MAT – The Terrible Three

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Recently, I received a call from a buddy who had been in my music technology class a few years ago. She spoke enthusiastically about her new teaching position and about how technology had made her teaching so much better. When I asked how this was possible, she spoke at length about the time saved by creating and printing her own band arrangements by computer. She was also convinced that it was much easier and quicker to teach students about music with an electronic keyboard, a computer-driven CD player, and multimedia software. The saving of time seemed very important to her.

On one level, this is understandable. Time is precious, especially for those engaged in artistic experience. Creators of the arts are always seeking more time to refine their work, and they often work against internal or external deadlines. Consumers of the arts actively seek more time to listen, view, and read. Arts educators are constantly challenged to schedule as much time as possible for arts education in a full school day, often with the hope that students will choose more arts experience in their leisure time.

History continues to show that technological development helps creators, consumers, and educators to make the most of their precious arts time. Good examples of this for music include the invention of the phonograph in 1878, followed closely by the first magnetic tape recorder in 1888 and the radio in 1895. More recent events have had an even greater impact. The Music Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) protocol, devised in 1983, continues to be one of the most profound developments in the quest to make machines useful tools for all types of musicians. Digital sound sampling and its use by the recording industry and personal computer companies have completely changed the delivery systems for music. Finally, the power and affordability of today’s personal computers and the music software that runs on them have increased the efficiency of music making and its enjoyment and study.(1)

Examples of modern technology at work for music abound. Composers and arrangers in all styles of music have found that music printing by computer saves time and money. Performers and conductors have discovered that digital recording and editing techniques help them to become more productive and perceptive as they refine performance. Consumers of music have discovered new ways to experience music both inside and outside the concert hall because of the advances in delivery systems that have resulted from advancing technology.(2) Educators have discovered and have often created new software programs for themselves that effectively teach complicated music concepts in record time?

My former friend’s enthusiasm is further evidence of the growing support for technology as an efficient aid in artistic work. She is experiencing the positive effect of time savings that new technology may well provide, but I would hope that there is more to it than that. Whether the use of technology saves time in the routine of teaching and other work in the arts is actually of secondary importance. I suspect that this really depends on the skills and motivations of those using technology. In some cases, its use might well complicate, extend, and even be detrimental to the artistic process.

Technological Abuse

For example, critics frequently argue that such technological developments seriously threaten the quality of the aesthetic experience. They say, for example, that in the quest for saving time, quality suffers; composers write less thoughtful music; performers do not develop technical skills on “real” instruments; consumers go to live performances less frequently; and educators let commercial software teach music or sell out to cheap video thrills with little substance. All of this has some basis in truth. New technology is constantly abused, often because it is seen as a shortcut. I suspect we have all heard trivial synthesizer music, seen poorly notated scores, and used teaching software programs that have limited and even incorrect content. What must be remembered, however, is that these are people-centered problems, often caused by our desire to work faster or by carelessness and poor education. It is unfair to blame technology for this human problem.

It starts at the board.

If a music composition calls for the use of a wind controller to excite five different MIDI devices, so be it. If the music is good and performed musically, we are impressed; if it is bad or played inaccurately or insensitively, no amount of technology can make it better. Likewise, if an arranger uses the newest desktop publishing system to create a score and parts for a wind ensemble, and the music is poorly conceived and notated to begin with, it certainly is not the fault of the technology. If a teacher uses the slickest of multimedia devices to illustrate a class presentation but the information is unfocused, boring, and nonmusical, the technology will not save the lesson. Technology is a powerful tool, but only if it is used musically. As history continues to teach us, the quality of the product is the point.

I believe that today’s digital technology offers some of the most significant support for artists ever seen in our civilization. This is true, in part, because of efficiency in the routine of production endeavors such as music printing, control of theatre lighting, and artistic displays of graphics. But, more importantly, it is true because of technology’s support for the fundamental core of the artistic endeavor–the creative thinking process. Never before have we had such powerful assistance for thinking. I believe that technology allows us to use time better, not necessarily faster.(4) This might be best explained by first describing one view of how time is spent in the creative process in music and then following this model with some examples from practice.

In past writings, I have argued that the creative process in music involves the ability to “think in sound.”(5) Composers and arrangers do this as they work with musical gestures in the short term, and as they craft more extensive sound structures that occupy longer periods of time. Improvisers, regardless of musical style, engage in similar thinking, often concurrently with the actual musical performance.(6) Performers must constantly think in sound as they consider new ways to interpret music. If listeners are to listen to music imaginatively, they must remember previously heard material and construct ideas about how the music might unfold in the future.

