Bust of a Man by Francis Harwood

If it wasn’t clear, I am indeed back in the United States. Good thing there’s art here too!

In Rome I saw an exhibition at Bramante’s Cloister about Italian Orientalism. It was filled, as you can imagine, with deserts and harems and odalisques. Orientalist art is curiously anthropological, and so all the more amusing (in a sad way) in its failure to be at all culturally accurate. In the end, Orientalist art is more about longing for the exotic than cultural reportage, a quality that puts it firmly on the wrong side of post-colonialism. This kind of historically important but morally squeamish art is incredibly difficult to curate, as the curator has to justify the significance of the works, while at the same time acknowledging their moral, and subsequently artistic flaws. On the scale of Breakfast at Tiffany‘s to Triumph of the Will, can we even appreciate these kinds of works artistically, or do they have to be examined from a historical remove?

Forgive me for getting a bit academic as this piece unfolds, but this work of art deserved research.

Francesco Netti, Odalisca (ca. 1844-1845)
(Italian Orientalism)

In 18th and 19th century Great Britain, at the height of the British Empire, just about the entire outside world could be called the Orient, except perhaps for Paris and Ancient Rome. British art flourished during this period. Young British nobles on their “Grand Tours” flooded continental Europe, particularly Italy and France, adopting their artistic traditions. These same types also traveled to India, East Asia, and the so-called Near East, documenting and exoticizing the cultures they now controlled. British art at home was largely concerned with noble portraits and sporting art, art that depicts the animals and pastimes (hunting) of the upper classes. Because the British Empire commanded such vast portions of the globe, it could afford to think of anyone outside of an upper-class band of Western culture as an Other. A foreign culture might not be Asian, but it could be Oriental, and by being Oriental become by definition the opposite of the West. The post-colonial period that followed was defined by the efforts of post-colonial societies to reassert cultural identities in the aftermath of the dehumanizing, de-individuating power of Orientalist Othering. That multicultural, post-colonial ethos remains deservedly dominant today. Hence why Orientalist artworks can no longer be interpreted as the products of the ruling paradigm, but instead as historical artifacts of an attitude incompatible with modern values.

Like the Chiostro del Bramante’s exhibition, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven has the difficult task of presenting an aristocratic past to a democratic present, running the risk, by its very existence, of seeming to validate the old colonial (imperial) value system. Yale may be the historical product of this culture (and if you’ve ever visited Yale, it certainly looks the Gothic part), but its contemporary identity is based on a value system of egalitarianism and meritocracy. This dilemma comes to a point in Francis Harwood’s deeply artistic Bust of a Man, a 19th century sculpture that combines both ancient and pejorative artistic traditions in order to reach a nearly post-colonial conclusion. By including it, the museum both highlights and elevates the differences between the culture that views it today and the culture that produced it.

Francis Harwood, Bust of a Man (1865), Yale Center for British Art

Bust of a Man (1865) is in certain ways a typical piece of British art, and yet its sophisticated racial politics make in unlike anything else in the gallery, or what was produced by 19th century British artists. Bust of a Man depicts a black man with what has been described on its accompanying labels as a “dignified, even regal bearing,” a “powerful physique” and “individuality.” The bust is carved from black marble and mounted on an antique yellow marble socle (ie, base), terminating in a curved arc below the man’s chest, a style more commonly used in ancient Greek and Roman busts of nobles than in portrait busts of the time. The man’s features are not anglicized, but recognizably African. He bears a scar on the side of his face, and he stares upwards into the distance. The model for the bust is anonymous, meaning that scholars waver between whether the man depicted is supposed to be an ideal, a specific individual, or a combination of the two. The current wall label states that the work could be an “idealized African head” or “a figure from history or ancient mythology, such as the Ethiopian warrior-king Memnon from Homer’s Iliad,” while the previous label said it represented “an athlete by the name of ‘Psyche’ who served in the household of the Duke of Northumberland. Sadly no such person has been traced and the identity of this sitter remains a mystery.” Both labels, however, are swift to emphasize the fact that the work was a departure for Harwood and from the art of the time.

