Second Empire Look

“then we would go into what he called his ’study’, whose walls were hung with some of those engravings depicting, against a dark background, a fleshy pink goddess driving a charriot, standing on a globe, or wearing a star on her forehead, which were admired during the Second Empire because they were felt to have a Pompeiian look about them, were then hated, and are beginning to be admired for one reason, and one reason only, and that is that they have such a Second Empire look about them.”
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way.
Davis Translation.

I don’t want to get too far into a discussion of art, architecture, and politics, of 19th Century France, or anything, but…
Actually, there is nothing more that I would like to get into but a discussion about those three things, because I fuckin’ live for that shit, but I have a feeling that there is a slight chance that I’d come off sounding like a pretentious blow-hard, and we can’t be havin’ that, n’est pas?
So, at the risk of that, I’ll explain the Proust quote and why it struck me, at 8 in the morning on September 19th, and what I’ve been mulling over here and thereafter.
One of the two reasons that I live on the Upper West Side (there areally aren’t that many) is the architecture. I love it. Old doorman buildings from the 20’s that look like the unholy spawn of a pile of bricks and an Italian Renaissance palace, beefed-up Beaux-Arts buildings like the Ansonia and the Dorilton with hulking mansard roofs that curl and crest, in my mind at least, up heaven itself…just absolutely glorious. I mean, gorgeous if you’re into that sort of thing. I am.
Just around the corner from me, there is a whole block dedicated to ecclesiastic buildings, with the church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on the south side of 86th and West End, and the church of St. Ignatius on the North. St. Paul and St. Andrew, with it’s octagonal bell tower, empty niches, red-tile roof, and arched buttresses, is French Neo-Classical-ish, while St. Ignatius crosses the channel and looks Anglican Gothic. It’s hard to peg, because it’s all sort of a mish-mosh of different styles and countries, that for the newly-monied upper middle class that settled this fine rocky farmland in the mid 19th Century, it probably made them feel right at home. At home in the Europe that they had, a generation before, escaped because of persecution and/or poverty. Who knows?
What I’m getting at is that all of this great architecture up here that I love so much is all a pretense. The brownstones are just deftly carved mud, last-centuries stucco. The canyon of ten-story brick buildings that line Central Park West and West End Ave, without their little flourishes of limestone rosettes and anonymous Greek deities in profile, would be nothing more than a bleak shadowy brick canyon. Don’t get me wrong, I love walking past them and keep a mental catalogue of all the different faces and gargoyles that emerge, for example, from the foliage of a round balcony, extending all of two feet out, below a brownstone’s bay window. It would be pretty bleak if they weren’t there, but in an of themselves they’re pretty superficial.
And that’s where this goes back to Prousts’ uncle. Like his uncle’s study, which we find out later is nothing more than a setting for illicit trysts with debauched courtesans, the old architecture of the UWS that I know and love, is really all a sham. None of it existed during the Second Empire, before the 9th Ave El, and most of it was filled in by the 20’s. Does that make it all insincere and artificial? Who’s to say? I grew up in Austin, and I’ve never been around so many old buidings, even if most of them are just under 90 years old. Am I some sort of poser, then? That’s your call. The jury is still out on that one, and while it’s deliberating you can find me underneath my stove-pipe hat, monocle firmly clamped beteween my left brow and creased cheek, wearing a double-tailed suit and wandering amongst the brownstones in luminous reverie, a flaneur searching for a past that never was.

Oh, the irony…

At the end of the summer of 2007 I was at my wits end. Heartbroken, confused, and suffering from profound spiritual anguish, I spent a lot of time sweating in front of the computer.   Full of inarticulate rage that could be directed towards nobody in particular, I focused on a crappy review that I had read on a website. Pretty pathetic, but in so doing, I was able to find my own voice, stuttering though it may be.  The ironic part is that I accuse the writer of being pretentious, and now I’m no different.  Oh the foolish cockiness of youth in its last feeble flush…

When I wrote this, I didn’t know Neckface that well, and, even more dangerously, I didn’t know the reviewer I was writing about. I got to know both of them much better after this. One comes to my weekly drawing salon sometimes, and the other would most likely stab me if he saw me. I leave it up to you guys to figure out which is which, and as far as I’m concerned it is water long under the bridge.  Since this is a blog about my art-writing, I have to include it, and I stand by what I said.

