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Art and the artist

  
 
Tsuga
23:56 / 09.02.08
I couldn’t find a thread with this topic, though I found some of it discussed here.

In that thread, some bobo going by the inflammatory name “I Left Because I Hate You All” mentions there that there were already threads on this topic, so I’m sorry if this is redundant.
What got me thinking about this was when I was listening to Mystikal recently, and I felt guilty. It wasn’t because I was embarrassed for liking the music (I’m not), or even specifically because of the misogyny of the lyrics, which I could have grudgingly lived with (that topic has been well-trod here concomitantly with race issues, and in many other threads). But you gain a new perspective on those lyrics when put in the context of Mystikal’s current situation, that of being in prison after committing a grievous sexual assault . Now when I hear his lyrics, especially some of the harshest, I get distracted from the art of it, with that knowledge. I get past it sometimes, but sometimes not. I don’t know if it’s bad that I can get past that knowledge sometimes. I’m pretty conflicted.

Mystikal is, of course, not alone in being a talented artist with a fucked-up personality, it's just one striking example. I think in any artistic medium you can find people with that special combination. You always (well, I always) hear stories about some famous person who is an unbelievable asshole. I found out things through a sibling about Oliver Stone and through a friend about Jimi Hendrix that really made me think they were both utter douches. Not personally knowing people can distance you somewhat, in that you don’t know how much of what you hear is precisely true, though it’s hard to argue with something like the knowledge of someone being booked for sexual assault or battery. You could argue about their talent if you want, but that’s always subjective and not really the issue. Take Picasso (well, you’d be an idiot to argue against his talent, but). It could be argued that he was an woman love-hater and a self-centered asshole. Same with Jackson Pollack.
Some others that I can think of, though this is by no means complete or even correct, and like I said, you can argue about the talent:
Famous shitheel Madonna
Salvador Dali, shameless self-promoter and Nazi sympathizer
James Brown, musical genius wife-abuser
Seeming rabid anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer Richard Wagner
Leni Riefenstahl
Anti-Semite and sugar-titter Mel Gibson
Jack Kerouac
Admitted cannibal Tobias Schneebaum (okay, maybe that’s a bit sensationalist)
T.S. Eliot
Charles Bukowski
Ayn Rand
Henry Miller
David O. Russell

It's too bad, but you just can’t perform an “artistectomy” and relieve the product of the producer. I mean, every work of art is inhabited by the person who made it. Or, less floridly, everything the person is, is what made the art. Though they may only be using the good parts of themselves to make the art, I don’t know. And, as has been discussed here before and maybe should be addressed again, there is often a complicated history behind the creation of douches. Should that be taken into account?
I know there are many more examples, and probably much better examples, but I’m wondering if anyone else has any qualms enjoying great art created by a horrible person, and how they deal with it?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:50 / 10.02.08
Basic rule: appreciating the work of art does not mean agreeing with the artist on anything other than the arrangment of colours, notes, word sounds and so on. Art is all about form, and form is what brings diverse human beings together.

Now, Wagner was dead before the Nazis were around. This may seem like a snarky point, but I think details like this often get forgotten when we talk about artists with 'dodgy' political connections. 'Richard Wagner was a Nazi, innit' - no. Personally Antisemitic, yes. Yes, Wagner was very much in the (sometimes, by then) conservative Romantic tradition as opposed to the neo-Classical tradition more closely associated with post-Revolution France, that's true. Yes, the Nazis plundered the music for propaganda, after the event. All this stuff bears thinking about, but Wagner's schtick, looked at objectively without later assignations, isn't that much more pro-German than Sophocles is pro-Greek, and he was more left-leaning as a young man. Also, they're good operas.

On Eliot - yes, you can see some anti-Semitism in the poems, but then no-one mortal comes out of them unscarred. They're vicious non-moral satires. Add to that, that in every case it's not Jews in general but a character who happens to be Jewish - usually a rich American wandering around Europe being uncivilised. 'Chicago Semite Vienese.' And later in The Waste Land we have retracting it. Also, they're good poems.

When we got on to stuff like accusing Picasso of being a 'woman love-hater' I wonder exactly what standards we're supposed to be judging people by. Who doesn't love and hate the people that matter to them? I'd like to draw a strict line between someone personally being horrible to their friends and relations (which is not worth complaining about because we all do it, it's called life) and someone 'supporting' some kind of political faction, which is worth more serious thought but as above is still no reason not to like the work. It's worse to deny that a piece of music is beautiful, for political reasons, than it is to admit that a piece of music with stupid political associations is also beautiful.
 
 
ghadis
13:35 / 10.02.08
Can we count Barbelith in this? I mean, personally speaking, i feel that myself and a large number of Barbelith people i've met in real life have been total pricks.
 
