Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "art"
Art is a Team Game
TRUE (Tuesday Round Up of Everything) post #3, 7/1/14
No matter what the stereotypes or even an individual artist's stated intentions, the act of making art for other people is a fundamentally optimistic one. It presupposes not only a faith (sometimes mistaken for narcissism--and sometimes accurately pegged as narcissism) that one has something worth articulating but also that other people want to hear it, can be reached, can be moved by whatever that thing is.
It's pretty much impossible to argue that art is a team game. But too many people forget that it is absolutely and unequivocally a cooperative one. You can go ahead and count awards and sales and compute rankings any way you like. In the end, though, if humanity as a whole gets better, and if people individually have richer, more satisfying, more stirred and engaged lives, then everyone wins. And if either of those things doesn't happen, everyone loses.
For that reason, more than any other at this point, I've been grateful that a lot of my best work seems to fall somewhere in the murkier corners of the big tent of horror. Because the horror community is full of people hellbent on making us a community. Peter Straub goes so far out of his way, so often, to support so many. Ramsey Campbell has been supportive way beyond what I would ever have asked of him. Lucius Shepard was like that. So is Liz Hand.
The latest person to fall--or, rise--into this category, for me, is Christopher Golden.
Nothing may come of anything we've been talking about, and that isn't the point of this post. The point is, because he likes my work, he has veered far off his own path to help me find mine. To see if our paths intersect. To make sure I know he hopes so.
Most of these TRUE posts are going to be about art, because art is so fun to chatter and argue about. A few are going to be about people. Because in cases like this, I can't think of anything truer.
No matter what the stereotypes or even an individual artist's stated intentions, the act of making art for other people is a fundamentally optimistic one. It presupposes not only a faith (sometimes mistaken for narcissism--and sometimes accurately pegged as narcissism) that one has something worth articulating but also that other people want to hear it, can be reached, can be moved by whatever that thing is.
It's pretty much impossible to argue that art is a team game. But too many people forget that it is absolutely and unequivocally a cooperative one. You can go ahead and count awards and sales and compute rankings any way you like. In the end, though, if humanity as a whole gets better, and if people individually have richer, more satisfying, more stirred and engaged lives, then everyone wins. And if either of those things doesn't happen, everyone loses.
For that reason, more than any other at this point, I've been grateful that a lot of my best work seems to fall somewhere in the murkier corners of the big tent of horror. Because the horror community is full of people hellbent on making us a community. Peter Straub goes so far out of his way, so often, to support so many. Ramsey Campbell has been supportive way beyond what I would ever have asked of him. Lucius Shepard was like that. So is Liz Hand.
The latest person to fall--or, rise--into this category, for me, is Christopher Golden.
Nothing may come of anything we've been talking about, and that isn't the point of this post. The point is, because he likes my work, he has veered far off his own path to help me find mine. To see if our paths intersect. To make sure I know he hopes so.
Most of these TRUE posts are going to be about art, because art is so fun to chatter and argue about. A few are going to be about people. Because in cases like this, I can't think of anything truer.
My heart sways
Theodore Roethke, in "The Dying Man", saying most of what I imagined I had to say. Meant to say. Only shorter, and rhyming:
"A man sees, as he dies,
Death's possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to sing."
"A man sees, as he dies,
Death's possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to sing."
Boursier-Mougenot Installation
Tuesday Round-up of Everything, Week of 6/17, Post 4:
Wandered into the downtown branch of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and stopped dead, in the lobby, for at least fifteen minutes, mesmerized and laughing at the sound and sight of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's installation of three inflatable backyard swimming pools gently circulating porcelain bowls and saucers, tuned and filled just so, their chimes as they bump randomly together as rich and atmospheric in that place as the bells of Riverside Cathedral on a Westside Sunday morning. Only funnier. Summer officially started for me right there.
This link doesn't begin to give you the sense of it, or the scope. But at least you can get an idea.
Wandered into the downtown branch of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and stopped dead, in the lobby, for at least fifteen minutes, mesmerized and laughing at the sound and sight of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's installation of three inflatable backyard swimming pools gently circulating porcelain bowls and saucers, tuned and filled just so, their chimes as they bump randomly together as rich and atmospheric in that place as the bells of Riverside Cathedral on a Westside Sunday morning. Only funnier. Summer officially started for me right there.
This link doesn't begin to give you the sense of it, or the scope. But at least you can get an idea.
Epistles from the Road: Art in Toronto
Stumbled out of the AGO reeling, after less than two hours, already full. The Henry Moore-Francis Bacon exhibit, so stunning, which works so hard to underscore the (very real) similarities in their work and concerns, but for me even more vividly underscores their differences, Moore's figures always reclining or collapsing, seeking relief or release from suffering, Bacon's almost bursting open--blooming, in a terrifying way--from it.
