeat one, with none of the conflicted feelings found in academia.

“Sure, the Greeks had flaws,” says Geffen. “These people lived 2,500 years ago, and some of the things they did were barbaric.

“But let’s get real. Plenty of other societies have done barbaric things, some of them pretty recently, and those societies didn’t produce Socrates or the Parthenon.”

 

***

So far, no television series is underway on the “Great Books,” although with “Don Quixote” and “Gulliver’s Travels” turned into miniseries, can “Paradise Lost” be far behind?

A more interesting development, however, is in academia.

Reports have begun to surface recently about the resurgence of “Great Books” courses – not at top colleges, but at community institutions such as Wilbur Wright College in Chicago or the Milwaukee branch of the University of Wisconsin.

The courses have proved very popular at these two schools, both of which cater to working-class students, many of whom have jobs and families, and who have come back to school to better their lot. What’s more, they are mostly minorities, the ones on whose behalf such courses were eliminated 20 years ago.

This is very much the case at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, where Philip Lerman, an associate professor of humanities, recently directed an ensemble of students and former students in performances of Euripides’ “Electra” and Sophocles’ “Antigone.” Prior to that, the group had done several Shakespeare plays.

“Many of my students are of Latino or other minority backgrounds,” says Lerman. “They are the ones who are supposed to be hostile to these works because it’s not their culture. But that’s not what I’ve found at all. They’re very excited by it.”

“In fact,” he added, “if you suggest to them that they might prefer something more contemporary or Latino, they’re insulted. They think you’re condescending to them.”

Heidi Arauz of Bergenfield, who starred in “Electra” this past winter, says she didn’t care about the ethnicity, sex of the author, or how long he’d been dead. In fact, she found it more interesting that the play was 25 centuries old.

“The stories are about things in human nature that don’t change,” she says. “You could switch some of these plots to the White House, and they would work just as well.”

Why are these small community colleges in the forefront of the fledgling revival of “Great Books” and classical culture?

“Smaller schools have to try harder,” says Stephen Balch of the National Association of Scholars, a Princeton-based group that works to restore core requirements and strengthen standards at American colleges. “Because the classics were tossed out by the elite schools, they see a niche for themselves in offering them.”

“At the same time, I think the path is easier in the smaller schools because the humanities departments are not so ideologically driven. There’s less resistance if someone wants to do “Great Books.” At an Ivy League school, everyone would have something to say about the list.”

And so it is that we have arrived at this strange moment in our cultural history, a moment when the idea that students should read “Great Books” is fraught with controversy, a moment when the biggest champion of Greek culture is a television producer, a moment when Shakespeare is celebrated in Hollywood but considered suspect in the nation’s top universities.

So go the culture wars.

 

Paterson’s Grand Old Bohemians

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 There have been lots of different Patersons. The Paterson of Silk City millionaires, the Paterson of hopeful immigrants and rebellious strikers, the street corner Paterson of Lou Costello.

Joe Ruffilo and Don Kommit come out of the Beatnik Paterson, the Paterson of Allen Ginsberg, of saxophone solos in basement coffeehouses and truckloads of abstract-expressionist paintings evoking the Great Falls.

Joe Ruffilo, Paterson artist.

These two artists have been part of every wave of hipness that has swept Paterson in the past 40 years. Today, they are looked upon as bohemian patriarchs, the ones who know how to find a loft or other cheap housing, where to buy art supplies or a guitar string, and, probably most important, how to keep going, how to keep being an artist, no matter what.

Countless coffeehouse pals must have long ago moved out to split-levels in Elmwood Park or Wayne, while these two continue to paint and sculpt and to draw inspiration from the bittersweet charms of their native city. And so, when they began reflecting on a theme for their current two-man show at the Paterson Museum, the word “progenitor” popped up.

“I don’t know who said it,” said Ruffilo, a loquacious guy with a goatee and horn-rimmed glasses. “But we decided it fit us.”

Don Kommit in 2017.

“We liked the definition, so we put it on the show announcement,” said Kommit, smaller, also bespectacled, and with a near identical goatee.

Hence, “Pair of Progenitors,” on a double bill with a show about motorcycles. The motorcycles are sort of relevant, evoking that Fifties and Sixties spirit of rebellion – “The Wild One” and “Easy Rider” – that was progenitor to these progenitors.

