Spawn of Mars

The Emptiness of Rothko

Saturday, February 2, 2008 4:42 am

I am an optimist. I believe that foolish forms of art endure only so long as they are a means to self-elevation. Once it is no longer the Mark of the Smart Set to gush about a certain sort of art, that art will be abandoned. 

Modern art is foolish art. Yet it has been tenacious; here we are, in 2008, and people still revere someone like Mark Rothko. But then, modern art is also the cry of the decadent, and decadence takes a while to play out. Perhaps only at the final passing of our civilization will the noisome banalities be properly held in contempt.

Till then, some of us can keep our senses and call modern art what it is: Art with a capital F.

This is one of Rothko's paintings, untitled, from 1958, part of a larger, unfinished series of murals, intended for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram's Building in New York City. It's like most of his "masterpieces": rectangles of color, arranged just so. Rothko's intentions — when considered with his actual work — are comical. He would speak about myth and intensity. "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions, tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on." His paintings were, he said, the "opposite of restful." What with the recent Holocaust and the existence of the atom bomb, normal depiction of figures and landscapes was out of the question. We had to choose instead a "pure expression of feeling." And thus... behold!

I don't know how to mock this painting of rectangles. It mocks itself. When Rothko says, "The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them," I can only snort into my beer. If such as the above embodies a "religious experience," we can only imagine what sorts of explosive transcendence Rothko might have achieved had he used triangles or circles.

With his Seagram's murals, in particular, he wanted to inspire a sense of unending confinement, like being trapped in a passage. He wanted to "make those rich sons-of-bitches lose their appetites." Seagram's was paying him millions for the paintings, truly granting him a great compliment; and like all modern artists, he wanted only to discomfort and revile his benefactors. Using big brown rectangles.

Rothko, after having dined himself at the Four Seasons, withdrew from the project. "Nobody who pays those kinds of prices for those kinds of meals is ever going to look at a painting of mine." Yet what he didn't realize is that his art is perfectly suited for the walls of a restaurant. His paintings are each an easily ignored decoration; an interruption of the wallpaper. They are the progenitors of what I call Corporate Wall Art — those formless, shallow arrangements of shapes and color that imply nothing, and adorn the reception areas and cafeterias of businesses everywhere. Because Rothko's paintings lack depth of information — strained imputations of myth and feeling notwithstanding — they can only end as corporate wall art; and only our ever-deluded intellectuals can claim greatness for such emptiness.

A Bourne Rumination

On the Last of the Trilogy

Sunday, January 13, 2008 3:52 pm

Catholic Faith · Movies

Beware! Spoilers follow.

I can watch the first two Bourne movies repeatedly and still enjoy them. They really do succeed. In general I am annoyed that they, like too much out of Hollywood, find the greatest criminality among American spies; but hey, they are exciting and they aren't cartoons. Having heard that The Bourne Ultimatum was even more anti-American, I wasn't so sure I wanted to bother with it; yet I had also heard it was very good, and so I got it.

Yes, yes, one could argue that it's not anti-American as such but only anti-CIA; but, in the end, it is Americans who are the bad guys, so it's a bit sour. It also spins its wheels a bit, as far as the action goes; the variations on a theme were sometimes not so variant. Still, I really liked it — and unlike, say, Spider-Man 3, it doesn't crater and ruin its trilogy, but finishes things very well.

Now, two observations. 

First: The black-ops program of which Bourne is a part has the power to kill enemies of America without any red tape or real oversight. The movie is particularly outraged that even U.S. citizens have been terminated. Now, I am one who draws a distinction between citizen and non-citizen. It does make a difference whether the target of a black-ops assassination is a citizen or not. But I find it interesting that a Hollywood movie should try to raise our outrage by dealing in a distinction that, in most other contexts, it would sneer at. Asserting that we should especially not kill U.S. citizens is asserting that there is something special about U.S. citizens. A "citizen," in other words, is a real category, with real rights above the rights of non-citizens. How wonderfully true! Yet The Bourne Ultimatum is essentially championing nationalism, even — if you want to be crude — tribalism. Are we finally allowed, dear Hollywood, to favor our own people over others?

Second: The Bourne trilogy is, action aside, about Bourne's journey towards his origins as an assassin; more to the point, towards knowledge of his true identity. And here the movie does something that I so hope I am not misinterpreting.

In all three movies, we have been led to think that Bourne was programmed to be a killer, brainwashed simply; and the final movie emphasizes this idea, showing flashbacks of Bourne being broken down so that his old identity would be lost. Yet his true origin as an assassin comes in a single moment. He is calmly sitting in a room with the man in charge, who is essentially saying to him: "Now's the time; you can leave or stay;" and Bourne is hesitating, perhaps agonizing; and then Bourne stands up and shoots and kills a hooded prisoner, about whom Bourne knows nothing. That is when he becomes an assassin: When he chooses to kill.

