Looking for Dan Flavin?

Are you looking for this picture? A while back I posted a blog entry about Dan Flavin's art and I linked this picture. Lately, lots of people have been coming to Believer's Brain via a Google image search, looking for it. Please allow me to give credit where credit is due. The photo was taken by a blogger who calls himself D.A.K. You can see the original photo on his blog. Thanks, D.A.K.

By the way, I'm really curious why so many people have been doing the same image search. What were you Googling for? If anyone feels like posting a comment to tell me how you wound up here, I'd really appreciate it.

Revisiting the Menil

Last week I wrote about visiting the Menil collection. I want to go again soon. It is an interesting place and I didn’t get to see everything on our first visit. One exhibit we didn’t have time for is entitled the Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall. We did pick up a copy of the brochure, though. My description here is from the brochure.

Flavin was evidently a 20th century artist of some note, one of the founders of Minimalism, according to the brochure. It seems that in later years he specialized in creating artistic “situations” by arranging ordinary fluorescent lights of various colors in otherwise ordinary rooms. The Installation at Richmond Hall consists of a simple, repeating orthogonal pattern of light fixtures installed on the walls of a large, empty rectangular room. These are standard, industrial light fixtures mounted on otherwise bare walls. I can certainly see the advantage. It would be nice to know that whenever the Muse strikes you’re never very far from a Home Depot.

The brochure explains how Flavin stumbled into this convenient new medium:

In the spring of 1961, Flavin created a series of eight works, which he called “icons,” containing elements of electric light playing off painted surfaces. Two years later he attached a single eight-foot, yellow fluorescent light fixture to his studio wall, calling the work the diagonal of personal ecstasy. He renamed the work one year later the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Robert Rosenblum). Fluorescent light thereafter became Flavin’s signature medium in which he discovered the unexpected sensuousness and beauty of a seemingly sterile and ubiquitous material.

Help me out here. Am I the only one who snickered at the line “he attached a single eight-foot, yellow fluorescent light fixture to his studio wall, calling the work the diagonal of personal ecstasy”? I really don’t understand this kind of art. Can someone explain it to me? How does hanging a crooked light fixture on the wall qualify as art?

If you do try to explain this stuff to me, please remember to use layman’s language. When I read the descriptions of the art critics they don’t seem to have any connection to the artwork itself. I wonder if they really are looking at what I’m looking at. For instance, last week I wrote about visiting the Rothko Chapel. You will recall that it is an octagonal structure adorned only with featureless monochromatic paintings. As I was Googling for it I came across a book on Amazon.com titled The Rothko Chapel Paintings: Origins, Structures, Meanings (Sales Rank 1,012,518). The publisher’s note states:

No painting in the set could be understood in isolation from the rest or apart from its place in the architectural setting. The Rothko Chapel Paintings explores this interdependence of paintings and place. As viewers move about the Chapel's octagonal enclosure, over whose walls the fourteen panels are continuously distributed, they discover systems of pictorial interactions which become the terms or characters of a cosmological drama in which the viewer is a necessary participant. In the act of vision, the embodied viewer is prompted not merely to witness but also to reenact that questioning of human destiny which has preoccupied the Western spiritual tradition.

Wow! I have to admit I didn’t notice all that when I saw the paintings. I thought they were dust covers! This seems like a complete fabrication to me, but it is perfectly postmodern. Meaning is in the eye of the beholder, and evidently the beholder does not feel terribly constrained by the actual appearance of the piece.

Clearly I need to go back and take a second look at those dust covers. I also can’t wait to see the Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall. But if time doesn’t permit, we’ll just swing by the lighting department at Home Depot.

Doughnut Souls

This past weekend my wife and I visited The Menil Collection. This museum houses the art collection of the late John and Dominique de Menil, prominent Houston philanthropists and art patrons. I am somewhat embarrassed to confess that although it has been open for nearly 20 years, this is the first time I had visited it.

Before we visited the main collection we took a walk around the grounds. There are two “chapels” on the campus of The Menil Collection. We visited the Rothko Chapel first. It is a windowless octagonal structure with stone walls and a stone floor. On the walls hang large abstract paintings by Mark Rothko. They are dark, monochromatic and nearly featureless. When I first walked into the dim light I thought the paintings must have been covered for protection. Then I realized those were the paintings. There is no other adornment and scarcely any furniture, just a few severe wooden benches and a couple of cushions for those who prefer to sit on the floor as they meditate. This space seems designed for meditation. Yet I almost felt as though my very presence was an intrusion into the silence and emptiness.

We stayed in the Rothko Chapel only a minute or two and were glad to be outside again. It seemed oppressive. We had been there once before several years ago when we attended a memorial service for a good friend’s son who had died of AIDS. My memories of the chapel itself were dim. I guess I was much more focused on the people and the service that day. Seeing it again, I reflected on what a fitting location it was for such a somber and sorrowful occasion. It occurred to me that the Rothko Chapel is the perfect metaphor for the emptiness of the modern soul. In such a chapel there is no God, no meaning, and no message from God to man – no content at all. The Rothko Chapel evokes the Eastern ideal of the extinction of self. In contrast, when we go into a Christian church there is light and music and words of hope, and most of all a community of believers gathered together to worship God.

