The co-founder and
former cellist of Velvet Underground, John Cale, recorded a great song (written
by Jonathan Richman) shouted in his hoarse, atonal voice: “Pablo Picasso / never got called an asshole /
He could walk down your street / and girls could not resist his stare.” Cale
added a wonderfully grinding, monotonous and discordant arrangement, then
trails off with the somewhat redundant taunt, “Not like you.” (1)
Seeing the show of
Picasso’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario prompted me to hum along, if only
because of how the show is marketed, in breathless one-word superlatives:
“Genius. Rebel.” and so on. While one expects museum marketing departments to
use myth-making and hyperbole to sell tickets, is such a worshipful atmosphere
really helpful to understanding what he was thinking, or how Cubism helped
shape and change modern vision and visual culture? But even art historians, who
should know better, tell us we live in a world of “post-Cubist design
principles,” attributing to the movement a “sweeping influence on contemporary
and subsequent culture” that changed all of art and design, architecture and
photography.(2) So, it makes me wonder.
A disclaimer: I don’t
enjoy most of Picasso’s work. I think his color is muddy and vulgar (uninterestingly
vulgar), and misses the point of exploring color. He was always drawing, not painting, and the rough contours
that he outlined everything in equally miss the point of questioning the application
of paint. His constant reference was
past art and his target was the act representation, and indeed the idea of the
individual genius itself. These are semiotic, social, and historical puzzles
more than they are purely visual innovations or work that goes beyond the
boundaries of the field. He should have been a cartoonist, actually – and I say
that out of the greatest respect for comics and cartoons. Linear simplification
and literal message was what his eye and hand always seemed to be doing.
There is one painting
in the show that caught my attention, as it had all the sly earmarks of naughty
Pablo, variously labeled Nude in a Garden, or Nudes
in a Garden; or Female Nude in a
Garden (you get the idea) from 1934. John McDonald puts it this way:
“Cubist devices had gradually been reappearing in Picasso’s work
for over a decade. At this point of his career he would jump between styles as
the mood dictated, breaking the body of a model into pieces and reassembling it
in various artful ways.
Nude in a garden is an image of sensual abandon and submission, with
Marie Thérèse compressed into a ball of pink flesh, with breasts, genitals and
buttocks all on prominent display.” (3)
And this is taken as
evidence of Picasso as “adoring lover,” not “the misogynist portrayed in
various biographies.” Once I had puzzled out the various body parts, I noticed
something quite central to the picture: yes, breasts, genitals and buttocks are
all on prominent display, but so is her anus. It’s that single black smudge to
the left, which in the original fades into drybrush as it smudges up and to the
right, lending it a truly profound depth and realism. A masterful smear, and a
perfectly vulgar (interestingly vulgar) celebration of the woman as completely
exposed, all at once and at a glance, highly vulnerable and available.
Picasso is so much
about biography, about his personal pleasures, conquests, and indulgent self
that he is the perfect object of adoration. He doesn’t profoundly challenge how
art works or the role it plays, or try to take us very far past the comfort
zone of classical themes and subjects. He simply shifts his one message (the
male ego dominated by its id, perhaps?) from style to style, and across
different semiotic registers. He gives us the pleasures we deny ourselves,
assholes that we are. For me, he embodies the logic of pornography quite
perfectly, which is at least a nice change from the legion of tortured and
self-damaging artists so often celebrated in art historical narratives.
These works do need
to be seen and studied, as direct representations of their times and as
exemplars of modernism that utterly dominated the visual conversation of art for
decades. But they have also dominated art historical writing, and had a truly
“sweeping influence” on the reception of painting and art, shaping so much of critical
and, more to the point, resolutely non-critical writing and theory for almost a
century.
If we argue that
Picasso was a powerful leader in modern art’s struggle for an autonomous logic
of form, for self-reference and self-definition, aren't there much more
‘advanced’ and challenging artists and works? (Why did he never really paint
about painting, or move to the issues
of, for example, non-objective abstraction?) And if we argue that he captured
the social and political tenor of his times, aren’t there better examples of
that, too? Like design, for example; or commercial comics and cartooning; or advertising,
with its poundingly oppressive, infinitely varied and seemingly unstoppable
application of the memes and idioms of visual messaging – just like Picasso,
only better: more effective, more honestly pornographic.
Picasso, I think, keeps
us rooted in the past; we really can’t “resist his stare.” He blinds us to the
obvious: the most important art of the last century wasn’t about
self-expression, or even art at all, but its defiant, irrepressible Other. That
would be marketing, and what Debord called “spectacle,” the ways in which
capital is visually expanded and publically expressed and coded across many
media, in design, photography and illustration. Always looking forward, drawing
its poetry from the future, not the past.
Oakville, ON / 2012.Aug.24
Oakville, ON / 2012.Aug.24
____________
(1) John Cale, from Helen of Troy
(Island Records, 1975).
(2) Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, Cubism and Culture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001): 7. To their
great credit, Antliff and Leighten have carried the tough arguments against the
many overly formalist reading of Picasso, which imply he only ever thought
about styles and his medium, placing him squarely in the anarchist and, later,
Stalinist political currents of the day.
(3) http://johnmcdonald.net.au/2011/picasso-five-highlights/
