Opicinus de Canistris (1296–ca. 1354), Diagram with Zodiac Symbols, folio 24r, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, Pal. Lat. 1993

Turning again to the oracular nature of art (see Monday’s post), it is compelling to consider that, in the Western canon, drawing as an autonomous art form first came into its own in the medieval period, embellishing the texts of the Bible and other works, both sacred and profane. If you believe, as I do, that drawing is the most direct route to the subconscious, this historical association implies a solid link between the psychological impetus of visionary art and the theological objectives harnessing its iconography. In other words, an id running wild might be reframed by its context, but it can never be tamed.

These thoughts were prompted by Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is easily (Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective and The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 notwithstanding) the most of-the-moment exhibition in the building. The overwhelming majority of works on display are presented in book form, rather than broken out of their original bindings. So it is hard to ignore their prima facie similarity to graphic novels and comic books, especially the simplified Matt Groening-style curves of the theatrical masks depicted in a mid-12th-century copy of Terence’s Six Comedies from Saint Albans, England.

The technical experimentation of these anonymous illustrators and scribes (often the same person), such as the variously colored contour lines in the Psychomachia and other texts written by Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, would feel as much at home in Pierogi 2000 as in Canterbury circa 1000. Not to mention the utter weirdness of the squat, schematic and anatomically inaccurate figures from the Salomon Glosseries, which were drawn in 1158 and 1165 in Prüfening, Germany. Or the text-free, comic book framing of a double-page spread from The Dialogues of the Holy Cross (1170-1180, Regensburg-Prüfening, Germany) and its detailed depictions of outrageous violence.

The most fascinating discovery of the show is the work of Opicinus de Canistris (1296-ca.1354), a priest and scribe for the Papal Curia in Avignon who, according to the wall text, “suffered from a stroke-like episode that rendered his right arm almost useless, yet he still managed to draw” and thereafter “worked obsessively to develop and convey his unique understanding of the divine order.” An actual visionary (“His illness, he felt, had brought him a vision from God…”), the large diagrammatic drawings selected from his portfolio of 52 works on 27 sheets of parchment (all made in Avignon between 1335 and 1350 and now held at the Vatican Library) bear a startling resemblance to modern outsider art. The drawings are built up rather than composed, with information overriding decoration as their primary motivation, which endows them with the same freakish, nonlinear narrative found in the most outré ‘zine art.

The crisp lines and sharp contrasts emblematic of both Opicinus de Canistris and comix artists like Eamon Espey return us to the kind of primal visual pleasure that drew us to illustrated books and comics when we were children. They also reestablish the intimate though often-denied connection between the verbal and the visual – a resetting of the dial to the image’s most basic form and function. The works on display in Pen and Parchment emerged at the turn of a millennium in the clearing between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance; graphic novels and ‘zines came into their own at the turn of a millennium after the rigors of modernism and the platitudes of postmodernism had both fallen apart. We are again back at zero, hallelujah.

Pablo Picasso, "The King of the Minotaurs" (1958). Oil on canvas.

The other night I was at a dinner where someone suggested that, all things being equal, what ultimately makes the difference in a body of work is the character of the artist. This might fall on most ears as a wildly dicey proposition, but in the context of the conversation it seemed plausible. An artist who is capable of making hard choices and facing unpleasant truths, especially personal ones, will develop a more substantial and exacting practice than someone who possesses a similar range of intellectual and aesthetic gifts but is too narcissistic or insecure for ruthless self-criticism.

Still, the prickly issue of an artist’s character got me thinking about the tendency to regard creative personalities, especially those at an historical remove, as glamorous and forward-thinking, if not downright heroic. This doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, of course. But it does reflect a need for consensus among artists and aficionados—whose values are assaulted daily by the dominant bottom-line culture—that they are on the right side of history.

Never mind that Cezanne, the father of modern art, broke with his childhood friend, Emile Zola, over the Dreyfus case, which was the litmus test for progressive thinkers at the end of the 19th century. The paradoxes and complexities of history include the Fascist affiliations of the Futurists and Ezra Pound, as well as the reputed, though unverified, reason for Fritz Lang’s emigration to the United States—not to escape Nazi persecution, as was the case with Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, and countless others, but to elude a prestigious job offer from Joseph Goebbels.