In other words, he can't escape responsibility by saying he was brainwashed or tortured. He made the choice. It wasn't the evil CIA that corrupted him; it was he himself. Bourne misused his free will. And of course, in the present day, he chooses not to kill; notably he does not "take the shot" when he has another assassin in his sights. Bourne doesn't overcome the nasty CIA; he rejects the choice he made in the beginning, and restores himself. He has repented. Is it an accident that, in a movie indifferent to explicit religion, Bourne is identified (via his old dog tags) as Catholic? Is this a clue? Am I encouraged to give a Catholic interpretation to Bourne's original sin? Encouraged or not, I do; and it is a very satisfying resolution of the trilogy.

Depicting Christ Anew

Encouragement From the Past

Sunday, May 27, 2007 1:54 am

Art

How am I to say anything anew? For two thousand years, artists have been depicting Christ and what He was and is. Even if I am inclined — even if I am impelled — to express, in my fiction, an image of Christ, what fresh manner can I take? I am not clever enough; and my civilization is in its decadence: it offers no help; it has spent itself. At the end of our culture, all has been done and done. 

When Only Corruption Is Authentic

The "True" Self, Revealed

Saturday, July 29, 2006 9:44 pm

Metaphysics · People & Society

There is a conceit that most of day-to-day life is a lie and, underneath it all, seething darkly, lives the truth. Thus, when a good man says or does something bad, we thereby learn what he is "really" like. But have we so learned? Bad acts or words are bad precisely because they present a failure; they signal a corruption. The man who, especially when drunk, does or says disreputable things has not lost his mask; he has succumbed to his corruption. When he is sober and does and says reputable things, he is not being a hypocrite nor a traitor to his "authentic" self; he is rising above the sins to which we are all subject. Our authentic selves are the uncorrupted, sinless selves, what we would have been had not the Fall occurred. No matter the terrible thoughts that beset a man, they do not represent him truly, unless he pertinaciously and characteristically indulges them. A man's character, after all, is what he wills of himself. When his will is crippled, especially by drink, his character has been set aside and he fails himself. It is a shame, really, that when someone is kind to us one moment and unkind the next, we think the kindness was false and the unkindness true. It is uncharitable, really, to allow a bad act to trump a good. Yes, a single bad act, absent repentance, can be decisive; but only absent repentance. Isn't that what God has told us, after all?

A Bee Contemplates Buzzing

The Definition of High Art

Sunday, January 8, 2006 8:46 pm

Art · Literature · Music

Despite having been a writer for decades now and having had the unsurprising and frequent inclination, as a producer of art, to contemplate the nature of art, it was many years until I realized something that I think is very true.

Let me begin by stating the obvious: All works are not substantially equal. However much the academics might want to de-privilege the canon, there remains a qualitative difference between high art and low art. This, to be sure, is not news. If you think I am merely about to scoff at academics who overpraise hip-hop or graffiti, you would be wrong. Such academics, however much they perdure, have been adequately ridiculed already. My question is only this: Given the obvious fact that some art is high and some low, what is it, in the end, that distinguishes high from low? And my answer is this: Depth of information. 

Eternity With Love Handles

God's Gonna Resurrect This?

Monday, August 1, 2005 1:54 am

Catholic Faith · Metaphysics

It's right there in the Nicene Creed: "I expect the resurrection of the dead." On the final day we will each arise as Christ arose and be restored to our bodies, no matter how dispersed our flesh might be among the elements of the Earth. To be sure, on that day our bodies will be uncorrupted and imperishable, glorious bodies like the glorious body of Christ; but I've always wondered: What will those bodies look like? 

Marriage Isn't a Lark, After All

The Carter Family Gets Incendiary!

Monday, May 30, 2005 6:49 pm

Family · Music

When I was a teenager and I started to read Great Literature, I read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. You know what struck me then more than anything else? That a book written in the 1860s should be about an axe murderer. My miseducation to that point had not prepared me for the idea that past ages might just know a thing or two about horrible, sad, or sordid things — and, more to the point, that past ages might be unafraid to talk about them.

Mankind has been doing the same blasted thing for thousands of years. Yet it is an annoying conceit of this era that, until now, man has been naive about his own circumstances. Because civilization once aspired to better circumstances and once celebrated ideals, it is supposed that civilization was once ignorant of all our shortcomings and squalor. In fact, our civilization has simply despaired of ideals. 