Anonymous, Bust of Trajan (ca. 108-117 CE), British Museum
(typical heroic bust)

Harwood spent the majority of his career in Florence making replicas of ancient sculptures for Grand Tourists, and most depictions of Africans at the time consisted of the “crude stereotype of the blackamoor” (wall label). “Blackamoor” was a slang term for black servants and slaves, often from Northern Africa;  it also refers to exotic representations of Africans in jewelry, decorative sculpture, or heraldry, often draped in precious minerals or posed in servile positions. These blackamoors were particularly popular in Venice, where they could be found as small decorative objects or larger statues. There is no question that a British visitor would have been familiar with them, as Venice was one of the most important stops on the Grand Tour. Blackamoor figures were part and parcel of the tradition of Orientalism. Though they depicted Africans, they were grouped with the fetishized, exotic Other that comprised the European conception of what was “Eastern,” or Oriental.

By using black and yellow marble, Harwood both deliberately refers to the gaudily decorated, black and gold blackamoor tradition, and deliberately denies it. This bust was not designed to be a kitschy decorative object (note that decorative objects are not considered to be artistic), and the subject is neither savage, nor servile. What is interesting is that the sculpture belongs to really no tradition at all, making it instead an isolated work with artistic legitimacy. Harwood has chosen to sculpt the man in an ancient style with unique features and blackamoor coloring. Whether or not the man is meant to be an ideal, an historical person, or a mythological character, his sobriety and individuality elevate him from the homogenizing force of Otherness, a force that is terrifying because of its anonymity. As Edward Said describes in his classic Orientalism, the Orient was never meant to be an anthropologically correct idea, but rather a vague antithesis to the West, “to define Europe…as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (Said 1-2). Othering, or dehumanizing, a group is of course the easiest way to justify the maltreatment of it. Bust of a Man seems radical to a modern viewer, and though it may be tempting to fit the work into established artistic traditions, its humanity is a profound refutation of 19th century Orientalism.

Blackamoors (ca. 1880)

Bust of a Man is hardly representative of the British Art Center’s collection, however, and needs to be contextualized in order to be understood as part of the larger museum experience. The piece is located in the “History Painting” section of the Center, in the southwest corner on the fourth floor. It is given no more or less prominence than other works. Like nearly all of the busts in the museum, it is placed against the wall, as busts are intended to be seen primarily from the front. It is accompanied in its room by several large paintings and two other sculptures, one a bust of Hercules and the other a small marble statue of a Greek boxer. This placement firstly implies that the museum considers the work’s mythological interpretation to be more likely than its portrait-like qualities. The bust has, in fact, been moved. I mentioned earlier that Bust of a Man has had two different labels. The first label, which emphasized that the bust may have been of an actual servant, making the work a portrait, was used when the bust was located in the fourth floor foyer, where other traditional white marble portraits are located. The current label, which describes the bust as primarily mythologically inspired, is used now that the work is located in the History section. It is unclear whether new research prompted the move, or if it was merely a matter of curatorial discretion.

The first label is eager to suggest that

“whoever [the subject] was, he was important enough to be sculpted by Francis Harwood…His individuality is emphasized by including distinctive features-the prominent scar on his forehead is a good example-which stamp this work as a portrait, not a ‘type’…The fact that Harwood and his studio made replicas implies that that the sitter could have been someone of considerable prominence.”

(credit: http://deliver.odai.yale.edu/content/id/1eb85374-4b69-4639-8fc1-0d85b77f1f20/format/3)

Other scholars have claimed that the bust’s scar and typically African features suggest he is a “ ‘savage’ warrior” (Bindman 32). That is, very much a type. The new label sedately states only that “While the bust may be a portrait, it may equally show an idealized African head” (Hargraves). Whether this distinction is a promotion or a demotion is up to the interpreter. A warrior-king is surely a step-up from a servant-boxer, even if an idealized head is perhaps a step-down from the individuality I was going on about two paragraphs ago. One does not preclude the other however; portraits have a tradition in Western Art of being used to represent gods and ideals. Roman nobles had themselves sculpted into the likenesses of deities, and European aristocrats had themselves fashioned into the likenesses of Roman nobility, each to emphasize their power. The bust could as easily be “Psyche as Memnon” as it could be none of the above. Regardless of the bust’s true significance, the museum has chosen to associate it with Hercules and a Greek boxer. Visitors will appreciate it as part of the British love of mythology and the “Neoclassical interest in pugilism” (A Greek Boxer Waiting His Turn). This is a decision that reflects a great deal of skepticism on the part of the curator regarding any radical artistic intent. No one who sees Bust of a Man will deny its nobility and presence, but at the British Art Center they may doubt the nobility of the artist. It would be wonderful if a sculpture of an African man were part of the 18th century British portrait tradition, but the museum avoids idealism.