Perhaps it is a throwback to the ancient belief that the inscrutable pronouncements of the oracles were the disguised prophecies of the gods, but when an artwork thrusts us into new experiential territory, we seem atavistically susceptible to the notion that it contains the spark of the divine. And what is the divine if not all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful? How could the vessels through which such revelations pass, to paraphrase Stravinsky’s famous remark on The Rite of Spring, be liable to the mundane corruptions of the flesh?

Easily. Instead of retreating into misty, neoclassical visions of Apollo speaking through the Oracle of Delphi, maybe we should recast our imaginations to consider the influence of hallucinogenic vapors (as archeologists have recently conjectured) on the prophetic voice. Not to advocate artificial stimulants or to diminish the power of imagination, but to emphasize the bodily origins of prophecy which, like aesthetic innovation, define themselves by stepping outside the slipstream of their own time. Prophets and artists, both in the business of extracting undiscovered or unacknowledged truths, must peel away the strictures of social conventions in order to see the world anew. They are not necessarily good persons, but certainly uninhibited ones, compulsively groping through the intricacies of their own flawed humanity. This is why someone as self-contradictory as Picasso so dominated the art of the last century.

Mythology is replete with tales of those who challenged the supremacy of the gods or the limits of the human condition (Marsyas, Icarus, Prometheus) and paid a hideous price for their hubris. That is one metaphor of the artist—reaching for the heavens one moment, crashing and burning the next. Another can be found in Picasso’s innumerable images of the Minotaur, a figure who can navigate the labyrinthine passages between human aspirations and animal instincts, but only because he is himself a grotesque amalgam of man and beast. Picasso gives form to our inner monsters by calling out his own.

Dan Colen, "Untitled" (2008). Chewing gum and chewing gum residue on canvas in artist's frame. 19.1 x 15.1 inches. Courtesy David Nolan New York.

In his New York Times article on the opening of the Venice Biennale, Michael Kimmelman laments that the look of the exhibition “suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus.”

Without reading too much into it, the critique that contemporary art has been “professionalized to a fault” feels analogous to the sentiment expressed by the anonymous graffito I mentioned in my previous post: “The only true artists are amateurs.”

Of course, the word “amateur” cuts both ways. In most contexts it connotes a lack of training, sophistication, or seriousness, but its derivation from the Latin amator implies that its foremost meaning is “lover.” Simply put, the amateur is someone who, motivated only by the love of the game, engages in an activity without expecting anything to come of it.

Two exhibitions that I encountered yesterday, Slough at David Nolan New York and Alice Neel: Selected Works at David Zwirner, brought this concept into focus in very different ways. Slough, astutely curated by the artist Steve DiBenedetto, is a group show with a complicated backstory based on the title word’s multiple meanings. As explained in the press release, the range includes “bog-like” and “primordial,” “moral degradation or spiritual dejection,” “cast aside or shed off,” and “the accumulation of dust on the rim of a fan, snow on the edge of a shovel, or trash in the breakdown lane of a highway.”

The show includes striking works by Dieter Roth, Jon Kessler, Robert Bordo, and Michael Scott, who represent quite a heterogeneity of aesthetic objectives and studio practice, but who are nonetheless united by a sense of improvisation, accident, and play: a what-if approach akin to kicking over a can of paint to see what happens next (which, in fact, is what Hermann Nitsch’s untitled canvas seems to be). Philip Taaffe’s swirls of pigment, titled Slough I and Slough IV (both 2003), and Andy Warhol’s invariably lovely Piss Paintings from 1978 adopt pure serendipity as their method and meaning; densely laden works by Larry Poons and the late Eugène Leroy revel in their raw materiality; Carroll Dunham’s surprisingly aggressive Untitled (1984-85), in graphite, ink and paint on wood veneer, bespeaks a jittery call-and-response that, like most of the strongest works in the show, seems to spring from an ethos of risk-taking oblivious to the ultimate salvageability of the results. Nothing is calculated, preconceived, strategized, theorized, or prejudged. The object comes into existence solely to delight its maker or, as it seems with Dan Colen’s chewing gum pictures, for the sheer giddy hell of it.