For each of these kinds of music experience, the thinking proceeds somewhat differently in terms of time. The composer and the performer have the luxury of spreading the experience over several sessions that may occupy days or weeks. The improviser and the listener must deal with it in minutes and seconds. Regardless of these differences, I suggest that stages of thinking occur and that each stage is qualitatively different from the other. The model in Figure 1 displays how these stages relate. (The traditional stages proposed by Wallas are merged with more contemporary writing by Gardner and his associates working at Harvard’s Project Zero.(7))

Preparation begins the process. At this beginning stage, musical ideas are generated (composers); heard (listeners, improvisers); or considered (performers). Pieces of the puzzle occupy the perceptive consciousness of the creator. Often, when digitized, there is the potential that these sounds can be lost, and that is because of the problems inherent with hard drive technology. Because of this, creative musicians also face the high potential of hard drive failure, which can eliminate so much work in a single stroke. Sound is played with in the same way that an artist might treat clay or paint or a poet or novelist might treat words. Influenced by a host of variables (both personal and environmental), the creator generates these musical ideas as a basis for creative work. This is clearly easy for some and very difficult and time consuming for others.

Such divergent thought often gives way to periods of relative repose. For some, this might include a period of reflection during which the many ideas from the first stage are considered more carefully as a group. For others, simply getting away from the task at hand allows distance and a chance for the subconscious to work on the ideas. In improvisation, for example, this might be the time that the performer is not actively improvising and is listening to or accompanying others. For listeners, this stage might be characterized by a focus on the overall gestalt of the piece and not on individual elements.

Active return to the creative thinking process might lead back to the divergency of the preparation stage or ahead to the period of illumination and verification. In this last major stage, much time is spent on developing musical ideas in a more linear and convergent fashion. It begins with a sense of wholeness and clarity about the final form of the work. All the pieces are now on the table and the general shape seems clear, illuminated by the previous work. It is here that much of the content is formed and final decisions are made. Composers, arrangers, and performers are working on the important details of the music, crafting sections and making subtle decisions about the music. The improviser is bringing the music together, weaving personal ideas with those of fellow players. The listener is reflecting on the whole work as it is ending, blending the analysis of elements together with the variety of emotions and feelings for the work. This may lead to the final product, a return to a more reflective state, or simply a move toward a new cycle of divergency.

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Updates Are Coming

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I just wanted to apologize to readers of my blog recently. I have had a lot of things happening in my family and unfortunately I have had to put it aside for a while in order to take care of things. This is a very strange period in my life, and unfortunately it has affected me greatly. As a result, I haven’t been able to keep up with a lot of the stuff that I wanted to put on this website. Not only that, but I have also experienced a pretty decent bout of writer’s block recently that is probably borne out of all of the stress that is going on in my life.

I thank you for continuing to check out the site, and I always encourage your comments of course. But I will tell you that over the next couple of weeks I plan to update the site with lots of interesting content involving some of New York’s art scene as well as some of the reasons exhibitions that I have seen on the West Coast.

This is an interesting time not only for modern art, but for the site, and I intend to keep everyone up on what is going on.

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The Art Behind Book Covers

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The body of an angel soars in three dimensions, spine straight, long hair flowing. Immense, feathery wings spread from his powerful torso. This is not a painting, though colored; nor is it a sculpture, though molded. It is a contemporary book cover.

What is art? Well, certainly not this...Modern bindings like these are now called ”book art.” Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the first American ”Book Arts in the U. S. A.” conference will be held at the New York Pennsylvania Hotel in Manhattan. The field, described by Richard Minsky, the director of the conference, as the fastest-growing area in contemporary art, is attracting artists, binders, scholars, collectors and curators. Some 320 participants will come from all over the world, including Brazil, Britain, Germany and New Zealand.

Their technique and imagination come mainly from a small, distinguished British group called Designer Bookbinders, which has been influential in the English-speaking world and in Japan.

”Binders, collectors and students have looked to us for leadership for the past 30 years,” said Sally Lou Smith, an American member of the group who has lived in London for the last 30 years. ”Americans, relatively new to the form, have been especially inspired.”

Believing the traditional leatherbound book with its ubiquitous gold lettering to be prosaic and artistically confining, a few British bookbinders banded together in 1955, calling themselves the Guild of Contemporary Bookbinders. Their point was, and continues to be, that the binding should express the artist’s interpretation of the book’s content. In 1968 the guild reorganized as Designer Bookbinders.

Only 23 fellows are members today, all elected by their peers for excellence in technique (there are some 40 steps to binding) and design. Of the fellows, three live in the United States, one in Holland and the rest in Britain, where all have studied. The group also include 11 honorary fellows, eight licenciates (aspirants) and an associate membership of about 700 from all over the world.

Some artists graduate into book art through other fields like painting, sculpturing, printmaking. Applying their original medium to books has dramatically extended the craft. The result has been artist books (limited editions made as art objects), bookworks (in which the book is part of a larger art work), containers (elaborate or simple boxes carrying through the book’s design) and bookforms (sculptural bindings designed first, words to follow).