Ultimately, I want to make it clear that Bust of a Man isn’t good work of art because it gets a pat on the head for a being a bit less racist than its artistic companions. Neither is the museum automatically self-aware for including it. Bust of a Man is a good work of art because it doesn’t settle for being one thing or another. Not only is it beautifully sculpted, but its seamless blending of new and ancient, kitsch and refinement, and craft and art make it a fascinating work of commentary from a period so obsessed with high-art antiquity that it became a factory for low, derivative art. This sculpture comes from a man who spent his life making replicas. Whether or not such commentary was actually Harwood’s intention (his intentions, if it hasn’t been clear, are entirely opaque), from a contemporary perspective it has an almost prescient, Pop-like quality. With such doubts in mind, the museum’s skepticism is exactly right. It would be wrong to shoehorn Bust of a Man into our present post-colonial narrative, but it would be equally wrong to call it representative of the portrait or historical categories. It’s a gorgeous anomaly.

Bindman, David. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Cornell University Press: London, 2002.

Museum label for Francis Harwood, Bust of a Man. New Haven, Yale Center for British Art.

Museum label for Joseph Gott, A Greek Boxer Waiting His Turn. New Haven, Yale Center for British Art.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Random House: New York, 1979.

Museum label for John Rysback, Hercules. New Haven, Yale Center for British Art.

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The Davids by Bernini, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio

I think I fell in love with David in Italy.

But not as much as his painters and sculptors did. David is a tellingly apt stand-in for the frustrated, ambitious artist, the lowly individual hacking away at Hulk-like Meaning. Every artist who depicts him seems to do so in his or her own image. When an artist becomes David, he or she isn’t presuming to be a perfect Apollo or a half-god Hercules or the Adam father-of-all, but the human hero who kills a monster with a rock, the weapon he has made with his hands. In David, self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation meet.

Michelangelo’s David is all about the hands and the balls. That casual hand, lazy and crushingly powerful. Those casual balls, making up for an epoch of embarrassed Greek heroes, just hanging out like they do. He is poised and at ease, as if he doesn’t know how strange his ill-proportioned body is. He awaits his enemy naked and self-satisfied.

Michelangelo, David (1504)

Bernini’s David has no ease, only effort. He is not muscular like a deity or ideal, but like a mortal, athletic man. He has hair in his armpits. His movement is taut like the cord of his slingshot, a pitcher at the end of his windup. He strains with kid-like concentration. Bernini sculpts bodies with hypnotizing realism, but in this case it’s the face that you remember.

Gianlorenzo Bernini, David (1623-24)

Caravaggio’s David is young. He is not a symbol or apotheosis of manhood. He is solemn, with lost-innocence quietude. Did I do that? His hands are dirty and his ears are flushed with blood. His arms are thin and his cheeks are soft and round. He is the teenage executioner of the beast, the artist, and himself.

Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath (ca. 1610)

Though the works are distinct, for me they spell out a complete narrative: from apprehension, to action, to aftermath. From innocence to experience, in other words. Michelangelo’s David is a model-less composite of academic parts, a masculine, Christianized interpretation of an antique form. By comparison, Bernini is said to have used his own face as the face of David, thereby exalting his own artistic struggle, and finding meaning on the human rather than massive scale. Though Bernini’s David is smaller, he has greater agency, filling and interacting with the space around him, rather than waiting within safe confines. The Renaissance offered rationality, the Baroque humanity (consequence). Like Bernini, Caravaggio uses his own face, but in this instance as the model for Goliath (and you thought he was just being typically macabre). He reminds you that Goliath was a man himself. He turns humanity from a source of awe into a source of pity and fear. He has isolated David spacially, but contextualized him emotionally. There’s something brilliant in how at odds the black and white of the David and Goliath story, and Caravaggio’s painting style, is with his David’s moral ambiguity.