Alice Neel, "Young Woman" (c.1946). Oil on canvas. 32 x 25 inches. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

One Sunday last month I was sitting in Sara Delano Roosevelt Park in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown. A small ensemble of musicians were playing traditional instruments while neighborhood residents crowded the benches or milled about. An old man found the musicians’ wireless microphone and sang an apparently unsolicited solo. The tunes came one after another.  No one clapped or even paid the instrumentalists much mind; for their part, the players seemed indifferent to whether anyone was listening or not.  They were most likely amateurs, yet their musicianship was top-flight. The way the neighbors seemed to take them for granted, however, did not strike me as rude or condescending; instead, it evidenced how culture, rather than standing apart from the community, is woven into its fabric.

This is how I see the pictures of Alice Neel. Her paintings of lovers and friends seem part of a daily conversation, a record of who dropped by that day and had the time to sit.  This feels especially true of the works in the first room of the David Zwirner exhibition, and of the nudes in a related show uptown at Zwirner & Wirth, all of which were done in the 1930s and 1940s. Neel was working in near-total professional obscurity, but this circumstance never diminished her drive to infuse these images with a solidity of form and a magnificence of color that bears comparison to the titans of European modernism. Her expectations for her work might have been humble, but not her aesthetic ambition, which she fulfilled through a searching eye, a sculptural line, and a savage palette. Her art was not her career, but her life. How many of us wouldn’t wish that for ourselves?

Webpage from the redesigned MoMA.org, with images from the Online Collection

I remember, back when I was in art school, walking into a lecture hall where someone had scrawled on the chalkboard, “The only true artists are amateurs.”

That was the 1970s, when the object was dematerialized and the gallery system, for the avant-moralist, was integrity’s sinkhole. Extremes beget extremes, and after Vietnam, Nixon, and Kent State, a rage against authority of any stripe channeled young artists toward ideological purity and radical form. It was fun while it lasted.

The other day I revisited the exhibition, Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, at the Museum of Modern Art, which I reviewed for the current issue of the Brooklyn Rail. The show had left me with such a negative reaction that I began to second-guess myself – which I’d never done before – on the validity of my response. I came away feeling even worse but while I was there, I overheard a couple discussing a wall of drawings by Per Kirkeby, Luc Tuymans, Rosemarie Trockel, H.C. Westermann, and others, solely in terms of what they would fetch at auction.

I’m not sure why this surprised me, perhaps some lingering, willful naïveté about what ultimately matters in a work of art. It’s probably the same reason why I kept looking through the various Flash Points entries on the value of art for one that would discuss it in terms of anything other than price (though, to be fair, this was how Beth Allen framed the question in her original post).

Although the notion that the only true artists are amateurs is flagrantly impertinent, it does strike at the core of the question. It certainly lies beneath the ongoing fascination with outsider art – that the pressure of passion (or obsession or compulsion) must be expressed at all costs.

Incandescent passion – no matter how unpleasant or fatuous – is surely what is drawing such large crowds to the current Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, while on the other side of the building, the deliberate avoidance of emotional commitment among the artists of The Pictures Generation succeeds in turning that show into a suffocating bore.

But to return to the Museum of Modern Art, what bothered me about many drawings in Compass in Hand, particularly the more recent work, was their disregard of shared experience in favor of esoteric, often hermetic pursuits. By shared experience I’m not referring to social exchange (indexed by monetary worth) as discussed in the previous Flash Points posts, but to the personal and communal rituals that mark off the progression of our days.

Taking the escalator to the fourth floor, I stopped in front of Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes from 1939, which hangs at the entrance to the permanent collection. Never my favorite Picasso due to its cartoonish over-stylization, I was nonetheless struck by the tension between the universality of its theme – the eternal search for food from the sea – and the eccentricity of its formal invention; the former provides intelligibility while the latter does all it can to subvert it.

