THE EFFORT THAT COUNTS

James Dougherty

Lou Reed recalled the time Andy Warhol scolded him for not working hard enough:

No matter what I did it never seemed enough.
He said I was lazy, I said that I was young.
He said, "how many songs did you write?"
I'd written zero, I'd lied and said "ten."
"You won't be young forever.
You should have written fifteen."

When Reed explained he was uncertain what to write, Warhol brushed him off. 

                    You think too much. 

                    That's cause there's work that you don't want to do.
                    It's work. The most important thing is work.

Milton Glaser was a different type of artist, but agreed on the importance of work.  In fact, he urged that we abandon the word "art" and replace it with the word "work."  Calling it work, like every other type of honest labor, would not only "restore art to a central, useful activity in daily life" but would also eliminate anxiety for everyone who is obsessing about whether they are artists or not.

Saul Tepper

Before the era of video games, civilizations that valued hard work and disparaged slackers were often rewarded with great art.  The Italian Renaissance and the golden age of Greece were two such periods; those cultures faced political strife, religious violence, civil uncertainty and military threats as great as ours yet their artists accomplished great things without electric lights or air conditioning. 

The Stuart period in England (1603 - 1714), a culture which shamed idleness, produced Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Herbert,  followed by Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, before ending the century with Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift.  It became the cultural home of great painters such as Rubens and Van Dyck.  While this was going on,  Isaac Newton was transforming human understanding of the universe,  Francis Bacon was inventing the modern scientific method and William Harvey was discovering the circulation of the blood. Newspapers were invented and indolent minds which for centuries had dwelt on witchcraft and superstition were challenged.  Great architects such as Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones flourished.  What a fruitful century! 

Of course, not all work pays the same dividends.  A lot of what passes for artistic effort today doesn't seem directed at enhancing the quality of the work.  

• During the last century, fine art became more fixated on pure self-expression.  Illustration, which involved purposeful work in the empirical world, was demoted to a lower spiritual plane.  But as Glaser wrote, "The dissociation of art from other human activities has impoverished our lives."  He noted, "Michelangelo didn't paint the last judgment to express himself.  He painted it because the Pope wanted to scare the bejeesus out of the congregation."  The type of "work" involved in pure self-expression primarily involves emoting-- which can be difficult to distinguish from laziness.  That's why it helps if fine artists can establish their bona fides with suicide, addiction or emotional incapacity.

• A second type of effort which preoccupies many of today's artists is self-promotion. Artists such as Hirst and Koons have become sensationalists, achieving fame by causing commotions.  This is the work involved in smashing plates and gluing them to a great big canvas.  While there seems to be no artistic growth or edification from this type of labor, the financial growth can be considerable. 

• Perhaps the most slippery and inimical challenge of all is the work currently outsourced to labor-saving software such as ChatGPT and its progeny.  "Effortless" art presumes that there was nothing to be gained from the effort.  This assumption may resonate easily with a culture centered around "labor saving" kitchen appliances, but it's not clear that art functions the same way.  Previous civilizations that were less afraid of hard work would be wary of "easy art."  If ChatGPT had spared Michelangelo's four years of hard labor painting the Sistine Chapel, how would that have affected the outcome?

John Cuneo

   

The type of "work" that goes into creating what we now call art has become increasingly wobbly.  At the same time, much of the art turns out to be increasingly minor compared to what past civilizations have produced.  Are the two trends related? It's too early to say.

TRIP REPORT FROM ROME

 Hi, gang.  I'm in Rome studying beautiful sculptures from antiquity.

This place would be a nightmare for Barney Bishop III because several of these sculptures have penises.

One thing apparent from these great sculptures is that each manifests an enormous struggle.

For example, artists struggled to escape mortality and the way of all flesh by preserving as much of tender skin and hot passion as they were able in permanent marble. 

Or, some struggled to escape the limits of two dimensions, with art that literally jumps off the wall:

Many struggled against oblivion, and the inevitable loss of our personality, our face, our individuality.  The  memories of our loved ones gives us the consolation of a few extra years but even that is soon gone.  In Rome we see miles and miles of busts of people hoping for a little endurance.

Some struggled to escape the limits of static material by capturing the freedom of motion in solid rock.

Artists today no longer have to struggle with these heartbreaking constraints. Digitization gives our work permanence. Video empowers us with motion, audio preserves our voices and our personalities, holograms give us three dimensionality.  In so many ways, artists have been freed from the struggle that bedeviled earlier artists.  

So what's the consequence of our freedom?

At the Villa Borghese modern sculpture is exhibited side by side with ancient sculpture, for comparison. Here are two sculptures by modern sculptor,  Giuseppe Penone.

