Towards A Definition of Art Through Personal Memoir

Above is a candid polaroid of me hanging out in the bad, old Times Square circa 1979. I was evidently waiting with my parents to attend a matinee on Broadway. I am not exactly sure of the title but I believe it was this middlebrow play/musical starring, (and a less likely candidate to be in such a project), Liv Ullman.

I had known Liv Ullman from a couple of Bergman masterpieces, highbrow in more than one sense of the word, in particular Persona and Face To Face.

I really disliked this show. It was by Charles Strauss of Annie and Bye Bye Birdie fame. My mother cried all during the production because she said the set was an exact replica of the home she had grown up in: the Pittsburg of the 1940s.

I saw so much Broadway during those ten years. It is safe to say that I saw every Broadway or off (off) Broadway project that came through, from commerical musicals to avant-garde plays. The Joseph Papp productions in particular were full of vitality, the closest thing to the experience of a Cassavetes film that could be had on the stage. I saw the earliest examples of gay avant-garde theatre as well, from Charles Ludlum's Theatre Of The Ridiculous, to Lesbian political theatre. I did not always understand what I was seeing but I was never bored or restless.

A couple of times my father would take me down to the older Times Square so that I may study, (and he actually used the words sociology and ethnography, without bothering to define them), the rougher elements of society. He would show me the X-rated marquees and spoke vaguely of how some lonely men likes to watch such things and we discreetly watched drug dealers and hustlers go about their semi/illegal business. He pointed out who the prostitutes were, and they were rather conspicuous, so after awhile I could pick them out. He said that this world had to be contained in this section to satisfy human needs. He never explained what those needs were, only that it had to be contained in this one area because there was danger there.

I saw a lot of things down there that most children are, according to today's rules, never supposed to see, yet everything I saw was in public for the whole world to see. But at least I got a sense that this world was complicated and compromised by considerations of survival and even evil. My father always pointed out that no free will was involved in what I witnessed; rather, circumstances and "what is bred in the bone" had everything to do with it and that I had to feel sorry for the people I witnessed. He also told me that all of these people had good in them somewhere but that it wasn't allowed to shine or come forth. The goodness "was knocked out of them," was how he put it.

 I would often argue in a child's way with him to try and figure out what he meant, but it made for interesting discussions. I was fortunate enough to see a lot of R rated and exploitation fare in that neighborhood, the kind of stuff a child could get in while "accompanied by a guardian".

One of the most interesting things at this time to me is that I would "see" movies and plays that attempted to deal with the themes I had witnessed in real life, in a more condensed and summarized fashion. I would often wonder about the accuracy of the representation or depiction but I felt it curious that humans would reenact such things. Already I was curious about the connection between the arts and daily "real" life.

The following is that same block in which I was pictures above. (Note the Playland sign). The particular picture showing on the marquee - The Legend Of Boggy Creek - was a witless, cheap, and incoherent adventure movie about a mysterious monster in a rural area: it was a children's/family styled horror movie, as oxymoronic as that seems. I am sure I saw this particular run at that very theatre.

Note that the selling point of Caligula is its "sadism, gore, and extreme violence", a shameless celebration of the safely distanced consumption of represented, unreal, yet immoral behaviors for viewing pleasure. I doubt any commercial theater today would announce such motives so nakedly.
And here is the same location today: a gaudy, obscenely congested confection of  candy colored neon,  news images, all of it childish and without any human scale whatsoever.

 Here are some trailers giving a feel of the non-X rated material that would play at some of the movie theaters:

One of the things that occurred to me rather early on is that in one sense all of this stuff - call it culture or the arts - held one thing in common. It was made, constructed, built by human beings so that we might reflect upon our condition in this life.

I mention all of this not to discuss the history of New York City, or my personal life at all; my point is to talk about a basic fact of human existence: that we humans build, construct objects that we can call art so that we may reflect back upon ourselves removed from direct reality.