This is the gist of modernism – distrust of appearances, truth revealed through distortion, exploration of the medium as its own reality: qualities that existed in the work of the School of Paris, including the amateur painter Henri Rousseau, before anyone put a price tag on it.

Money may be a shared commodity but it fractures perception; not only is it the most unreliable historical indicator of aesthetic value, but when art is rendered into a trophy and displayed as such, its role as a piece of communal experience, owned by all, is diminished. Nowhere is this more graphically demonstrated than in MoMA’s 2004 expansion and reinstallation, where masterpieces of the 20th Century hang like caribou heads in barnlike, one-size-fits-all galleries – not connecting, not conversing, not communicating anything beyond their spot in a predetermined timeline, as independent of one another as the thumbnails on the museum’s website.

It’s a sorry state, but not the end of the game. Artists will continue to find ways to inoculate themselves against the confusion of price and value, the conversation will proceed apace, and the golden calves and diamond skulls of our recent, benighted past will inevitably fade into obsolescence.

On February 7th I drove to the Kasser Theater at Montclair State University to see a performance of The Investigation, a 1966 documentary drama by Peter Weiss (1916-1982), the expatriate German artist and writer best known for Marat/Sade.

This 80-minute version by the theater group Urwintore was conceived and directed by Dorcy Rugamba and Isabelle Gyselinx from an adaption by Jean Baudrillard (the original German production—culled verbatim from the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963-65—ran nearly five hours).

Urwintore is from Rwanda, and Dorcy Rugamba’s parents and six of his siblings were shot to death by Hutu militiamen on the first day of the Rwandan genocide.

This production is not Rugamba’s first examination of mass murder. In 1999, he co-authored and performed in Rwanda 94, described by Jon Henley of The Guardian as “an extraordinary, emotionally exhausting six-hour creation about his country’s 100 days of madness.” For Rugamba, the four years he spent touring with the work “’rebuilt me.’” In 2004, the play was brought to Rwanda, where the audience reaction was extreme: “’For genocide survivors, it was something far, far stronger than theatre,’” Rugamba recalled, “Everywhere we performed, people–especially women, who had undergone unimaginable tortures–were howling, passing out where they sat. The authorities had to station ambulances outside each venue to carry them away. Rwandans have trouble expressing their emotions, you see. They don’t like the raw and the crude, and this play was both. It was very real. It was like bursting a boil.’”

The Investigation, as performed by Urwintore in Kinyarwanda with English supertitles, has no exposition or narrative arc, and no verdict at the end–only testimony, accusations and denials. The actors wear stylish street clothes and the set is minimal. Yet when a witness declaims, “The society that built the camps is our society,” the emotional effect is stunning and ineffable.

How can art effect political change? The question implies an integral, activist role within a progressive agenda, yet the history of politics and art since Jacques-Louis David is fraught with paradoxes and complexities. Art’s essential element–its ability to transcend the circumstances of its creation–can be best described as “news that stays news.” But to do so would be to quote the radical modernist American poet and Fascist sympathizer, Ezra Pound. And so you begin to sense the difficulty of the problem.

Political change requires a collective engagement with a clear set of goals. While self-criticism is helpful and at times mandatory, nothing can be accomplished without a steadfast commitment to the cause. Art’s staying power is embedded in its interrogatory, multifaceted, subversive, uncomfortable and often self-contradictory apprehension of truth. It questions and reveals, exalts and purges. Marat/Sade examines the descent of the Enlightenment principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity into tyranny, paranoia and bloodlust. In Urwintore’s performance of The Investigation, the roles are passed from actor to actor; guilt and innocence are not endemic but migratory, and the values of an individual society can cut both ways, forming the character of perpetrators and victims alike. (In a move that provoked much criticism at the time of the original production, Weiss never includes the words “Nazi” or “Jew” in the dialogue.)

The political profundity of Urwintore’s work lies in its quiet devastation of our well-heeled complacency. The historical sweep of their performance reminds us that–as Sade knew better than most–the point of civilization isn’t necessarily to defeat barbarity, but to camouflage it.

Thomas Micchelli, an artist, writer and filmmaker, is Managing Art Editor of the Brooklyn Rail.