Death, rebirth and transfiguration of Norman Rockwell

[imomus]

This morning I received a video treatment for a song I wrote about five years ago. I'm not going to tell you what song it was, or many details of the ideas in the treatment, because it wouldn't be fair to the director. All I want to note here -- this continues my text v. texture theme -- is that, based on a few pages of text, I feel I have no way of knowing whether the video will work or not. The treatment is pretty much useless to me. Trying to describe a video with words is like trying to describe a human face or a musical sound with words. I'm not the kind of person who can read a score and hear a symphony in his head. I only know if I like a sound when I hear it. I need to listen, and I need to see.



They're cliches, but they're true: 'Don't tell me, show me!' 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' Imagine you're choosing a lover. Someone offers you a 1000 word textual description of his face. Someone else offers you a photograph. Which do you choose? Would you marry someone based only on a textual correspondence? In the early days of the internet, when computers could do text but hadn't yet mastered pictures or sounds, lots of ASCII romances flourished. Text, it seemed, was incredibly flirty. Almost anyone could be attractive in an e mail, whereas in real life you probably wouldn't look at them twice. On the internet nobody could tell whether you were a dog. That was good, at least for the textually-gifted and the texturally-challenged. 'Don't judge a book by the cover!' In a society governed perhaps too much by the textural and the visual, the early internet seemed like a return to the primacy of the logos.

Douglas Rushkoff wrote a book comparing the early internet to early Judaism. I don't disagree with the analogy. I just disagree that either were a good thing. Both Judaism and the early internet foster de-corporealisation and favour the textual above the textural. This is one of the deepest sicknesses of our culture.



The video treatment is for a song I don't perform much. It's a song which appeals to people who don't much like the rest of my work. It's a somewhat mystical and metaphysical song, a Romantic song, a spiritual quest. Musically, it resembles 'The Bell Dog' by Brian Eno. It has a similar 'where are you?' cadence to the vocal melody, a similar misty electronic atmosphere. It's a song which, unlike the others around it, doesn't deliberately debunk the idea of surface and depth; a 'deep song', then, a song which might even harbour Lorca's duende: 'an air bearing the odor of child's spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things.'

My correspondent (not the duende, but the video maker) has chosen an Amercian Abstract Expressionist painter as his visual frame of reference for the video. Again, I won't tell you which one. Suffice to say that it's a painter whose work is highly textural and highly tangible, and yet whose early death brings religion and metaphysics rushing into all commentary about him, along with a weird sort of back door Romanticism. Why is it that 'formalist' critics like Clement Greenberg seemed to need to call on spurious metaphysics to back up the hard, pure, simple and profound 'thisness' of Abstract Expressionist canvases? Were they aware that western culture sees formalism as a vacuum, and abhors it? That textural and formal arguments alone could never make the final sale? That metaphysics -- an appeal to all that's absent and yet real -- would have to be called upon? And can we excuse these 'formalist' critics for calling mostly on eastern metaphysics rather than western? For, if all metaphysics is an attempt to deal with absence, eastern metaphysics has accepted absence as absence, and turned its attention back to present realities (this room, my breathing), whereas western metaphysics has insisted on the reality of what's elsewhere (God, the Platonic ideas) and turned its back on life.



Personally, I vastly prefer the idea of things like 'spiritual wisdom', 'metaphysical insight' and even some kind of pompous 'death, rebirth, and transfiguration' schtick being applied to a painter like Norman Rockwell -- unpretentious, concrete, life-loving and life-transfiguring -- than people like, oh, say, Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. Transcendence, it seems to me, lurks in the lightness of the everyday. And perhaps the ultimate 'transcendence' is complete acceptance of the literal, the textural, the corporeal, and the tangible.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Why don't you post audio or video streaming of you talking instead of the text, Momus?

You're starting to sound like a broken record. You have a world view that could be summed up in a paragraph that dictates your response to every type of art, to the point of caricature. Are you so sure that metaphysics can be banished? I think history shows that it can only be deferred.

That text is not a great medium for describing a face is not a great argument against the medium. Would you trust a song about someone over their photograph? I think you've just grafted text into your anti-metaphysics argument. You've created a rigid grid into which ultimately everything can be placed.

[(Anonymous)]

That sounds rather nasty read back, please forgive me for the snotty tone, Momus. Although I hold by the sense of the words.

(also, Pollock was pretty good at mythologising himself; I don't think he needed that much help from the critics on that front.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If I do sound like a record, I like to think it's the jazz record that Roquentin plays in Sartre's 'Nausea'. And I hope it's not broken, because then all that's left is... the abyss!

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

I don't know if M would trust a song *about* someone over their photograph, but he might trust a song *by* them over their photograph...not so, M?

[(Anonymous)]

Momus: "And I quite agree that metaphysics can never be banished entirely, but personally I prefer a metaphysics which is kept on the run, kept somewhat fugitive, and has to resort to cunning hiding places."