After we visited the Rothko Chapel we walked over to see the Byzantine Fresco Chapel. It is quite different. This chapel was built to house two 13th century frescoes which had been stolen from a small church in Cyprus. The Menil Foundation rescued these pieces, restored them, and built the chapel to house them. The outer walls of bare concrete surround an inner steel box, painted flat black and suspended from above. Within the black box is a tiny chapel in the traditional cross-shaped arrangement, made from panels of frosted glass. The glass panels do not touch each other but are held by black steel supports, so that the whole effect is like one of those “exploded” diagrams you see in the assembly instructions for some machine. The frescoes themselves are suspended above this structure in the locations they would have occupied in the original medieval church.

This place seemed much friendlier and more accessible than the Rothko Chapel, and to my mind more beautiful as well. But in its own way, it too reflects the impoverished worldview of the postmodern society. The exploded structure reminded me of the disconnect in modern thinking Francis Schaeffer discusses in his book How Should We Then Live? He describes how in the Renaissance modern man decided to make himself the central reference point for all meaning and truth, rather than God. But without the transcendent to give his life meaning, man finds that he is nothing but a machine. To avoid giving into despair, Western thinkers began to split their view of reality into two realms, which Schaeffer illustrated as the upper and lower stories in a house. In the lower story is rational scientific thinking, which deals with facts and figures and has no room for value or meaning. In the upper story is irrational faith, which gives meaning and significance, but which has no factual content or objective truth. The two stories are entirely separate.

The Byzantine Fresco Chapel is the perfect picture of this philosophy. Here is this modern structure, all steel and glass. And above it floats these ethereal medieval symbols of faith, devotion and transcendence. Though they reside together in one box there is no connection between the two. Our heads have become disconnected from our hearts, so to speak. We stand amidst the glass and steel and look up wistfully at the beautiful images above. It makes me pity those whose hearts are so empty. They have doughnut souls – there’s a hole in the middle where God should be.

Roll over, Rembrandt!

Today I want to talk about modern art. Fair warning, though: I am a geek. I write computer programs for a living. I am neither schooled in art, nor an avid fan of it. My encounters with art are mostly of the casual and unplanned type. If you are an artist, consider this a dispatch from the frontiers of your world, where serious art occasionally intrudes upon the lives of the ignorant masses.

Unschooled I may be, but even the most casual observer can notice that something has happened to art in the past hundred years or so. Somehow I grew up thinking that Art (be sure to capitalize it) was about creating timeless expressions of Truth and Beauty (be sure to capitalize them, too). I was woefully behind the times. In our impoverished contemporary culture, truth and beauty have been deconstructed to the point of disappearance. What values do the artists of today hold dear? From what I have seen of their work, I would say there are only two: novelty and shock value.

For the thoroughly modern artist, novelty takes the place of beauty. This is a tremendous boon to the aspiring auteur. It takes skill to create beauty, but mere cleverness is all one needs to achieve novelty. Of course, there are only so many novel ideas out there, so when you come up with one you need to milk it for all it’s worth. In practice, this means that artists tend to come up with some gimmick and then execute endless variations on the theme. It’s as if they’re practicing to get the Motel 6 starving artist contract. So what constitutes a good gimmick? Well, Jackson Pollock dripped paint. That was a good one. How many different gizmos can you rig up to drip paint on a canvas?

I went to MIT in the 70’s. There was an art gallery in the Humanities Building I often passed on the way to class. (Yes, at MIT they had all the Humanities in a single building. You laugh, but then how many small liberal arts colleges have one Science Building?) Anyway, I remember seeing some pretty silly exhibits in that art gallery. One guy’s gimmick was making India ink drawings of eggplants! Fat ones, skinny ones, large ones, small ones: all down the long corridor it was just one eggplant picture after another. I wonder if that guy ever came up with another gimmick, or did he just retire when all the eggplants started looking the same?

If novelty takes the place of beauty, then surely shock value has taken the place of truth. The old masters tried to create works that reflect some deep truth about life in a way that is profound and moving. The modern artist believes he is performing a great service to humanity if only he can transgress some social taboo in a way that offends the bourgeoisie. Or maybe he doesn’t really believe he’s performing a public service, but it’s a good way to generate some publicity, right? The problem with this notion is that year by year there are fewer taboos that have not been transgressed. Year by year the bourgeoisie grow accustomed to outrageous assaults on their values and respond only to more and more extreme examples. This is the trend that gave us, in the past few years, crucifixes soaking in urine and images of the Virgin Mary adorned with elephant dung and pornographic cutouts.

Not all artists have gone down this road, but far too many have. By adopting such impoverished values, these artists have marginalized themselves to an ever increasing degree over the past few decades. When they finally have something to say that society finds worth hearing, and when they recover the ability to express themselves in an appealing aesthetic, they might just regain an audience for their work. In the meantime we’ll just keep watching TV.