Non sequitur: Bernini must have been the vainest man alive, yes? If you looked and sculpted like that you probably would be too.

I love how each David is so different, with such a different attitude toward humans and men and heroism (confidence versus action versus wisdom), and yet connected by the same story. They’re like different directors taking on Hamlet. And each interpretation stuns. The Davids remind me why I don’t mind religion mixing with my art, because ultimately religion tries to explain people–and everything else—the same way art does. That is, David was already a metaphor before Michelangelo made him one. The philosopher Arthur Danto said that “art provides the highest values which secular existence acknowledges, except perhaps for love,” which is perhaps the case because art is demonstrably made by people. Like many stories from the Old Testament, “David and Goliath” is not very spiritual, but within that story are other stories about duty and daring and yearning and unfairness. With this story as the tool, the artists have excavated reality–maybe not the reality the text intended–but certainly a human one.

The New Middle Eastern Wing at the Met

I visited it last weekend and it was beautiful. It’s exciting when a major museum takes a definitive stance on such a colossal portion of the world’s art. About time. I haven’t studied Middle Eastern art history, and so cannot judge it on those terms. I can only judge it on the terms of feeling artistically sated and educated afterwards. The art somehow manages to integrate both eastern and western artistic traditions while maintaining its own entirely distinct character. Seriously beautiful.

Lots of stars. Two thumbs up. The little man falling out of his chair. You should go.

I Wed Myself by Tayeba Begum Lipi

Let’s get this blog started again, shall we? So very very much to catch up on.

Contemporary issues tend to be timeless issues in contemporary guises. It’s like how the most interesting thing about any generation of teenagers is not that they’re worse than the last one, but how despite the tools for expressing their teenage-ness change, their preoccupations remain pretty much the same. Or how human morality and technology have been on a general progressive trajectory since the acquisition of sentience, but our intellectual freak-outs about that trajectory tend to hit the same notes (“Remember when we used body heat instead of ‘fire’? Those were the days.”). People are mystifying not because times and cultures change, but because people are mystifying. Hence why we are told that great art taps into the universal. Yet…we are also told to “write what you know,” which is a piece of advice that gets applied to all art forms. A writer named Dennis Dutton called it “expressive authenticity.” The idea is that by being authentic to your actual knowledge rather than the knowledge you wish you had, in fact sometimes by operating on an incredibly specific scale, you will end up creating something of great truth. So why do certain small-scale works succeed and others fail? Why do we still appreciate Dostoyevsky even though our frame of reference includes zero 19th century Russian politics or in-jokes? How are massively large-scale books like Cloud Atlas still artistically successful? Why are most modern memoirs not? Because expressive authenticity is not about conveying your personal experiences, but conveying your truth, whether intentionally or not.

Questions of authenticity are even more knotted at the Venice Biennale, where “cultural authenticity” is a reigning concern. Because artists are divided by country, and are thus assigned the task of “representing” their country, there is a temptation to resign oneself to traditional aesthetics and cultural cliches. On the other hand, Venice is also an opportunity for countries to peacock their relevance, modernity, and talent. Like most global events, it’s an arena for legitimization, and it often seems that countries struggle with the question of whether to legitimize their present or their past. Some call Venice a symbol of the globalization of art, but its attitude is clearly and problematically Western. The vast majority of the participating artists were educated in the West, or work from there. A more accurate symbol of the globalization of art is the number of Biennales that are now held in non-Western countries, at which the Western perspective is not taken for granted. However, when one is expressively authentic, one will be authentic to the culture that produced one; national politics, traditional motifs, and contemporary aspirations may very well appear, but they cease to be their own purpose. I liked Algorithm because while it was almost too patently American, its themes were indiscriminate in scope.

The concept of I Wed Myself is so perfectly simple that just upon hearing its description, one might feel that they have already seen and understood the piece. This is not necessarily a bad thing in a work of art, but luckily the execution of I Wed Myself is something to behold. In a three-minute video projected on two sides of a corner, Lipi performs both the male and female roles in a traditional Bengali marriage ceremony and records her transformation into each participant. The work was shown as part of Bangladesh’s first-ever pavillion at the Venice Biennale. And while it is absolutely appropriate as a “work of art from Bangladesh,” in that it is tangentially related to Bengali issues, it is more concerned with Lipi’s personal issues, which happen to be informed by the fact that she is from Bangladesh. I found the video to be multiply authentic in a way that made me go “This is what the Venice Biennale is about.”