Indeed I would argue that what I have just stated is the only definition of art that seems to be sufficient enough to define the commonalities: "made-up things by ourselves so that we may reflect back upon ourselves, outside of the daily living".  We might reflect to just undergo catharsis, or for crude thrills; or we might reflect for the deepest of spiritual reasons. But in all Art we are trying in some way to reflect upon our condition. Even a distraction from that condition is still a reflection, a kind of self overhearing or eavesdropping upon our lives. This was what Persona had in common with Smokey and The Bandit and the Mark Rothko at MOMA. It was what Private Afternoons Of Pamela Mann had in common with Pippin, the two sharing more or less the same block. Indeed I think the only arts that don't really do this are the purely utilitarian ones like architecture or visual design. And even in these latter we are expressing the kind of environment in which we would like to exist.

 I had a sense that these were human creations and as such artificial. Only later did I discover the etymological connection between art and artifice.

Yet I had just as an immediate sense that all of these things had very little in common. Some of it was really not worth very much, some of it was boring and disgusting and some of it enlightened my soul and spirit.

Ironically, in a flat culture like the current moment, both of these insights are forgotten. It is by not exploring the commonalities that we inevitably are unable to see crucial differences. The insight of necessary discrimination or quality, and the opposite, though equally valuable, insight of unanimity in creativity.

By treating art as if it were completely natural and at one with the world, as if it weren't the product of individual hard effort (even in collectives!) but somehow a magical appearance in culture, we do what every censor does and what politicos do. We tend to think art is not special and  not apart from everyday life. By hewing to too exclusive a criteria of what art actually is we forget that human beings made  the stage show Pippin just as surely  human beings (including those other than Bergman) made the filmed "show" Persona. Even if one of these two productions is in some deepest, objective sense really better than the other, they nevertheless share the commonality of being manufactured objects.


What I am arguing for is that Art is actually a product. It is very fashionable to describe art as a process these days. The word product has negative connotations of purely commercial intentions. But I would argue that even the least solid artwork, say, a street dance performance, or a computerized light show is nevertheless a built thing. One of the great tragedies in art criticism these days has been the loss of the art object. Everything that lacks the quality of the thing itself is discussed: politics, morality, History and so on. What gets lost is the object.

Indeed, art is not unlike a construction project.

It is no accident that artists will use words like craft when discussing their work. We should not take it utterly for granted that humans manufacture and construct objects whose purpose is to help us reflect upon our lives. It is the most astonishing thing in the world. It is far easier to understand shelter, a home, and office building. It is less easy to understand a poem, a movie, and a ballet, at least in the sense that I am discussing, as human manufacturing.

Book Review: Lucking Out, My Life Getting Down and Semi-dirty in Seventies New York

Upon first glance at the title and subject of my book review you might wonder to yourself, dear reader, "why is Mitch going to talk yet again about the 1970s?! Just what we need: another book on the 1970."

Yet my review of James Wolcott's memoir of being a writer for various publications in the 70s, chief among them, Village Voice is going to be an elaborate foray into what I have really been discussing all along in my blog and its motley installations: style and tone. The content and the topic of Mr Wolcott's book may involve the 1970s, but I am going to do a close reading of it as an aesthetic object, as if it were written at (almost) any time. That is, I am going to review it as a piece of writing. This is something that is rarely done since we don't get book reviews that much these days; instead we get something like reviews of an author's attitudes towards this or that issue of the moment, and to what social needs to which the book may or may not be a sufficient response. Here I offer an alternative. As I proceed we will learn a lot indeed about the times in which we have been living along the way, but we will also learn about certain problems in writing more generally over the past thirty or forty years.

The plot of this memoir needs to be summarized so that we may better get into the manner which is the matter of the thing. A young man of humble origins, partially on account of a fan letter written in defense of Norman Mailer to which Mailer responds finds himself in the New York city of the 1970s and manages, through work at the craft of writing, perseverance and the gift of an outsider stance, to work his way to the top of the world of journalism. He travels through various worlds of the 70s: the worlds of punk, and the cinema, the latter where Wolcott finds his hero and mentor in the person of Pauline Kael and to which Wolcott owes something of an aesthetic position.

It is my aim to prove in this review that prose style and even syntax is more important than subject matter in determining the real meaning of a written text.