Indeed, metaphysics can't be banished because as soon as we can grasp the concept of the human world, we can also can conceive that there might be something outside it. I think that's inevitable. And it's profoundly problematic. Fundamenatalist anti-metaphysics is a logical absurdity, and I appreciate that's not your position. But it's as if you wished the problem of metaphysics would just go away, and in that you're denying something pretty essential about human thought. Because metaphysical enquiry *is* part of our human world and essentially always has been. And any attempt to get away from it has always ended up in fetishising something in a way that is remarkably similar to metaphysicalising it. I think you're close to doing this with the "here and now", the presentness and tangibility of things as some sort of ultimate of human experience, even as you proscribe other legitimate human experiences such as metaphysical enquiry (or "the text" in the Momus mythos).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Because metaphysical enquiry *is* part of our human world and essentially always has been. And any attempt to get away from it has always ended up in fetishising something in a way that is remarkably similar to metaphysicalising it.

Why not just accept my anti-metaphysics as a line of metaphysics, then? Why not see it as adding to that delightful human semantic activity, the metaphysical tradition, and even possibly injecting new blood into it, making metaphysics sexier? Nothing like a glimpse of metaphysical stocking to get the heart beating faster, eh?

[(Anonymous)]

Well, yes. That's exactly how I see your anti-metaphysics, and if that's how you see it too, then well and good. It's contradictory, but perhaps that's inevitable. But it does leave an "arrière-goût" of distaste for the metaphysical - a bit like the early Christians saying: "sex is bad, but if you really have to do it, and it seems that you do, then only do it within these strict parameters."

from a book apposite this conversation

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

"... if we strip our thought for the arena of a perfect logic, we should be performing, perhaps, a remarkable dialectical feat; but this feat would be a mere addition to the complexities of nature, and no simplification. This motley world, besides its other antics, would then contain logicians and their sports."
George Santayana "Skepticism and Animal Faith

[(Anonymous)]

You wrote >>Imagine you're choosing a lover. Someone offers you a 1000 word textual description of his face. Someone else offers you a photograph. Which do you choose?<<

Better than both is a 1000-word textual description of the person's character (or lack thereof). Maybe that's why your marriage did not last? From the picture of your face I can see that you are blind on the right side. From your words I can understand more about what that means.

FC

[(Anonymous)]

Are you unable to gain an impression of the man's character yourself?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

'Better than both is a 1000 word textual description of character' was not an option on offer in my original proposition. But you can add it if you like. Perhaps, going back to my original example, I should have asked my video director, not for a pictorial storyboard or rough demos of the video, but for a letter including character testimonials from respectable members of the pop video community? Or simply some kind of certificate stating whether his proposed video had or did not have 'character'? 'This video treatment has been assessed by the Board of Film Character and found to possess, potentially, A-grade backbone...'

By the way, using stuff like divorce or medical misfortune in your argument is called ad hominem and smacks a bit of desperation. It certainly isn't a sign of 'character'.

[(Anonymous)]

Language - hence words and text - is what we have that other animals don't. The metaphycists want to pull us up to where the angels are, anti-metaphysicists want to push us down to where the other animals are. But ultimately both positions are romantic ideals.

[(Anonymous)]

What's romantic about being an animal? Or an angel for that matter?

Gabriel

PS Alternative name for anti-mataphysicist: "materialist" (call a spade a spade, particularly if it's stuck in the earth).

[(Anonymous)]

Is it "Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan"?

-- Michael

[w-e-quimby.livejournal.com]

Momus, I do believe that you are a metaphysicist who likes to deny metaphysics for various reasons of your own. Anyway, you are not truly a materialist until you become a Republican!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The fact that the word 'materialist' can mean both 'concrete-minded' and 'greedy' is a great annoyance to me. I'm sure it's the result of a CIA plot to discredit Marxism.

[substantiv.livejournal.com]

Yah, reading scores can be helpful. Wish I was better at it.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sure you have already read, but Wittgenstein would interest you (about metaphysics).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The Wittgenstein I know is the late Wittgenstein of the 'Tractatus', which isn't very useful on metaphysics because it pronounces ethical, aesthetic and metaphysical statements 'outside the realm of the sayable'.

history and lies

[tump.livejournal.com]

Soundtrack (http://www.emusic.com/m3u/song/10819343/12965729.m3u)

"Norman Rockwell -- unpretentious, concrete, life-loving and life-transfiguring"

Since my conceptions regarding art coalesced primarily during the 1960s (I was 12 in 1960, 22 in 1970), I find this phrase singularly shocking. In the milieu where my esthetic was formed, Rockwell was considered at the time the chief purveyor of a particularly insidious American lie; very technically competent, and therefore all the more to be despised.

Of course, my own feelings about Rockwell have changed a great deal over the last 40 years, but my sense that this is how he is viewed by the literate and radical remained intact to the moment I read this. This is a measure of how much Rockwell's work has fallen out of discourse -- perhaps because Rockwell's paintings can no longer be viewed as a representation of the contemporary US; they are now lies about the past, rather than lies about the present, and as such are indistinguishable from history.

Re: history and lies

[jliv.livejournal.com]

I have trouble seeing how his paintings were lies. Yes, his subject matter was rather shallow and simplistic, usually driven by commercial interests, but that should not negate how unique his artistic talents were. In his later years, his works became more political with the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's becoming an important theme. Hardly a propagandist for the "American lie".

Re: history and lies

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Rockwell's been rehabilitated for a while now...

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Oh, the artifice of Pollock (http://materialscience.uoregon.edu/taylor/art/splash.html).

[tump.livejournal.com]

Yes, a complete fraud. The nerve of passing those nature studies off as something "new!"