Culture

Looking at Art

~ John ~ Leave a comment

My new year’s resolution: look more closely.

My favorite writer John Berger said: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.  Each evening we see the sun set.  We know that the Earth is turning away from it.  Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”  LOOKING at something, afresh, as though it were the first time we’d seen it, explodes our preconceptions and challenges our assumptions.

This is why I love to travel.  Tourism, by definition, places once in unfamiliar surroundings and gives one license to gawk.  I’ve just had the enormous privilege of three weeks traveling in Europe, the first such trip since I was in my 20s.  As one does, we saw a lot of famous art under very crowded conditions.  We jockeyed for position in front of Rembrandt’s “Night Watch”; squinted to see Van Gogh’s brushstrokes obscured by our own reflections in the glass that now protects the paintings from vandals; mooed and lowed in a great listless herd through the Sistine Chapel.  Florence at Christmas was less of a zoo; we had a breathtaking, quiet interview with Michelangelo’s David.  And then, at the Uffizi Gallery, a painting of Judith slaying Holofernes slew me.

It’s the image to the left, done in 1621 by Artemisia Gentileschi — a name I’d not heard before.  I was expecting to be wowed by what I already thought I knew: Caravaggio.  But whereas Caravaggio’s version has Judith meekly decapitating Holofernes as though he were a roasted pig, this one at the Uffizi is all violence and brawn.  Judith and the other woman have him pinioned by the hair and throat, and he’s fighting for his life as the sword severs his jugular.  The spurt of blood, to which this reproduction does no justice, is in the original a great roostertail of crimson gore, worthy of Quentin Tarantino.  I thought, who was this painter, and how many people did she arrange to have executed in her studio in order to get the work right?

It turns out that Gentileschi was initially a follower of Caravaggio and a protégée of a guy named Agostino Tassi, who raped her, promised to marry her, and then reneged on the promise.  Her family brought charges, and during the trial she was tortured with thumbscrews to “prove her truthfulness”.  Tassi was found guilty and sentenced to banishment, but the sentence was never carried out.

In the painting, Gentileschi painted herself as the avenging Judith, and the rapist Tassi as Holofernes.  I went into the Uffizi expecting Madonna and Child.  I’d come out with Thelma and Louise.

While in Florence I caught a nasty cold and spent Christmas in bed.  So I made a little drawing, as I often like to do when we’re on vacation when I have time and space to really look at something.  When I do, I realize the apples and oranges are not round, but have strange bulbous shapes, and the tassels of a shawl are rarely straight.  I especially like trying to draw fabric, in the way light hits the folds.

Berger again: “Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through whatever it is one is scrutinizing.”  That rebounding energy has been described in many ways: the divine, the muse, the light of inspiration.   When I look at art, I try to find, in that point of intersection between the artist and the subject, a burst of energy, like the green flash at the end of a sunset.  That’s where the painting comes alive.   It’s usually in the eyes of a person, a face.  It happened in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where I got tired of crowding around the Rembrandts and Vermeers and instead focused on some small portraits by Jan Steen.  One, the “Baker Oostwaert and his Wife”, filled me with simple, openhearted joy. 

On my return to the States, I became immediately sucked back into the vortex of the known.  Work obligations and household tasks stacked like unwashed dinner plates.  Shrapnel from Trump’s latest detonation hit close to my heart.  By yesterday I had careened back into seeing exactly what I expected to see.  A Facebook row with a conservative friend was turning sharp – and before turning out the light I sent a last reply, calling him racist and ignorant, hesitated, and then punched post.

But this morning the New York Times gave me a little buried gift in this quote from Georgia O’Keefe: “Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see it takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”  I opened Facebook to see that my friend had amended the words that had sent me over the edge, and I amended mine in return.  He’s a hard friend to have, given the gulf between us.  I haven’t really seen him yet.  But maybe this year, if I look harder, I will.

The Art of Storytelling

~ John ~ Leave a comment

For Boulder filmmakers, last Monday was New Years’ Day — the day after the biggest and best celebration of the year, hosted by impresarios extraordinaires Robin and Kathy Beeck.  This year’s Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF) was their latest annual triumph, turning Boulder into an ever-enlarging red dot on the world filmmaking map (disclosure: I edited one of the documentaries screened).  BIFF’s roster served a delicious elixir of cosmopolitan entertainment and social awareness. We all got smashed.

Hopefully it’s not amiss, as we nurse our happy hangovers, to reflect on the stories we tell and consume at such festivals.  We believe, as makers and watchers, that film is an agent for social change.  Films flagged as “call2action” at BIFF featured talkbacks at which local activists brainstormed with the audience to translate message into movement.  At several such gatherings, a participant would ask: how can we get Trump to watch this film?  As if the simple act of watching would change his mind.

