DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE.
criticism. decorum. innards. bric-a-brac. nostalgia. nausea. polemics. diatribes. litanies. symphonies. polaroids.
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from The Papers of David Smith, “Questions to Students”
3. Are you a balanced person with many interests and diversions?
11. Have you examined the echoes of childhood and first learning, which may have once given you the solutions? Are any of these expectancies still operating on your choices?
15. Do you think you owe your teachers anything, or Picasso or Matisse or Brancusi or Mondrian or Kandinsky?
16. Do you think you work should be aggressive? Do you think this an attribute? Can it be developed?
18. Do you think that your own time and now is the greatest in the history of art, or do you excuse your own lack of full devotion with the half belief that some other time would have been better for you to make art?
20. In the secret dreams of attainment have you faced each dream for its value on your own basis, or do you harbor inherited inspirations of the bourgeoisie or those of false history or those of critics?
32. Are you saddled with nature propaganda?
35. Are you afraid to work from your own experience without leaning on the crutches of subject and the rational?
36. Or do you think that you are unworthy or that your life has not been dramatic enough or your understanding not classic enough, or do you think that art comes from Mount Parnassus or France or from an elite level beyond you? -
![Cy Twombly, “Bacchanalia” Brandhorst Museum, Munich [1977]
Happy New Year.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lww51xeuuI1qz7arro1_1280.jpg "http://marklow.tumblr.com/post/15097055169/cy-twombly-bacchanalia-brandhorst-museum")
Cy Twombly, “Bacchanalia” Brandhorst Museum, Munich [1977]
Happy New Year.
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I will absolutely see you there.
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On Masterpieces.
Mr. Ledger’s work will outlast the frenzy. But there should have been more. Instead of being preserved as a young star eclipsed in his prime, he should have had time to outgrow his early promise and become the strange, surprising, era-defining actor he always had the potential to be. -A.O. Scott, New York Times.
A.O. Scott praises Heath Ledger in today’s New York Times. Ledger, like other actors and performers who died young, are often praised for the work they may have created as much for the work they left behind. Clifford Brown died in 1956 at the age of 25. His work with Max Roach is gorgeous stuff, but I’m not alone in believing that his career may have complimented the work of Miles Davis (perhaps even reshaping some of the latter trumpeter’s innovations) had his career extended beyond 1956.
This weekend I got my hands on a few Veronica Lake films. Lake received both popular and critical acclaim for a brief part of her career. She is remembered as one of the most glamorous actresses of the early 1940s. Erratic behavior and mental illness are to blame for her short career in Hollywood. She died destitute at 50. Of her eight to ten films still in print, two or three have lasting value. I’ve only seen a few of her performances, but her most remembered film - Sullivan’s Travels - has a witty plot that almost entirely depends on her performance. The DVD was issued as part of the Criterion Collection. The cover is a painting of her face.
The critic Harold Bloom argues that art should be a purely aesthetic pleasure. The second we try to satisfy some other agenda (feminism, multiculturalism, deconstructionism) we further our understanding of that agenda and not the work of art. What makes Ledger’s films important now is that we can’t help but look at his performances with greater scrutiny. A.O. Scott tells us today that we will be rewarded for doing so. He warns us not to look at the circumstances, the gossip, the frenzy. This makes me contemplate whether we respond to masterpieces, American masterpieces perhaps, as works that contain necessary flaws that must be held together by an otherwordly, perfecting presence, one stronger than the work surrounding, one that transcends even death. Ledger’s performances, like those of James Dean and others who died young, may create masterpieces with their mortality.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m 27. I think this is first and foremost a tragedy. But I feel honored to see some of his quieter works, to enjoy them and take the time to praise them.
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