Ruffilo, in particular, slides easily between these two worlds. Before he was a serious artist, he was a motorcycle and car guy, “a gear head,” he says. His sculptures were made from scrap metal and machine parts salvaged from the floor of the race car fabricating shop where he worked. “I just started picking them up and making things out of them,” he said.

The result is very Patersonian, evoking the machine-soul of this city that once churned out entire locomotives. Unlike some metal sculpture, Ruffilo’s pieces don’t take unfair advantage of their ironness, don’t try to intimidate with jutting beams or huge slabs leaning in your direction. Ruffilo sculpts half-inch-thick steel as if he were making paper dolls – snip, snip, snip – and decorates the jigsaw-like pieces with curlicues of welding bead. He makes sure that each assemblage stands up neat and straight, like children dressed for Sunday school. Although essentially abstract, recognizable forms emerge: a sea horse, one of Da Vinci’s war machines.

Kommit is known for his constant sketching of city scenes. Many of his works look like sketchbook pieces that have been worked over with layers of paint, collage, and lines of poetry until they take on the weight and presence of easel paintings.

A page from the notebooks of Don Kommit.

His “Once More a Renaissance” is a collage of business cards, show announcements, stationery, poems, and painted vignettes built on a foundation of old-fashioned wallpaper. When he starts to explain about the Straight Street shop that supplied him with wallpaper sample books, and the people that worked there, doors swing open into Paterson’s past.

His art is a rambling journey. There are artists who you can sense are bored stiff, who may be entertaining, even moving, to the viewer, but who have disappeared behind their talent, forgotten how to keep themselves interested. Kommit doesn’t make that mistake. With him, the finished artwork and the journal of its creation are the same exuberant experience.

And, it’s all one long love poem to Paterson. Despite being a city whose glory days were over before Kommit was born, a place that seems unable to catch up, to make one of those renaissances that other cities have, Kommit sees only its greatness.

“It’s got all those things that great cities have: It’s got beautiful architecture, it’s got a castle on a mountain, it has a river coursing through it, it has parks and neighborhoods, and it’s got people from all over the world.” He rests his case.

Ruffilo and Kommit have watched all these bohemian waves wash over Paterson: the rock musicians, the hippies, the poets, the performance artists, the black activists, the jazz musicians, the painters, the students from William Paterson. They’ve seen it all, heard it all, been there, done that, and yet, they don’t seem the slightest bit cynical or world-weary. To listen to them, they enjoyed every period, picked up on the energy of every scene, reveled in La Boheme.

There were the open-mike nights at the readings of the Silk City Poets. And there was that artist center in an old church that ran a respectable program till the grant money ran out and, in Ruffilo’s words, “the rabble took over” – meaning them – and kept it going without heat or hot water.

“As long as we were carrying on programs in there, the city wouldn’t kick us out,” Kommit recalls.

Ruffilo’s face lights up. “Remember Dial-a-Poet?”

“We had a number on the wall,” Kommit explains. “People could call it and get a poet – one of us.”

“It didn’t last,” Ruffilo adds.

And now, here they are. Several marriages under their belts. Several sets of kids. They are beyond issues of success and failure. The important thing for them hasn’t been the objects left behind, but living and feeling things fully, being on, plugged in, alive and even a little feverish, heeding the call of Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

But the scene has changed. The new people seem to lack the bohemian spirit. Kommit and Ruffilo can’t put their fingers on it, but they both mark the decline to the advent of artist housing, to the city’s deliberate attempt to cultivate an arty image by fixing up the old mill buildings.

The gentrification it was supposed to spark never happened, and the spontaneity of the old scene was lost. Too many of the new artists don’t have any connection to Paterson, says Kommit, who himself lives in one of the subsidized lofts.

Ruffilo and Kommit find this beyond imagining, not feeding on the soul of the city. “We’re a product of the city, and what we did with our art is a product of that,” says Ruffilo.

In fact, it’s been said that only a city can produce a great artist, because only a city can reveal the full range of the human condition, can test ideas, provide so much energy and so much history. Think Joyce’s Dublin, Dickens’ London, Dante’s Florence, Miller’s New York, Picasso’s Paris. An artist without a city is like the sound of one hand clapping.

The Paterson Museum

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