Dylan Thomas’s drinking was legendary. Stories of the debauched and disheveled Welsh poet’s epic drinking binges have had a tendency to drown out serious discussion of his poetry.
It’s a legend that Thomas helped promote, as this pencil sketch he made of himself attests. The undated self-caricature was published in Donald Friedman’s 2007 book, The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers. It depicts a teetering, goggle-eyed figure with tumbler in hand, happily surrounded by bottles.
Thomas would sometimes tell his friends he had cirrhosis of the liver, but his autopsy eventually disproved this. As legend has it, the poet literally drank himself to death on his American tour in the fall of 1953, when he was 39 years old. In fact, it appears Thomas may have been a victim of medical malpractice. He went to his doctor complaining of difficulty breathing. The doctor was aware of the poet’s reputation as a drinker, and had been informed by Thomas’s companion of his now-famous statement from the night before: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.”
So the doctor treated Thomas for alcoholism and didn’t discover he was suffering from pneumonia. He gave Thomas three injections of morphine, which can slow respiration. Thomas’s face turned blue and he went into a coma. He died four days later. When Thomas’s friends investigated, they determined he had likely consumed, at most, eight whiskies. That’s still a large amount, but the poet’s exaggeration appears to have led his doctor astray. In a sense, then, Dylan Thomas was killed not by his drinking, but by the legend of his drinking.
Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the most admired and influential architects of the 20th century. He was a flamboyant, unabashedly arrogant man who viewed himself from an early age as a genius. Others tended to agree. In 1991, The American Institute of Architects named Wright the greatest American architect of all time.
Wright believed that the adage “form follows function” was something of a misstatement. “Form and function should be one,” he said, “joined in a spiritual union.” A sense of spiritual union ran all through Wright’s work. He identified God with Nature (which he spelled with a capital “N”) and strove to design buildings that were in harmony with their natural surroundings. “No house should ever be on a hill or on anything,” Wright wrote in his 1932 autobiography. “It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.”
Wright spoke about life and the creativity of man in mystical terms. In this rare recording from June 18, 1957, a 90-year-old Wright describes his philosophy. “Man is a phase of Nature,” he says, “and only as he is related to Nature does he matter, does he have any account whatever above the dust.”
Sylvia Plath’s poetic talent should go unquestioned, but as Plath fans will know, she first intended to become a visual artist, and some of her earliest work—illustrated childhood letters like the adorable dog below—remained hidden away in the family attic until 1996. Editor Kathleen Connors included this juvenilia in a 2007 collection of Plath’s work entitled Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual, which also features sketches, photographs, and portraits—such as the brooding 1951 self-portrait above—that represent Plath’s work while an art student at Smith College.
Much of the art-school work is not representative of Plath’s best. While she made the difficult decision at age 20 to abandon aspirations for an art career and focus on her writing, Plath continued to make visual art. For example, at 23, she produced a confidently-rendered series of pen-and-ink drawings—such as the fishing boats below—while she and Ted Hughes honeymooned in Paris and Spain.
The Telegraph has a gallery of thirty of these drawings, which were on display at London’s Mayor Gallery between November and December of 2011. Plath’s writing has always been remarkably visual, her deft handling of sometimes startling imagery giving her work so much of its ability to seduce, enthrall, and unsettle. As in her poetry, the images of herself seem to attract the most interest. There are other pieces of Plath self-portraiture, but none contrasts so much with the youthful painting above, I think, as the accomplished pencil drawing below, with the poet’s fearless sidelong stare and bare shoulders expressing both her vulnerability and considerable personal and creative power.
Four years ago, I experienced musical polymath, rock producer, “drifting clarifier,” and high-tech painter Brian Eno’s generative-art installation 77 Million Paintings in Long Beach. I also saw him give an entertaining talk there on his observations of and ideas about sound, images, and culture. This year, he brought the show to New York City, giving it the largest staging yet, and then sat down for an equally entertaining 80-minute Q&A for the Red Bull Music Academy. Perhaps it sounds a little odd that a creator who has based the past few decades of recent solo work on quietude, reflection, and mental receptiveness would appear at such length in a forum sponsored by an energy drink, but hey, we live in interesting times, and Eno has interesting thoughts, no matter where he voices them.
Sitting back on a sofa (whose side table comes stocked with cans of Red Bull), Eno discusses composing music for hospitals after meeting a great many children born to his 1975 album Discreet Music; the amateur chorus he runs and with whom he sometimes invites famous singer friends to sit in; “scenius,” or the special kind of genius that emerges when large numbers of enthusiasts cohere into a scene; the DJ as cultural “lubricant”; his love of early 20th-century Russian painting; what makes popular music, from Abba to Beyoncé, sound popular; the importance of deadlines; and his new iPad app Scape, which, to his mind, should soon displace the tiresome conventions of Hollywood film scoring entirely. While this provides a stimulating introduction to Eno the intellectual, longtime fans will want to catch up with his latest thoughts on several favorite subjects, such as the value of surrender in not just experiencing but creating art, and the counterintuitive bursts of creativity that come when working with fewer options, not more.
What would a modern Marie Antoinette look like? Her hair would hang down; her once crooked teeth would be straightened; she’d continue to wear designer clothes; and, yes, she’d sadly have some surgical enhancements too. A far cry from how the more stately Queen Elizabeth I might look today. These images come out of a Telegraph gallery that gives historical figures a modern makeover. Other figures re-imagined here include Shakespeare (who goes a little hipster doofus), Henry VIII, and Admiral Lord Nelson.