They are exhibited accompanied by long, pretentious explanations by the artist. Minor struggles will invariably produce minor art. 

EVADING THE SNARE OF MODERN ART

 How do you like this painting of an "intense gaze"?

Yeah, I don't see it either.  

The face is a detail from the painting, "Picking Cotton" by Hale Woodruff, which hangs in the prestigious Yale University Art Gallery.

The curators of the Yale Gallery describe the "intense" face this way: 

The intense gaze of the old man at the center of Hale Woodruff's composition-- like a sharecropper or day laborer-- is amplified by the expressive character of the painting's active, thick brushwork, drawing the eye and focusing our attention.

If you think that's a stretch, art critic Sebastian Smee is able to impute emotions to Gerhard Richter's painting, "Betty," through the back of her head: 

  

“Betty,” he writes, "twisting away, evokes for me an impossible yearning: a desire to turn away from the din, the debacle, of political life and to dissolve instead — to bleed, to blur — into an intimate, apolitical present."

New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, similarly transported by the back of Betty's head (or perhaps impaired by a stroke?) wrote that the painting is "the single most beautiful painting made by anyone in the last half century."

On and on the blather goes.  The sequepedalian word mongers at Phaidon offer us a long tiresome exegesis of "Betty," conjecturing that Immanuel Kant would favor Richter's "anti-sensibility."  They prattle:

For [Richter] photorealism has long been a project of rupture, the kind of performative desecration that served to uphold its own site of defacement. His faceless Betty is as much a testament to the “thingness” of painting as it is to interpersonal ephemerality.

It takes a lot of Kool-Aid to make it through this brand of art criticism.

For me, these descriptions embody the most dangerous snare underlying modern conceptual art: the snare of being seduced by fanciful verbal descriptions rather than the actual visual qualities of the picture.  As words and ideas become more important than physical execution, the quality of art increasingly rises or falls on the ability of some observer to find words about it. Unfortunately, eloquent people can come up with words to justify almost any position. The oleaginous Jeff Koons, lacking talent, has built an entire empire on his gift of gab.

 

In a more serious era, when art was less superfluous, the great Pericles gave a funeral oration to honor the fallen heroes of the Peloponnesian War.  He urged against valuing the greatness of heroes based on the rhetorical ability of some speaker who comments on them:

The reputation of men [should] not be imperiled on the eloquence or want of eloquence of [a speaker], and their virtues believed or not as he spoke well or ill.

If conceptual art is to be taken seriously, people who believe in the potential of conceptual art (and I am sometimes among them) have a special duty to resist flabby rhetorical excess.

 
I believe it's crucial to growth in arts, and even to the progress of humanity, that we struggle to keep an open mind.  Our ideas should remain broader than our specialties. But in the words of the Maharani of Jaipur, "Don't keep your mind so open that your brains fall out."

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 69

 

Here are the top 5 reasons why I love this drawing by Tom Fluharty:

1.) I love these hands:

Fluharty is an artist who not only knows anatomy, but has formulated opinions about it.  Photo reference gave him the basic facts he needed about the position of the fingers, but after that the artist took over.  He plays with line the way a great guitarist might play guitar strings.

2.) I love this beard:

Look how brilliantly Fluharty combines lights and darks in this beard.  That thin line doesn't flow in a direction, the way most artists would draw hair.  Instead, it forms crazy static all over the place, before Fluharty comes in with a heavy line and chisels lightning bolts into the beard to give it some sense of order.

3.) I love this face:

Another great example of how understanding anatomy pays off.  Those dynamic lines whipping all over the place don't trace specific facial wrinkles but they create values which demonstrate knowledge of the skull, the eye sockets, the facial features, etc. far better than a painstakingly realistic approach might. When it comes time to enhance the design by distorting those ears, Fluharty knows exactly how far he can take it.

4.)  I love the muscularity of those bold lines:

Fluharty claims to be no fan of abstract art but these bold lines are straight out of Franz Kline.  Superimposed on a network of fine, curling lines which go in all directions, these powerful dark accents contribute vigor and confidence.

5.) I love the way this drawing uses felt tip markers:

  

Most illustrators today use markers because they're frightened of india ink.  They fear they can't control a dip pen or a brush.  But Fluharty appreciates the visual qualities of a marker-- even one that is beginning to dry out-- and fearlessly takes advantage of those qualities.  Ink-- not even a drybrush--could accomplish this effect, which contributes so much to the energetic feel of the drawing.

In an era of photo-drawing, semi-drawing, AI-drawing and excuses for not drawing, I think this is the kind of work that vindicates true drawing and puts all those excuses and substitutes to shame. 