DAVID GREENGERG AND MANNERIST ART CRITICISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY

By Ted Barrow, 2007

Neckface, after Albrecht Durer

“At one time it is the deepening and spiritualizing of religious experience and the vision of a new spiritual content in life; at another an exaggerated intellectualism consciously and deliberately deforming reality…sometimes, however, it is a fastidious and affected Epicureanism, translating everything into subtlety and elegance, which leads to the abandonment of classical forms. But the artistic solution is always a derivative, a structure dependent in the final analysis on classicism, and originating in a cultural, not a natural experience…We are dealing here, in other words, with a completely self-conscious style, which bases its forms not so much on the particular object as on the art of the preceding epoch…” (Arnold Hauser The Social History of Art, vol. 2, p. 100)

Ok, admittedly I’m a bit out of the loop. For the last few months, whenever I condescend to check glob.anewyorkthing.com, I’ve said to myself, “why, all of a sudden, does this site suck so much? Who the fuck are all these hood-rats and dumb kids out in the Hamptons, what the fuck do all these essays, and “old NY street-character” -type pieces have anything to do with what I would find even remotely interesting? Where are the tits? Where’s the blood? Where’s the raw charisma? Oh, and where the fuck is A-ron?
Like I said, I’m out of the loop. I didn’t know that through some shake-up at the store, the blog that I had come to know and make feeble attempts at cool-hunting at had moved to nyglob.com.. The way that I see it, checking the site, either one, is like everyone’s dirty secret. I’m not gonna ask one of my friends what happened to A-ron’s blog, because to me that question is kind of on the same level as asking your friends which finger they use to jam up their own asses while masturbating to snuff films. It’s a dirty secret, which explains why I was a bit out of the loop on this big change.

So there I was, proverbial left index finger up my own ass, boredly scrolling down picture after picture of multi-colored hats on Harlem’s finest—or whatever—when I stumble upon a gem of an essay bearing the august banner of a title, “Neck Face & Mannerist Graffiti Art in the 21st Century”. Wow. I was floored. The author was the esteemed David Greenberg. I encourage you all to check out his page at myspace.com/poetdavidgreenberg.

When I read his essay, however, on the former blog of the anything store, I thought ah, what a perfect Mannerist art critic. According to his Myspace page, he is a poet, curator, art critic, band member, freelancer, and general dude on the street in the know. A casual scroll through his pictures is an advanced seminar in photo-beaming. I could, and probably will, do a separate essay on all of the rules of subtlety and tact that are broken with each of the photos and their captions, but for my purposes right now, I’ll leave that to some later date. My particular favorite is the one shot by Brooke Dillon and has Allen Ginsberg standing on a bed, naked, with David Greenberg shining a light up his ass—literally. There are plenty more like this, at least thematically.

In his essay, Greenberg begins with a scant definition of Mannerism, the sort of thing you could cut and paste off of Wikipedia, that for now I will accept as being generally true. He then takes the time to opine intellectual, making the bold claim that ” I’ve always considered Michelangelo to be the first Mannerist, as opposed to a Renaissance artist—most art historians would probably vehemently disagree.” Oh, really? And what art historians would those be? Surely it wouldn’t be the teacher of my, or any other survey on western art offered for first year students across the country, where they directly state that both Michelangelo and Raphael, in their later work show very clear signs of “seeds of dissolution” (Hauser) to the rigidity of the Classicism of the High Renaissance. Shit, you can find this on Wikipedia. Look up Raphael’s late Transfiguration, 1520. This kind of showing off, touting off his own opinions on the history of art against the so-called rigid theories of those academic smarties at Artforum, for example, would make Greenberg seem like the renegade he would like to be seen as, IF he was saying anything new. The problem is, he isn’t. Nobody’s disagreeing with your ground-breaking theory about Michelangelo and Mannerism there, buddy, so what the fuck are you really saying?

Once he defines Mannerism, albeit loosely, Greenberg waxes nostalgic and name-droppy about his time with Neckface, Everyone should read about what an insider this guys is. I won’t contest that, just yet. What I must ask, however, is: what does this have to do with Mannerism? According to any definition, and I’ll just refer to the big hulking quote above this essay, Mannerism is defined by its derivative relationship to the art that came before it. It can be overly spiritual or intellectual, or overly stylized and artificial, when compared to the stoic rigidity and calm of the High Renaissance. A typical Cinqueccento deposition painted by a mannerist would be charged with an almost neurotic and perverse mood, gestures exaggerated, the actual meaning of the scene riding backseat to the solution of aesthetic and peculiar intellectual problems that the artist has set out for himself. Think of it as a rare Nike dunk colorway, the De La Soul ones, for example. Once the functional solution of the shoe has been reached in 1985, they are twisted and riffed upon in 2005 by adding colors and patterns that make the shoe a piece of frivolous and fetishistic art, and not a functional piece of athletic equipment. Get it? Good.

The same goes for painting. The devotional and astoundingly technically beautiful aspect of High Renaissance painting is twisted into something stylized and artificial in Mannerism. No less fun to look at, but appreciated for different reasons. What does this have to do with Greenberg’s opinion of Neckface?

Absolutely nothing. That’s the point.

Once Greenberg makes his high-falutin’ claim to Neckface’s place in the pantheon of western art, he doesn’t really back it up. The rest of the essay is about where Greenberg, the art critic at large, thinks Neckface should go with his art, the little run-in’s they’ve had, squawkety-squawk. He seems mad at Neckface for ignoring his “musings” on him, and attempting to wrestle one of his drawings back from Greenberg in his “mad little traveling art show”. He takes jabs at Tony Shafrazi, outs Sacer, and maintains his tone of the all-knowing sycophant. One particularly annoying description is when Greenberg describes “the last vestiges of IRAK crew.” Are we to understand IRAK as the High Renaissance of 21st century graffiti, and then Neckface as, say, Parmagianino? How pretentious.