 
Tsuga
14:37 / 10.02.08
AAR, I hear what you're saying about judging in the first place, I hoped that I had addressed that when saying Not personally knowing people can distance you somewhat, in that you don’t know how much of what you hear is precisely true and by no means complete or even correct. In making a list, I was just thinking of people off the top of my head who I could remember as being questionable. Not that all of them absolutely are, nor do I really know to what degree any of them are "bad". I also don't really know how necessary it is to get into individual artists and whether or not they are shitheels and whether or not they are good artists; other than within the context of their art and their personality and seeming discrepancies or differences between them. Maybe more relevant would be the instances where the art more specifically relates to those actions or beliefs that may be problematic. For example, Leni Riefenstahl's striking films. Or Nazi iconography in general, which, if you could take it from the context and connotations, would have different evocation. But you can't take it from it's context. It is a specific abstraction now representative of something that was horrible and destructive. In many other instances, I suppose it's often a long distance between the art and whatever problems they may have as people (e.g. Pollack et al.).
Hubbardian Moonchild VI, I don't know what you're talking about, but expand on it if you think it's relevant.
 
 
ghadis
15:20 / 10.02.08
No, maybe it's not relevent at all. I guess i was making a point about how we are just talking about people and as people they, even if they are artists or whatever, are just people. I was just using Barbelith as an example really. What we read or hear is a tiny skimmed off top of what we know about that person through what they choose to share with other people.
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
15:41 / 10.02.08
Essentially, what All Acting Regiment said, with the addition of the idle thought that it is perhaps sometimes precisely the more unsavoury views an artist held that gave hir art its interest. Take Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles D'Avignon' (1907), a painting that as well as being a key stage in the Cubist breakthrough, also presents sex workers as pox-ridden, cock-chopping 'primitives'.

Here it is:



Now, maybe this image would have been as intriguing if ol' Pablo had decided to, say, paint a respectful (albeit wonky eyed) portrait of the contributors to the Guardian's Women's Page, but somehow I suspect not.

I could compose a huge list of fantastic artists who had, or have, dodgy views, and who it some cases allowed these views to seep into ther work, but I'm not sure what that proves. Thank god, really, that Hitler was a mediocre painter. Or perhaps not. Were he to have had the artistic goods, well, let's just say 'Dad's Army' would probably have had a different theme tune.

Maybe it would be more interesting to make a list of artists with fairly Barbe-friendly politics, but who make really, really, really shit work. Poet Laureate Andrew Motion is, by anyone's estimate, liberal left-leaning, but he is also the author of the following poem, written to mark Prince William's 21st Birthday. It is in two parts - a 'rap influenced' 'A-side', and a more traditional 'B-side', which takes the form of a sonnet.

(A-Side)

"Better stand back
Here's an age attack,
But the second in line
Is dealing with it fine.

It's a threshold, a gateway,
A landmark birthday;
It's a turning of the page,
A coming of age.

It's a day to celebrate,
A destiny, a fate;
It's a taking to the wing,
A future thing.

Better stand back
Here's an age attack,
But the second in line
Is dealing with it fine.

It's a sign of what's to come,
A start, and then some;
It's a difference growing,
A younger sort of knowing.

It's a childhood gone,
A step towards the crown;
It's a trigger of change,
A stretching of the range.

Better stand back
Here's an age attack,
But the second in line
Is dealing with it fine."

(B-Side)

'Is twenty-one the threshold any more?
Why not eighteen? Whatever. Most of us
Can choose which line we draw between the past
And future; we can call our lives our own.

But you're not 'most of us'. You cannot tear
Yourself from your inheritance, or pass
Unnoticed to find out what suits you best.
You stand apart but never stand alone.

That's what our 'happy birthday' means today:
A wish that you'll be free to claim your life
While destiny connects with who you are -
A Prince and yet familiar common clay;
Your father's heir but true to your own faith;
A mother's son and silvered by her star.'


I love that 'Whatever' in line two of the 'B-side'...
 
 
Haloquin
19:26 / 11.02.08
presents sex workers as pox-ridden, cock-chopping 'primitives'. - Glenn

Um, does it? I'm not familiar with this picture, but looking at it I can see that they are probably sex-workers (although that wouldn't have been my first thought), but I can't see pox, or cock-chomping. Am I missing something obvious? Where does this interpretation come from? What is the translation of the title - and is this relevent? (I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I can't see this represented in the picture and wondered what was informing your view.)
 