Of course, we know it wouldn’t.  But beyond a little healthy reality-check, it’s appropriate to ask: what is the power of our craft?  Is there a trade-off between telling stories that open others’ eyes and ones that simply make ourselves feel more righteous?  Are the objectives of persuasion and entertainment aligned or in tension?  I worry that it’s the latter – that if our narratives entertain by congratulating us and preaching to others, instead of challenging us and connecting with others, we end up diminishing our power to accomplish the social change to which our projects aspire.

Take for example the festival’s runaway favorite film, “Chasing Coral” — a vitally important movie that won the Audience Award at Sundance as well as three awards at BIFF.  It follows a team of filmmakers racing to document, through time-lapse videography, a cataclysmic “mass bleaching” event in 2016 that killed 22% of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef due to rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change.  The images they took, shown in the last fifteen minutes of the film, devastate the viewer.  The scope of this silent catastrophe is beyond words, and the “Chasing Coral” team has done an inestimable service in capturing it.

Yet the 75 preceding minutes focus heavily on the exploits of attractive, white Boulderites building gadgets, making witty repartee, jetting to exotic locales and strapping on adventure gear.  It’s “The Amazing Race” for the Patagonia set.  Of course Sundancers and BIFFers love it, because it’s all about us, or who we fancy ourselves to be.

And we, almost to a person, already understand and agree with the film’s central thesis that climate change is killing corals worldwide.  Indeed, the film pretty much assumes this viewer knowledge and orientation from the opening frame.  The first character it introduces is a former advertising executive who has been a scuba diver for many years (i.e., a very wealthy person) and who has decided to leave corporate advertising and dedicate himself to publicizing the plight of climate-caused coral death. The film assumes viewers will cheer this choice without question or exploration.

It is only at the end of the film, after the devastating time-lapse images, that the film lays out the science of CO2 loading of the atmosphere that causes warming of the oceans, and makes the connection to fossil fuels.  And it does so through a montage of talking-head scientists who lecture nearly to the point of scolding.

Let’s rewind for a minute.  Place yourself in the shoes of a person who is not from Boulder and does not particularly like Boulderites or Sundancers.  A person, more importantly, who thinks the theory of fossil fuel-induced climate change may be a hoax, and that ocean warming may be the result of natural cycles.  Does “Chasing Coral” change your mind?  My worry is that you are so alienated by the assumed politics and liberal cultural markers of the first half-hour that you will never get to the denouement.   You will turn away, just as I do when I try to watch a documentary by Dinesh D’Souza or a debate on Fox News.  If I were watching a documentary on abortion that opened on a group of filmmakers on a mission to “expose abortionists”, I’d have a hard time not immediately turning the channel, even if the film had more nuanced content later on.   I can’t abide the cover, so I never read the book.

It’s not just a problem for filmmakers.  We all struggle to persuade others across political and cultural divides.  We often try to do so by pointing at ourselves – our superior style, education, numerosity, power.   In bygone days, we could efface ourselves and “let the facts speak for themselves” – that is, back when facts were, well, facts.  Now, it’s undeniably harder.  I still believe in the power of an honestly-told story – but sometimes the teller needs to get out of the way.

Inauguration Day

~ John ~ Leave a comment

I took Trump’s inaugural speech like a punch to the gut.   Some consider his nationalism little different from Reagan’s, applaud his patriotic appeals, celebrate his invocation of God.  But Reagan rallied Americans against a distant menace; for Trump, the enemies are in our midst.  Previous Republicans believed that the tide of world prosperity would lift all boats; Trump will oppose the world’s gain, for he considers it our loss.  Former leaders appealed to the outstretched hands of a merciful God.  Trump’s deity carries a shield to protect us and a sword to “eradicate” our enemies “from the face of the Earth.”

I marched in Denver last Saturday seeking a better vision of ourselves.  I found it.  Progressive women have long counterbalanced the harshness of American individualism and moderated capitalism’s excesses.  From abolitionists to suffragettes, labor crusaders to rainbow pride, women articulate a communitarian core of the American idea.    Their fundamental concerns necessarily include reproductive rights and evolving concepts of gender, ideals that now form the next segments in Martin Luther King’s arc of history, bending towards justice, grounded in love.  They champion freedom of the body, counterpoint to freedom of the sky.

Aligned, America’s countervailing forces of individualistic liberty and communitarian justice have spawned our greatest national achievements.  Now our national polarity has become an agonizing spasm, triggered by our mirrored fears.   The cure is not some illusion of victory; it is a deeper love. Love of liberty, love of land, love of each other.   This is the work now.