One of the chief rhetorical moves of Wolcott is to offer dense reductionist and summarized typologies of what he observes. Every potential sensation, mood or emotion is turned into a type or specimen with the help of particular jazzy cultural allusions. Of course Wolcott is heavily indebted to Pauline Kael, The New Yorker film critic who all but invented this stylistic mode. In Kael it consisted of exaggerated caricatures of, say, actor's physiques or mannerisms, or chatty and vernacular celebrations of the popular i.e. "What's so wrong with entertainment? Would they rather have punishment?" Or when she complained that because a character played by Marcello Mastroianni wasn't aroused by having Sophia Loren in bed with him that he and the film were not worth the audience caring about, arguing from both utility (entertainment again) and a rather literal sense of "reality". (The best criticism of this aspect of Kael's writing remains Renata Adler's "The Perils Of Pauline.")

Wolcott follows Kael in seeing in criticism the opportunity for seizing upon some kind of catchy expression or phrase that reduces the meaning of what is being written about to an essence or a type. A favorite device of Wolcott's is the catchy noun phrase that aims to capture something definitive that he seems to hope the reader will be in on the joke or essence. For example he will write that a person is one of the "mole people" without describing who or what that is, or what bearing it has on the writer's work. In one instance he mentions the important actor/writer/director Tom Noonan, known commercially as playing Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter, but whose high artistic achievements include two very good films, What Happened Was and The Wife. Yet the only mention Wolcott can muster of Noonan is Noonan's "eggplant head".

I shall choose one lengthy passage to stand for the entire book. Here is Wolcott describing an ostensible backlash against the sensibility of Anais Nin and introducing a writer/colleague at the Voice:

"But in 1973 the backlash against Nin's queenly deportment-the narcissism slathered like moisturizing lotion across thousands of pages-had yet to commence, and she swanned through the village like the last dollop of dyed splendor in a Sidney Lumet world of screeching tires and clogged sinuses. Donald Barthleme once dropped by at the front desk, a confabulator whose stories in The New Yorker, were whirring devices constructed from from exquisite diagrams with sadness peeking from the corners, leaving residue. Jill Johnston, the dance writer turned Joycean stream-of-consciousness riding-the-rapids diarist, would wait for someone to open the back stairs (she was phobic about elevators), occasionally plucking a seashell from her denim vest to leave on the counter as a souvenir. I always liked Jill's entrances because she seemed to bring a playful breeze with her, a sense of salutation that was like a greeting from a grasshopper, owing no allegiance to the daily grind. Voice writers talked a good game of being uninhibited, but for them it was more of a policy statement, a plank in the countercultural platform. She was more performative. It was Jill who would roll on the floor with a lesbian pal at the Town Hall debate on feminism starring Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer, an antic that provoked Mailer to snap, 'Jill, act like a lady.'

To use a word Wolcott would surely love (and must be in his memoir somewhere), let us "unpack" this passage. First there is the casual, even cruel dismissal of Nin. Not only does he never demonstrate, that is, prove why Nin is second rate, he applies a psychoanalytic category to her person and, by implication, her art: "narcissistic". Why is Nin's particular memoir work narcissistic and Wolcott's trustworthy? And finally, there is his need to always look to the context at the expense of the text (a reigning habit of our particular critical moment): Nin was once fashionable, but now or shortly thereafter people caught onto her or saw through her, or else she simply became dated. Then there is the clever cultural allusion, insuring or trusting that his readers know the reference - New York city genre cinema of Lumet and 1970s, Dog Day Afternoon in particular. The problem here, though, is it assumes that what matters most in Lumet's work are isolated sensory effects like a screeching tire. (He never explains what the clogged sinus stands for). This reduction of Lumet's oeuvre to such sensual and sensory texture is a deep mistreading of Lumet's work. Sidney Lumet is not, say, Robert Bresson. In Bresson it is the case where such effects are often the point and the engine of meaning. Lumet is far more traditional in his narrative than is captured by such an inventory of effects.

Wolcott's description of Barthleme does nothing to help our understanding of the latter's fiction. As usual the author is typed: he is "the confabulator", as if Barthleme were a genre. (In Wolcott's mode of criticism everything is a genre of one kind or another). Again: what is a "whirring device?"