NOT SO EASY

Don't assume abstract painting is easier than realistic painting.  

True, an abstract painter never needs to worry about getting anatomy wrong, or failing to capture the light accurately.  Still, abstract painters have worries of their own. 

Consider this blast of a painting by Phil Hale. 

   

Hale knew how clouds look and how to paint them.  He knew how golden sunlight looks on skin.  He understood muscles and tendons, and how to pose the human body (planted here with confidence like the rock of Gibraltar in the center of the painting).  Ah, but the hair-- that's the one part of the picture he had to invent from scratch.  

In his preliminary drawings for this otherwise confident painting, there's only one element that Hale changed and changed again: the abstract shape of the hair.

 How would Hale know when the hair finally looked correct?  

What is the right number of accents grave et aigu that should be spitting from his hair? How long should they be? Should they be straight or curled?  soft or jagged?  Nature provided no clues, so Hale was all alone on these choices.

The importance of this black abstract shape is clear from the fact that Hale made very different choices in other paintings, and those choices had a significant impact on the painting, strongly affecting the "realistic" elements which took up 95% of the picture.

Sometimes Hale's black abstract shape swallowed up the head altogether...

If you're doing it right, it's not so easy to paint abstractly, untethered from mother nature.

WHEN AL WILLIAMSON GAVE IT AWAY

Artist Al Williamson put so much effort into drawing this story for EC comics, his pay couldn't have amounted to more than 13 cents per hour.

And that's not even including the backgrounds contributed by his buddy Roy Krenkel "for the fun of it."  Williamson later said about his work for EC, "what it shows is that I really loved what I was doing."  

At age 23, Williamson wasn't worried about a pension or a mortgage.   

Apparently he didn't care about posterity either. All that effort went into comic books, the most fragile medium, which were poorly printed on cheap paper that quickly yellowed and disintegrated. 

This was 1955, an era before NFTs and giclée prints.  Look at the difference in quality between what Williamson poured into the drawings and what emerged for the public in the finished comic book:

And yet, Williamson continued drawing page after page "for the fun of it." He was content with the percentage of beauty that made its way into the printed comic:  

Erica Jong wrote:

In a society in which everything is for sale, in which deals and auctions make the biggest news, doing it for love is the only remaining liberty....  Do it for love and the rich will envy no one more than you. In a world of tuxedos, the naked man is king. In a world of bookkeepers with spreadsheets, the one who gives it away without counting the cost is God.

Williamson wasn't seeking immortality working for crummy little comic books but for that reason he may have achieved at least a form of it.

LEONARD STARR'S OLDER BROTHER

Cartoonist Leonard Starr idolized his older brother, who was killed fighting in World War II. When Starr grew up and began his comic strip On Stage, he modeled a character after his brother.

The character, Grisha Volkov, was a dashing Russian rogue (Starr's family roots were in Russia).  Starr made his character as tough and confident as Starr remembered his brother.  Volkov won every battle, even the one Starr's brother lost.  

When I was barely old enough to read On Stage I was thrilled by the beautifully drawn action scenes featuring Volkov.

I must've traced this image ten times while learning to draw.

I cut the cool drawings out of my parents' newspaper and kept them in a shoebox. Those strips and I have both aged considerably since then, yet I still find them cool.

With a more mature eye, I can see the different ways in which these strips sparkled.  Sure, fight scenes were cool but I learned it was more cool to merely imply the action, with Volkov emerging nonchalant at the end:

In this next scene Starr uses the same device of implied violence, as the Volkov character clears two spies outside his gate, then gets in his car and drives away.

One by one, I grew to appreciate the range of talents that combined to make On Stage: Starr's brushwork, his timing, those subtle facial expressions, his staging. By the time I got to high school I even loved Starr's intelligent dialogue, which I believe was unique in the history of comic strips. Look how he used language to bring his brother's personality back to life, chuckling occasionally at how his brother might react in certain situations : 

When I grew up and met Starr I found him to be possibly the most well read person I'd ever met.  He loved the great Russian authors, particularly Gogol and Pushkin, but he would also seamlessly quote the private letters of Raymond Chandler.   This range enabled him to combine rich characterizations of human nature with blunt, "tough guy" messages:

So... Starr extended his brother's life a little longer with his strip, and now that Starr himself is gone, I've extended it a little further by mentioning these things to you.

Going back through my shoebox of treasures,  I was struck by the fact that there is no comic strip today that comes within ten miles of this kind of work.  The world of comic strips has moved on and today excellence takes entirely different forms.  This genre is as gone as the ancient city of Carthage after the conquering Romans were done plowing salt into its fields.