We visited a friend in the ICU today. Good news. He’s on the road to
recovery. But he looked at me twice and said, “You’ve never had any health
problems,” in a wondering manner. It’s not an accurate observation; there is
not nor can be such a person. Everyone has health problems.
When you see a contemporary revealed to be fragile, lying in a hospital bed,
your view of the world shifts almost in the way that looking through an auto
focus lens interrupts your sense of the present. You see. There are whirring
and possibly beeping noises. Things come into focus.
It has been a while since I wrote a “carry on.” You may have forgotten how to
distinguish one from a “hereabouts,” or I may now be stretching the form. In
my mind a “carry on” links seemingly distinct weirdnesses in the world, odd
things about how we live, usually relying on printed sources like obituaries.
A “hereabouts” reports on the strangeness of what is happening in my vicinity,
often involving local animals. In either case, if there are overlaps with your
vicinity or your sense of the oddness of life, we have met on common ground.
So, the New York Times last Sunday had film reviews by people who seemed to be
identified by acrostics: Bilge Ebiri, Teo Bugbee. In our times, who knows?
I paid particular attention to the section filled with critical reviews because
I think it’s a dying art. This week L and I attended a really bad play. The
actors did well, the set designer did well, I’ve no knowledge of lighting, but
everything seemed bright enough. But the script! My goodness what a clunker.
I’ll tell you how bad it was…for the first time in a long time Portland did not
give it a standing ovation. And where were critics? We have none. Long gone
from the culture.
The idea that someone could lead your thinking, of critical evaluation, seems
to be fading not only from the world of theater or film or architecture, but
from all the spots it once inhabited. We all feel now (one hopes not with the
consequences Modris Ecksteins outlined in" Rites of Spring”). Even New York
Times professionals seem to sense this. Here’s a television critic in that
newspaper, “But they’re all struggling with characters who feel a little too
off-the-shelf…” Where is Clive Barnes when you want him?
I was engaged by the NYT review of Lorna Simpson’s paintings. At the
beginning of my career I taught with someone who had a master’s degree from the
same place I got my Ph.D. And we were teaching the same course. The other
part of his gig was curating shows of contemporary art for the museum, so we
had conversations, frank ones. “Tell me why that isn’t rubbish. Difficult to
construct, but plywood, with all the glue marks? It’s like it’s part way to
becoming something.” Off we’d go.
That piece, the one we were discussing, the museum bought, and I’ve come to
understand. I think—and this could be memory smoothing over my embarassment—I
also liked the show he put together of Lorna Simpson’s photos. He and I had
photography in common, which is to say I wasn’t entirely ignorant of the
history of photography and knew what was what up till the point I became buried
in graduate school focus on history and nothing but. His Lorna Simpson show
was a challenge for me, as was the case when he exhibited his own work. Both
indicated I had some catching up to do. Which I think I did.
And now she paints, and the New York Times takes note. I am *this close* to
history.
I have been reading about Clementine Churchill, possibly with a view to
including her in a play. Her mother, like Winston’s, was not normal by the
standards of the time. There is some suggestion that she may have been the
daughter of the brother-in-law, who was the same bloke who fathered the Mitford
sisters. As I was mulling this over, and thinking about tanks and the talk
I’ll give in Poland, at lunchtime I ran across these sentences, “The larger [of
the two expositions] is the first full American retrospective of Charlotte
Posenenske (1930-1985), a German artist whose factory-made sculptures and wall
reliefs are a natural fit here. After early, improvised ‘art informel’
paintings made with a palette knife or spray gun, Posenenske in 1967 and 1968
turned to industrially inspired sculptures of aluminium, steel or cardboard,
whose modular components could be combined and reproduced at will. She showed
these serial sculptures alongside works by American colleagues like Sol Le Witt
and Judd—but Posenenske abruptly quit making art in 1968, and devoted the rest
of her short life to sociology.”
I can understand this in my own clumsy way, but I find Gaugin intrudes. In my
mind Sociology is a bit like Accounting, vital, with some interest, but I
rarely find it enlivening, engaging, in the manner of art. I think of it to be
in some way similar to whatever job in banking Gaugin escaped?
Carry on.
As we must.
David Ritchie,
Portland,
Oregon------------------------------------------------------------------
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