Last post I mentioned that I prefer it when contemporary art “uses contemporary forms and media to their highest potential in order to tell contemporary truths.” You have to tell your contemporary truth, because you don’t have any other kind, if we’re talking authentically. This work excited me because it uses a typical contemporary form–the video–to talk about what has become a very contemporary theme–the nature of gender and gender roles–as experienced in Lipi’s (a contemporary woman) specific way. This “contemporariness” is particularly prominent, and perhaps poignant, because the piece also wallows in the power of tradition. Just about all contemporary art will be somehow stylistically and thematically “timely,” because it is made in and of a time, but here such timeliness is given heft by being presented in opposition to something. Make-up for films/make-up for marriage. Performed gender/assigned gender. Past/present. Contrast is the salt of art. Chiaroscuro, baby.

I don’t usually think much of video art, due to the fact that unlike filmmakers, video artists don’t tend to emphasize the aesthetics of their videos. Critics don’t talk about cinematography in video art, the artistry of moving composition, unless cinematography is something the artist deliberately uses (thinking here of something like Koyaanisqatsi, the surrealists, or anything that uses film as a reference. Big shoutout to The Clock.). This is because most video art is about content and visual language rather than visual appeal. This is fine–not all art has to be physically beautiful, and certainly not all video art has to be cinematic, as that is something else entirely, but it does make one question the value of using the most definitively visual medium available if the visuality of it becomes secondary. The medium of a work of art should be self-explanatory. Every part of a great work of art has a reason for existing, and as the literal glue, wood, or gigabytes that hold the work together, medium ranks as fairly important. If a video artist ignores visuality, there has to be an artistic reason. If not, that is an objective artistic and aesthetic flaw. The problem isn’t artists not having adequate resources or production values, the problem is artists not taking advantage of the implications of their medium.

In I Wed Myself, there’s this fantastic moment towards the end, where Lipi-as-groom is sitting next to his bride, both in full make-up, and he gets this little dorky cat+canary, utterly male grin on his face. Lipi isn’t playing at being either male or female, she is being both, because she is both. As are people, she is saying. Whatever your feelings about the innate-ness versus performativity of gender, Lipi’s argument would not have nearly so much weight if she were not so good at being both.

The fact, then, that Lipi is discussing the way in which our exterior succeeds or fails in expressing our interior, means that her use of the intensely visual video medium is crucial. A novel is all about thought, and as such is inappropriate (like how the fact that The Hunger Games is a book and not a TV show is a total failure of medium); a painting is too expressive, and a photograph is too static, and a performance would prevent her from playing both roles. The video form forces us to judge her as a woman and as a man at the same time. These judgments start out isolated and compartmentalized on opposite walls, but eventually become inadequate as such. Lipi’s equal and incomplete selves are eventually united on one side, and so must our perspective come to encompass a more nuanced and cohesive interpretation of gender and identity. Lipi’s true self isn’t either the man or the woman or even both at once. Her true self is the artist in the act of transformation, a self which manifests not in how one looks, or how one is called, but what one does. Identity is action. Identity is creation.

If you want to watch the video, you can do so below.

Algorithm by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla

(photocredit: universes-in-universe.org)

The strangest thing about Venice is that it doesn’t smell like the ocean. All of that water everywhere and there is no smell whatsoever. There are no gulls, or sea-lions, or clam-encrusted rocks. There is no salty or sun-bleached sense of constant erosion, only, perhaps, erosion by history. Much like that sentence, there is something deliberately romantic about Venice. Venice is a beautiful, impossible non-place. The city was described to me as “Disneyland for intellectuals,” and I found that description apt in more ways than one, because no one lives in Disneyland either.

As you march your way across the top of the Italian peninsula, the Venetian winged lion begins to appear in unexpected places, announcing your destination like a premonition. Or like ads for a 16th century road-side attraction. “See the world’s biggest floating city! 500 horselengths!” Even as you pass through cities like Como, Verona, Vicenza, and Padova, some of which were once the seats of their own small empires, there’s a lingering, and somewhat exhausting sense of Venice’s pre-eminence.