 
Tsuga
21:57 / 11.02.08
I don't know about that interpretation, either. I've seen that painting in person, and I personally wouldn't think that, but, I don't know all of the history. Where does this perspective come from, Glenn?
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
10:17 / 12.02.08
The title translates as 'The young women of Avignon'. Most art historians agree that they are prostitutes, and point to the fact that poor artists (as Picasso was in 1907) of the period would commonly use sex workers as models because a) they lived in the same neighbourhoods as the artists, b) they were usually more willing than 'respectible' women to pose nude. There's also a the fact that there is a Modernist French tradition of representing sex workers in poetry / art: Baudelaire, Degas etc. Picasso was likely aware of this.

The pox reading is again popular among art historians, who usually point to the figure in the top right of the piece, with her green, sickly-looking face. So too is the notion that the painting is about a castration anxiety. Those who believe this point to the melon in the foreground (half vagina, half scythe), and more sophisticatedly to the fact that there is very little pictorial depth to the image. If the male viewer (who we might read as the 'client' for these sex workers) attempts to 'enter' the picture, he might come a cropper on all those angular, blade-like limbs. It's worth mentioning that the faces of the women are modelled, variously, on Iberian sculptures and African masks, bith of which Picasso used to collect. Many art historians think his use of these sculptures / masks is (among other things) an attempt to construct these prostitutes as 'primitives'.

There's a useful article here by Anna C. Chave entitled 'New encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: gender, race and the origins of cubism' which discusses the common interpretaton of the prostitutes in the piece as 'disease-ridden harpies', and offers a rather different perspective.
 
 
Jawsus-son Starship
11:36 / 12.02.08
Diving in to ask a quick question - whats the problem with David O'Russell? I know he's a bit of a psycho on set, is that it?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:04 / 12.02.08
It's kind of sad that the membership of Barbelith is now so apparently conservative, politically, that somebody - albeit but one man, but one man - can look at Andrew Motion, who has a direct reporting line in to the Queen, and think that he and we must be ideologically sympatico.

I think the best comment on Andrew Motion's politics on the board came during the discussion of his anti-war poem:

Also, fuck's sake, I know he's aiming for brevity, blunt simplicity and so on, but that last line does a real disservice to the many anti-war arguments/standpoints/cases that could and can be made. It's exactly the kind of learned-by-rote, slogan-ish list of buzzwords that the anti-war movement were/are constantly accused of. What makes this even more disturbing is the way the first line inadvertently suggests that Motion is mocking the pro-war camp for their fancy book-learnin' - as if there weren't a wealth of texts available and in fact cited by better commentators than himself in making the case against war, and as if a relative absence of research of any kind on the subject you want to argue about were ever something to be proud of...

In other words, he's not someone I'd want 'on my side' in any debate.

Awful, awful poet as well.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:08 / 12.02.08
Many art historians think his use of these sculptures / masks is (among other things) an attempt to construct these prostitutes as 'primitives'.

Or, you know, an artist dropping photorealism and trying to work in an African style might be positing that it was better. And not just for prostitutes, see Weeping Woman etc. Of course there probably is some idea about primitivism drifting around.
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
14:38 / 12.02.08
There's not a great history of my non-serious statements being taken as such by some members of Barbelith (it was All Acting Regiment, IIRC, who thought that I was being sincere when I proposed that Barbelith be renamed 'Shameful - and plays into the hands of Islam'), but I'm slightly surprised that Haus took me at my word when I put up Andrew Motion as an example of an artist with Barbe-friendly politics. Not in my name, Motion. Not in my name!

Or, you know, an artist dropping photorealism and trying to work in an African style might be positing that it was better. And not just for prostitutes, see Weeping Woman etc. Of course there probably is some idea about primitivism drifting around.

Yup. Not sure that my post said this was the only reason that Picasso employed African art* in his work - in fact I explicitly mentioned 'other reasons', among which I would count the new (at least to European artists) formal possibilities such art offered up. 'Les Demoiselles..' was, though, the first time he drew on African art in his work('Weeping Woman' was painted 30 years later in 1937). Also, I'm not sure 'photorealism' is quite the word you're looking for to describe Picasso's pre-Demoiselles work. Maybe something along the lines of 'figurative in a way that broadly conforms to the norms of post-Medieval European art'? 'Photorealism' - in art historical terminology at least - is usually associated with 60s /70s artists such as Robert Bechtle:

Here's a blue-period Picasso:



Here's a Bechtle:





*By this I don't mean all African art, of course, but rather the 'ethnographic' objects, such as masks made by the Fang people, brought back by European colonialists to Western Europe.
 
  
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