All very fun to read, though. Kind of. Neckface isn’t the mannerist here, by any definition of the word, Greenberg is. Again, I refer to my definition upstairs, in which Hauser discusses the “exaggerated intellectualism consciously and deliberately deforming reality.” It is very clear that Greenberg considers himself to be an intellectual, a direct inheritor of the poetic tradition of the beats. He asserts this in his poetry and the photos he chooses of himself with other accolades, even in his photos and Myspace friends (I was not aware that Burroughs, Corso, and Ginsberg maintained their own Myspace pages) and maybe the critical tradition of Renee Ricard. I even smell a little Michael Musto in there, too. When I say that he is a Mannerist critic, I mean it in the most derivative sense of the word. Mannerism can mean both “manneristic” and “mannered”. I’m thinking mannered, as in overly-affected. Greenberg’s prose is stylized, his points nothing more than academic posturing that only inform us about what he thinks of himself. It’s like he’s saying, “Look at me! I’m an art-critic. Here’s an art-term that most of you wouldn’t know about! Now let me tell a story about myself for a while,.. Keep dreaming, Tony!” Keep dreaming indeed. His poetry is the very definition of a “self-conscious style”, more about linking themselves to the themes of past, more original poets: junkies and hustlers, banal imagery of unrequited love, than they are about explorations of those themes. His essays on art are distinctly artificial, saying very little about the art itself and the experience of it, and more about the personalities and people associated with it.

Maybe that’s the point, though. It is, after all, an academic essay on the anything blog website, and not Artforum. Being that that is the case, just admit it. Don’t take this high tone with us, it makes us feel stupid.

Neckface, after Gustave Courbet

Transubstantiation

photo: Yuri Shibuya

This photo was shot at The Grootto Church of Notre Dame on 114th and Morningside Drive. The church itself was built in 1910 and was based on L’Eglise des Invalides which is where Napoleon the First was buried in Paris. Inside of this church, there is a sculptural replica of the grotto where Our Lady revealed herself to St. Bernadette in Lourdes. Similar instances of The Virgin Mary revealing herself to travelers or, in the case of The Virgin of Guadalupe, Mestizo Mexicans, exist all throughout Catholic lore. Thus you have a grotto built to replicate the setting of a western European Catholic legend, inside a church built in the Neo-Classical style that was so popular (for obvious reasons) in Napoleons Empire, which then serves as the model for a church on a sparsely populated bluff along Morningside Drive in Manhattan, which just so happens to have an awkward ledge with a grate in front of it that is a perfect spot for me to do artsy backside tail-slides and have my friend from Japan shoot shoot grainy pictures of them.

Some interesting issues I like to think of about this setting are, for example:

-the idea of Transubstantiation in the Eucharist that is given in the Church, where bread and wine actually become the blood and flesh of Christ, all of this taking place in front of a replica of the grotto in Lourdes where another miracle supposedly took place

-the fact that this takes place in a small church built for an even smaller French community of Catholics which is nonetheless modeled after a larger French church (Invalides) which served as the burial place for an even larger (albeit relatively small) French emperor (Napoleon I).

-The few times that I’ve been there have found the Church empty and sometimes even locked. There are beautiful old churches all over New York City that are crumbling, literally, because there isn’t a strong religious community to support them. Nowadays, people go to storefront evangelical churches, mostly conducted in Spanish. While I was shooting the photo, an older black woman with bleached-blonde hair was taking out the trash. She stopped, looking quizzically at what I was doing.
“Let me ask you something,” she said.
“Yeah?” I panted, ready to argue and eventually to be-grudgingly leave.
“Just what exactly do you expect to accomplish there?”
I tried to explain the trick to her as best I could, describing how I had to slide on the ledge above the grate and hopefully roll away. I also added that the granite that I was skating on was very strong and would be here long after both of us were gone, and that I wasn’t doing damage to it.
“I’m not worried about the granite, honey. I’m just worried about you getting hurt. The granite may be strong, but you aren’t.” She smiled and went back to work. We had tacitly agreed.

-The Neo-Classical style of architecture is a 19th Century style which appropriates the architecture of the High Renaissance, which in turn looked all the way back to the ruins of Greece and Rome. Greek and Roman architecture, up to say, 323 AD is decidedly pagan. So the different contexts of the architecture and what it was intended for: civic/ecclesiastic, public/private, modern/(neo)classical,…etc. are all at play here.

-speaking of miracles, it was a real miracle that I actually landed that backside tail-slide, because I’m 32. Now, look at that number above: 323. I’m 32 years old. Next year I’ll be 33. Jesus Christ lived to 33, and savior though he may have been, he couldn’t do backside tail-slides. However, he probably wouldn’t have minded me doing one on the church dedicated to his mother. He’s a lot more tolerant than people give him credit for these days…

This is a blog reflecting my experience, after 10 years, of taking a 19th century art history class again

I will not be blogging about skateboarding or downtown.