I feel that way about the Venice Biennale too. Sometimes called the “Olympics of the contemporary art world,” the word “Biennale” will always suggest the qualifier “Venice,” even despite the growing number of other international and highly important Biennales. But the Venice Biennale is not actually the collection of the best of the world’s most contemporary art, just as Venice is not actually the imperial seat of Italy. The Biennale is, rather, a fascinating opportunity to see what is considered “official” right now in the contemporary art world, and what is considered “official” by the governments of the participating countries in particular. Every work present has the stamp of approval of someone reasonably high-up (critically, politically, financially, artistically), and I found myself most interested by trying to answer the question “Why?”

I didn’t go to the Biennale expecting to be persuaded from my opinion of most contemporary art, which is that is ideologically and aesthetically confused, and can subsequently be disappointing, or boring. (Generally!). I know very well that plenty of bad and derivative art was made during the 17th century, and that we benefit from the fact that time has winnowed it down for us. Even if the Biennale didn’t change my feelings about contemporary art, I still found the experience worthwhile, because there’s a chance one will find the works of art that time will winnow this century down to. I don’t envy contemporary artists, who have struggled since Duchamp to find something new to say about art. What is there to say, really, after you’ve decided that art can be anything, as long as people agree that it is art? Duchamp asked the question: “Is this bottle rack art?” and people eventually said “Yes.” And since then artists have just been asking the same question over and over again, by changing the word “bottle-rack” to things like “this 20 minute video,” “this pile of styrofoam balls,” “this man sitting in jello smoking a stick of incense.” But always the answer is “Yes, if we agree that it is art.” So where do you go from there, except in circles?

Needless to say, people can still create moving and truly artistic work without finding a new aesthetic question to pose. Universal truths will never be irrelevent, and the longer humanity exists, the more material there will be for expressing what humanity is. Unlike the way I enjoy art made before 1914, I find that I’m not interested by contemporary art that tries to say something theoretical; rather I prefer art that uses contemporary forms and media to their highest potential in order to tell contemporary truths. The two works I’m about to discuss, one from the United States, and one from Bangladesh, I include because I feel like they accomplished that task outstandingly.

(photo credit: designboom.com)

Before you enter the room where Algorithm is housed, you first hear the triumphant groans of a cathedral’s organ, followed by little waves of laughter, like a canal-taxi’s wake. Then you enter the room, where the impression those sounds give recieve little elaboration. You see a big brown structure, ecclesiastical, with organ pipes ascending from the top. At odds with the seriousness of this box (in Italy, where Catholicism is a constant, one learns to become instantly serious at the prospect of religion), are the smiles of the crowd that surrouds it, everyone charmed and amused by whatever is happening on the other side of the box.

And what is on the other side of the box is…an ATM. A working ATM. In self-directed order, visitors step up to the machine, type their PIN number with what must be acute paranoia, and when the ATM ejects their cash, it also ejects a deep and joyous hallelujah.

(photocredit: http://schaefgrl.tumblr.com)

boop boop. ping. BRAHHH, BRUHH-BRRRRRUM, DAH DAHHHHHHHHH.

Everyone loves it! They grin, because it’s so funny, but also because the work’s goal is so clear–to suss out the relationship between people, money, and God–while still being true and complex. It feels satisfying both to understand, and to participate in. Algorithm particularly stands out because it seems like both artists and critics these days keep talking about ways to make art more “participatory,” and the work answers that challenge perfectly. Not only does it require viewer participation to be complete, but the act of participation (over passive observation) is itself replete in the work’s themes.

With wit instead of cynicism, Algorithm engages with how humans deal with money. From a particularly American, contemporary point of view, it pokes fun at recession-era propoganda that spending money is an act of patriotism. Would people spend more money if every trip to the bank was accompanied by a chorus of singing angels? From other, all too general points of view, Algorithm can be about worshipping money, or the way in which religious institutions, by virtue of being institutions, can never avoid monetary concerns. There’s also something a little inherently sordid and hoardish about the way people have always accepted that we all need to have money (or means) to get by, while forbidding the subject of the size of one’s pile from the table of polite conversation. You don’t ask people about their sex life, their psychological problems, or their savings account. Algorithm takes the private and squirrely act of taking out money, like an act of confession, and makes it public and loud. And thus deflates its power. In this way, what is most appealing about Algorithm is the way it personalizes the intimidatingly big concepts it wrestles with. MONEY and its subcategory BANKS have lately become these nebulous and almost super-human sources of fear. Because they are collective institutions, they are, much like fate or the divine, worryingly impossible to assess, circumscribe, or control. Instead of building up this mystical identity and suggesting that one begin sacrificing one’s goats to Bank of America, Algorithm focuses on the first input of any monetary equation: the person. What comes out the other side is anyone’s guess.