And finally there is Johnston's entrance. She becomes her entrance. Neither Johnston the woman nor Johnston the critic is ever addressed. What is important about her is her dramatic entrance. Saying that she owes "no allegiance to the daily grind" substitutes vernacular catch phrases for real analysis. I would say that when Wolcott finally gets to something of genuine meaning and value - to issues of 70s Feminism, and Norman Mailer's feuds - he never tells us what to think of them, or analyzes them too deeply. All he notes is that they happened and many of us old enough already know of them. Surely we should get more than this list and the usual anecdotes about Mailer's "colorful" sexism.

This paragraph is a view of the world, a view both of what matters in life and what reality is. This is what styles do. This is why styles are not superficial settings for the more important content. None of what I am discussing has anything to do with the plot i.e. the story of Wolcott meeting colorful characters like Jill Johnston. It is all in the telling.

I must admit a bias here since Wolcott and I are in opposing camps. (This is curious since I share many similar enthusiasms as him, notably the New York City Ballet of Balanchine, Farrell and Martin.) Wolcott makes clear his rejection of the overtly serious rigor of Susan Sontag. I admit I am in part of Sontag's party. It was Susan Sontag, after all, who, rather than writing praises of Brian DePalma as did Kael, championed some of the greatest of filmmakers when they were underappreciated like Ozu and Bresson, championed often neglected Eastern European writers, and wrote definitive essays on matters in art over which we are still debating today. If you were to ask me the one area in which I agree or am sympathetic to Kael it is in her strong defense of the need for violence in the arts. She was the one critic to defend its graphic usage against would-be censors and prigs. Kael also had a partial understanding of classical Hollywood, though she wrote about it in too casual a way in keeping with her extreme populism (as in her piece on Cary Grant).

I don't mean to give the impression that Lucking Out is all bad. Wolcott is at his best when he writes of the New York City Ballet. It is one of the rare instances where he actually addresses in somewhat a direct fashion an actual text a well as its reception.

Recently there was another memoir covering a similar period of time and set in roughly the same geographic location. This memoir happened to be a big hit and a bestseller, eventually winning the National Book Award. Of course, I mean Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. Let us compare her writing style:

"Robert was not especially drawn to film. His favorite movie was Splendor in the Grass. The only other movie we saw that year was Bonnie and Clyde. He liked the tagline on the poster 'They're young. they're in love. They rob banks.' He didn't fall asleep during that movie. Instead he wept. And when we went home he was unnaturally quiet and looked at me as if he wanted to convey all he was feeling without words. There was something of us that he saw in the movie but I wasn't certain what. I though to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know."

Now it might strike you as unfair to compare an incomparable poet and musician like Patti Smith to a journalist like Wolcott. She is clearly the better writer. But notice how she achieves this. For one thing, notice how much she accomplishes in such a short paragraph! The whole paragraph builds. Not only is it an ode of praise to Kazan's film, but is a summation of a point in a relationship between this man and this woman. (It even arouses curiosity in the reader who might say, "Maybe I should go back and revisit Kazan's film"). Moreover, the passage is about something of value. That is, it points to what is valuable in an object by appealing to a direct relationship of value rather than a list of catch phrases. It appeals to the realms of feeing and mystery. It builds slowly. At first he slept during movies but here was a movie that was different. Here was a movie where Robert cried. Part of Smith's rhetorical genius rests upon the rhythm of simple declarations: He didn't. He went. There was. This propels the narration further leading us to Robert's crying and a view of the power of art itself, what even a studio film, one directed by Kazan can be.

Lest I be misunderstood I am not saying that the problem here is that Wolcott's prose is dense and cluttered, and Smith's is superior by virtue of its being leaner. The crucial difference is that in Smith we are made to undergo and experience something rather than a reductive typology of mere effects. Smith could have accomplished this with the most dense prose imaginable. The real question is whether the prose reduces or expands our understanding. James Wolcott tells a good story to be sure; there is some fascinating history, yet, as my brief analysis of his style shows, there is more to a piece of writing than its movement and its content. There is attitude too. And it is in the attitude (or tone) where, arguably, the real story is to be found.