--Bacon; Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953
The long walk through the Group of Seven rooms with their snowscapes, their shadowed, not-quite-peopleless woods, half-identifying/half-inventing a specific, Canadian somewhere out of the great Canadian nowhere, so much gorgeous work we never get to see Stateside. J.E.H. Macdonald, my god! Hello, J.W. Morrice and your snowlit, Impressionist Quebec, welcome to my permanent collection;
--Morrice; Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, 1897
Tom Thomson, I know those shadows. Or I want to. Emily Carr with your trees winding to heaven. Bacon--crushed, heartbroken, devastated Bacon--said it best, said it on the walls of the AGO exhibit: "Painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation in me which return me to life more violently." Pretty much why I think I'm here. Why I'm anywhere.
--Bacon; Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953
The long walk through the Group of Seven rooms with their snowscapes, their shadowed, not-quite-peopleless woods, half-identifying/half-inventing a specific, Canadian somewhere out of the great Canadian nowhere, so much gorgeous work we never get to see Stateside. J.E.H. Macdonald, my god! Hello, J.W. Morrice and your snowlit, Impressionist Quebec, welcome to my permanent collection;
--Morrice; Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, 1897
Tom Thomson, I know those shadows. Or I want to. Emily Carr with your trees winding to heaven. Bacon--crushed, heartbroken, devastated Bacon--said it best, said it on the walls of the AGO exhibit: "Painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation in me which return me to life more violently." Pretty much why I think I'm here. Why I'm anywhere.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent (Holy Shit) Millay, (Edna St. Vincent Millay) explaining--far better than I ever have--why it's more than okay, experiencing art by one's lonesome. And no short jokes once you hit that last line, you nasty former students...
No, I will go alone.
I will come back when it's over.
Yes, of course I love you.
No, it will not be long.
Why may you not come with me?—
You are too much my lover.
You would put yourself
Between me and song.
If I go alone,
Quiet and suavely clothed,
My body will die in its chair,
And over my head a flame,
A mind that is twice my own,
Will mark with icy mirth
The wise advance and retreat
Of armies without a country,
Storming a nameless gate,
Hurling terrible javelins down
From the shouting walls of a singing town
Where no women wait!
Armies clean of love and hate,
Marching lines of pitiless sound
Climbing hills to the sun and hurling
Golden spears to the ground!
Up the lines a silver runner
Bearing a banner whereon is scored
The milk and steel of a bloodless wound
Healed at length by the sword!
You and I have nothing to do with music.
We may not make of music a filigree frame,
Within which you and I,
Tenderly glad we came,
Sit smiling, hand in hand.
Come now, be content.
I will come back to you, I swear I will;
And you will know me still.
I shall be only a little taller
Than when I went.
No, I will go alone.
I will come back when it's over.
Yes, of course I love you.
No, it will not be long.
Why may you not come with me?—
You are too much my lover.
You would put yourself
Between me and song.
If I go alone,
Quiet and suavely clothed,
My body will die in its chair,
And over my head a flame,
A mind that is twice my own,
Will mark with icy mirth
The wise advance and retreat
Of armies without a country,
Storming a nameless gate,
Hurling terrible javelins down
From the shouting walls of a singing town
Where no women wait!
Armies clean of love and hate,
Marching lines of pitiless sound
Climbing hills to the sun and hurling
Golden spears to the ground!
Up the lines a silver runner
Bearing a banner whereon is scored
The milk and steel of a bloodless wound
Healed at length by the sword!
You and I have nothing to do with music.
We may not make of music a filigree frame,
Within which you and I,
Tenderly glad we came,
Sit smiling, hand in hand.
Come now, be content.
I will come back to you, I swear I will;
And you will know me still.
I shall be only a little taller
Than when I went.
Colored in Feininger
Yet another advantage of having made a Kate: being dragged and cajoled, fussing and mumbling, from a jury duty-induced malaise, a lingering sense of things-that-should-be-done, out of the house to the art, Spent the afternoon slipping down Feininger alleys into Van Gogh gardens, vanishing through an Agnes Martin grid with some Klee-people. Came home colored back in...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...
Grace Notes
Sure, writing about music is like dancing about architecture...except when it's this writing. I was scouring my shelves last week, looking for something gorgeous and sad and suffused with color, just to remind me that such sensations existed while I hunched in what has become my personal no-shadows corner of the Jury Assembly Room, and I found this book. Which my dad apparently found for me, in 1998--there's one of his loving little inscriptions in the front--and which got forgotten about in the to-read piles during one of our moves.
Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty.
It's about an Irish woman composer dealing with being an Irish woman composer, and also a single mom, and island resident, a lapsed Catholic. Not much happens, except living. Hard relating, sweet and fleeting surprise moments of grace. And then the music comes. This is just a snippet of the description of the first performance of the piece our protagonist spends most of this hushed, beautiful novel dragging out of herself:
"It began with a wisp of music, barely there--a whispered five-note phrase on the violins and she was right back on that beach with her baby. If the audience thought themselves mistaken she would be well pleased. Did I hear that correctly? Like the artist's hand which moves to begin a drawing but makes no mark. Preliminary footering--throat clearing. Then the phrase repeated an eyelash louder. I did hear something...But the pause is longer, seems interminable before the music begins again. Is it over? they should be saying. Or have they not started yet. The phrase repeats a third time on the violas. They sound like violins with a cold. Yes, it has started, that there is something there is undeniable...starting friction has been overcome and now the phrase unravels..."
You can get it at Powells.
Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty. It's about an Irish woman composer dealing with being an Irish woman composer, and also a single mom, and island resident, a lapsed Catholic. Not much happens, except living. Hard relating, sweet and fleeting surprise moments of grace. And then the music comes. This is just a snippet of the description of the first performance of the piece our protagonist spends most of this hushed, beautiful novel dragging out of herself:
"It began with a wisp of music, barely there--a whispered five-note phrase on the violins and she was right back on that beach with her baby. If the audience thought themselves mistaken she would be well pleased. Did I hear that correctly? Like the artist's hand which moves to begin a drawing but makes no mark. Preliminary footering--throat clearing. Then the phrase repeated an eyelash louder. I did hear something...But the pause is longer, seems interminable before the music begins again. Is it over? they should be saying. Or have they not started yet. The phrase repeats a third time on the violas. They sound like violins with a cold. Yes, it has started, that there is something there is undeniable...starting friction has been overcome and now the phrase unravels..."
You can get it at Powells.
Failure: A Love Story
One of those magical L.A. nights. My kind of magical L.A. night, anyway. It was Kim's birthday yesterday, and she wanted to go to a play, as she often does, and I'd heard about this one somewhere, from one of my trusty someones, so off we went.
The theater was pay-what-you-can, a 99-seater in a building with all the romance of an Airstream in the middle of a park along the nowhere stretch of Olive Avenue west of the 5. We wouldn't even have found it--it was around back, behind the volleyball gym at the community rec center--if a couple ringers (maybe one of the search parties the theater troupe probably sends out) hadn't steered us onto the path.
But we did find it. And we paid what we could. And so the four of us got to spend the evening watching another twenty of the thousand or so most talented people on earth take an astonishing script by a playwright entirely new to me and blow most of the Broadway productions I've ever seen straight out of my memory. How even to describe it? "Our Town" in Chicago with talking clocks and escaped parakeets and a python named Moses? All I can say for sure tonight is, this was "Stoneface"-at-Sacred-Fools good. So sad and so funny and so relentlessly inventive in its staging, its (occasionally self-conscious but unfailingly winning) wordplay, its sheer joy in living,and making art out of living. Worth the price of admission--whatever you decide that should be--for the song about hating Johnny Weismuller alone.
I think tomorrow's the last night. Angelenos, if you don't go, you'll be sorry. And these people and this production are worth every penny you can give them.
The theater was pay-what-you-can, a 99-seater in a building with all the romance of an Airstream in the middle of a park along the nowhere stretch of Olive Avenue west of the 5. We wouldn't even have found it--it was around back, behind the volleyball gym at the community rec center--if a couple ringers (maybe one of the search parties the theater troupe probably sends out) hadn't steered us onto the path.
But we did find it. And we paid what we could. And so the four of us got to spend the evening watching another twenty of the thousand or so most talented people on earth take an astonishing script by a playwright entirely new to me and blow most of the Broadway productions I've ever seen straight out of my memory. How even to describe it? "Our Town" in Chicago with talking clocks and escaped parakeets and a python named Moses? All I can say for sure tonight is, this was "Stoneface"-at-Sacred-Fools good. So sad and so funny and so relentlessly inventive in its staging, its (occasionally self-conscious but unfailingly winning) wordplay, its sheer joy in living,and making art out of living. Worth the price of admission--whatever you decide that should be--for the song about hating Johnny Weismuller alone.
I think tomorrow's the last night. Angelenos, if you don't go, you'll be sorry. And these people and this production are worth every penny you can give them.