Algorithm is both political and non-political at once, which makes it an intriguing choice to represent the United States. Representatives from both ends of the political spectrum might be inclined to consider it “safe,” or “easy,” though as Adorno would say (name-dropping alert), art that is too political is rarely all that powerful. That is to say, good. Algorithm is powerful and well-done because like all good art, it is both made with clear intent, and widely open to interpretation. I find its apparent levity to be a sneaky and clever choice that conceals how relevant it really is.

Next post: the art of Bengali gender studies.

Traveling

By the way, I’m heading up to northern Italy this week. I’ll be spending a few days in Venice at the Biennale, so hopefully I’ll have something to report on when I get back! A record 89 countries participated this year–with any luck someone will have something inspiring to say.

Las Meninas advertisement for el Corte Inglés

El Corte Inglés (“the English Cut”) is basically Spain’s version of an upscale Target. It’s one of those “we sell everything places” that you hate for being so convenient, but love for the fact that it doesn’t close down for lunch/siesta in the middle of the day. Which it can do because it is a soulless corporation staffed by unpaid endangered animals.

Naw, I actually think Corte Inglés has perfectly  respectable amounts of soul, not least because they put out this ad:

Which we should probably compare to its source material, Diego Velázquez’s meta-masterpiece:

Las Meninas, Diego Velazquez

In Madrid I definitely heard some grumbling about Velázquez “revolviendo en su tumba” (rolling in his grave) over this ad. But why? What’s so bad about it? Low art can’t be smart? I think the 1970s had something to say about that.

What I like so much about this ad is how much it gets what Las Meninas is actually about. It would probably be most perfect if the photographer’s lens was clearly turned on the viewer, thus implying that he was in front of a mirror, or in the act of creation (I personally love the reflection idea, because it would be like the “fine art” version of an “I’m looking sexy in my bathroom mirror” profile picture. Which is all about crafted self-image, let’s be real.). But what can you do.

Here are some things that Las Meninas is about:

1) Self-representation and status. Velázquez asserts the status of the artist by including himself prominently, and by giving himself the red cross of the highly regarded Order of Santiago. This is a standard analysis. The visual theater of status and appearance is not reserved solely for the artist, however. The placement of each character (including the reflected King and Queen, and the viewer) is carefully calibrated to define his or her rank, and to provoke the boundaries of that rank. Each character, even the little boy kicking the dog, is so deliberately arranged, that the artifice of rank comes immediately into question.

2) Art as Artifice. Art tells truths, but that doesn’t mean that what art depicts is necessarily literal. That lovely little blonde Infanta? Apparently not so angelic. Velázquez is revealing the way that art, especially the court art he was often commissioned for, bends and defines reality, and comparing it in turn to the way that people paint their public faces to their liking.

3) Visual Language Today. It is no coincidence that Las Meninas is set in a royal gallery, occupied by what I believe have been identified as Rubenses. Nor that the artist’s easel encroaches so brazenly onto the foreground. Nor that the painting poses so many riddles of perspective. Velázquez was on the cutting edge of what art could do in his time, and he was deeply fascinated by what visual cues were capable of signifying. Meaning, he was both very well-educated about the artistic past, and intensely contemporary.

So now I’m going to say this: What is more about status and self-representation today than fashion? What is more about manipulative visual artifice than advertisement? What’s ever more contemporary than retro-nostalgic commentary? It’s certainly relevant in a present where Alexander McQueen sells out at the Met.

But most of all, I love that Las Meninas is famous enough, and loved enough in this city, that someone would come up with this advertisement, that a company would decide that it would actually be effective, and that people would then complain about it.

It’s at least a way better scheme than whoever named themselves Rembrandt toothpaste.