Street artists: you either love ’em or hate ’em. Or, to put it less bluntly, you either find ’em innovative public iconographers or find ’em puerile public nuisances. I surely don’t have to get into the controversy of appraisal and reappraisal that swirls endlessly around English stencil-wielding satirist Banksy, but even the far less secretive and aggressive Shepard Fairey has detractors as fervent as his admirers. Yes, I mean the Obama “HOPE” fellow, though he began launching images into our zeitgeist well before any of us knew the name of the future President of the United States of America. You can learn much more about his early, pre-HOPE work by watching Obey the Giant, a brand new twenty-minute documentary free to watch online. Among the truths revealed: Fairey also created “Andre the Giant has a posse” stickers, those pillars of nineties underground culture and results of an “experiment in phenomenology” that you’ve almost certainly been spotting ever since.
Directed by former Fairey intern Julian Marshall, the short examines the circumstances surrounding his creation of this prankish yet surprisingly long-lived campaign. Why appropriate the image of such a well-known professional wrestler? Why credit him with a posse? Why start spreading the word on the streets of Providence? To address these questions, Obey the Giant goes back to Fairey’s years at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late eighties and early nineties, when he hung out with a tight-knit group of hip-hop-loving skaters, known internally as “the Posse,” and needed a sample image to try making a stencil out of. The documentary, which crowdsourced its $65,000 budget through Kickstarter, features a fictionalized version of Fairey portrayed by an actor. The move seems faintly reminiscent of Banksy’s reality-ambiguous 2012 film Exit Through the Gift Shop, though the real Fairey doesn’t conceal his identity. He even occasionally turns up, so I’ve heard, at the museum here in Los Angeles where my lady works — in the gift shop, as it happens.
In 1987, Compuserve begatteth Image Format 87A.
Image Format 87A begatteth Graphics Interchange Format or GIF (rhymes with a certain brand of peanut butter, the video history above helpfully points out).
The proliferations of free online GIF generators begatteth the countless annoying, smarmy, boneheaded animated loops you’ve seen junking up emails, profile pictures, and MySpace pages.
Of course, some of them are also pretty cool, which is why they’re being celebrated with a festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. No tickets necessary. Moving the Still: A GIF Festival will be screening through June on the outdoor electronic billboard meant to promote upcoming and current attractions. Conceivably, viewers with wheels and time to spare could take it in on an endless loop of their own, by circling up Flatbush to Lafayette, then moving up when the light changes, battling traffic from the nearby Barclays Center on the return leg.
What do we stand to see in this festival? The video history leads us to believe that anything is possible, though certain things—accidental happenings, laser cats, colorful barfing (…wait, colorful barfing?)—have a built in appeal.
Considering the possibility of a truly proletarian art, the great English literary critic William Empson once wrote, “the reason an English audience can enjoy Russian propagandist films is that the propaganda is too remote to be annoying.” Perhaps this is why American artists and bohemians have so often taken to the political iconography of far-flung regimes, in ways both romantic and ironic. One nation’s tedious socialist realism is another’s radical exotica.
But do U.S. cultural exports have the same effect? One need only look at the success of our most banal branding overseas to answer in the affirmative. Yet no one would think to add Abstract Expressionist painting to a list that includes fast food and Walt Disney products. Nevertheless, the work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning wound up as part of a secret CIA program during the height of the Cold War, aimed at promoting American ideals abroad.
The artists themselves were completely unaware that their work was being used as propaganda. On what agents called a “long leash,” they participated in several exhibitions secretly organized by the CIA, such as “The New American Painting” (see catalog cover at top), which visited major European cities in 1958–59 and included such modern primitive works as surrealist William Baziotes’ 1947 Dwarf (below) and 1951’s Tournament by Adolph Gottlieb above.
Of course what seems most bizarre about this turn of events is that avant-garde art in America has never been much appreciated by the average citizen, to put it mildly. American Main Streets harbor undercurrents of distrust or outright hatred for out-there, art-world experimentation, a trend that filters upward and periodically erupts in controversies over Congressional funding for the arts. A 1995 Independent article on the CIA’s role in promoting Abstract Expressionism describes these attitudes during the Cold War period:
In the 1950s and 1960s… the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art—President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.” As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why, then, did they receive such backing? One short answer:
This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy’s hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy.
The one-way relationship between modernist painters and the CIA—only recently confirmed by former case officer Donald Jameson—supposedly enabled the agency to make the work of Soviet Socialist Realists appear, in Jameson’s words, “even more stylized and more rigid and confined than it was.” (See Evdokiya Usikova’s 1959 Lenin with Villagers below, for example). For a longer explanation, read the full article at The Independent. It’s the kind of story Don DeLillo would cook up.
William Empson goes on to say that “a Tory audience subjected to Tory propaganda of the same intensity” as Russian imports, “would be extremely bored.” If he is correct, it’s likely that the average true believer socialist in Europe was already bored silly by Soviet-approved art. What surprises in these revelations is that the avant-garde works that so radically altered the American art world and enraged the average congressman and taxpayer were co-opted and collected by suave U.S. intelligence officers like so many Shepard Fairey posters.
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