It is not arbitrary decoration. Coming from a painterly base, Philip Smith, the creator of the angel book cover for the ”Four Gospels,” explained. ”The wings and boards both spring from the shoulder, the head of the figure is at the head, the back of the figure is spine on spine. Spirit is more than material world, so the wings break out from the confines of the rectangular shape of the book.”

Sally Lou Smith’s exquisite bindings include Wilde’s ”The Birthday of the Infanta.” Contrasting textures, including beads on black silk, affected fin de siecle decadence.

Probably the most avant-garde of the group is Dee Odell-Foster, who believes that ”most designer binders are trapped” by the limitations imposed by the very form of a book. Her bookworks – sculptures using aluminum, resin and steel – are ”strong social or moral statements, with the need for words or text unnecessary.”

Over 75 years have now passed since the painter Sonia Delauney, interested in collage, stuck bits of material on books in a trial effort – perhaps the first – at still another esthetic layer. Like Pandora’s box, the book is open. In some cases the cover is unrecognizable as such; in others, the pages are gone. The artbook, in whatever form, has arrived.

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Motion Creates Emotion

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Alex Calder’s “mobiles” may be the most widely known examples of kinetic art, but Calder is only one of many artists to incorporate movement, whether actual or implied, in their works.

“The Notion of Motion,” the latest in the Islip Art Museum’s ongoing series of thought-provoking exhibitions, illustrates how 14 contemporary artists respond to this theme.

In “Somersalt” and “High Jump,” Susan Weil examines the continuous movement of bodies traveling through space. Stop-action photography is translated into soft-focus line and tonal watercolor, emphasizing the dynamics of athletic maneuvers.

The actual animation of still images is accomplished mechanically in works by John Billingham and Norman Colp.

Mr. Billingham’s subject is a folding chair, which he shows opening and closing by various methods. His zoetrope requires the viewer to crank the apparatus, revealing each stage of the simulated folding process through a viewing slit. Another simple, time-honored technique, the mutascope, or flip-book, shows a similar effect photographically.

Mr. Colp also uses the mutascope for his photographic series “Wave,” in which a double pun operates: waves of runners pass a spot in Central Park, while behind the athletes, a spectator waves at the camera.

Although not as esthetically engaging as Mr. Billingham’s chair pieces, Mr. Colp’s animated sequence also demonstrates the principle behind cinematography.

Elizabeth Knowles’s sculptures, while not actually in motion, imply arrested or incipient movement. Her forms, made of cut and twisted wire fencing, are full of lively curves, swirls and arabesques.

“Hatching,” for example, resembles a little cyclone pulling itself apart, while “Instinct” arcs off the wall, its pincer points ready to close on a passerby like a Venus flytrap snaring an insect.

A painter who styles herself Meadow works in a manner reminiscent, if not downright imitative, of Jackson Pollock, who once described his canvases as “energy and motion made visible.” This is also Meadow’s aim, and few painters have adapted Pollock’s spontaneous technique as effectively.

“Summer’s Glow” and “Midday Heat in Paradise,” two works from Meadow’s Captured Energy series, combine an overlay of dripped, spattered and splashed paint with a substructure of conventional brushwork. This lower layer pulses with a subdued rhythm that stabilizes the bright surface bursts.

Rikuro Okamoto’s motorized minerals crawl across their plinths at a snail’s pace, contradicting the immobility we associate with large, heavy stones.

Although they are hollow, his works look like solid boulders and slabs of marble. They remind the viewer that neither manmade monuments nor natural monoliths are permanent, that all creation is in constant flux over time.

Stone is also the primary material of Ray Rapp’s installation, “Rock Slide.” In a room littered with the end product of the slide, one video monitor plays back a cascade of pumice stones from the bottom of a chute and another shows the same action from above, complete with sound effects.

Karen Shaw, the exhibition’s curator, has described this piece as “contained chaos.” It is also a deception, for while the room looks like it contains the aftermath of a coal delivery, nothing has actually happened here. All the action is on the monitors, making the video, in Ms. Shaw’s words, “a surrogate for an event in real time.”

Christopher Saucedo has created objects that look as if they should move but cannot. “Dead Crane” is frozen in an effort to hoist a rock, while “Ready to Roll,” a construction holding interlocking rolls of orange canvas, is obviously going nowhere fast. These are solid, inventive sculptural forms enlivened by a welcome touch of whimsey.

Humor comes to the fore in works by Steve Gerberich, Joseph W. March and Murray Duitz, all of whom use animation to enliven their constructions.

Mr. Duitz is the most restrained; in fact, his found-object pieces seem hardly to move at all. In “Genesis,” a caged whiffle ball twitches like a jumping bean, engagingly imitating an egg about to deliver itself of a chick.

Inspired by the nonsensical machines of George Rhodes, Mr. March has created “Metropolis,” an amusing confection of wire channels that direct a succession of steel balls. Bells signal the balls’ descent, cleverly punctuating the continuous spiraling motion.

In Mr. Gerberich’s machines, numerous moving parts contribute to each ensemble. “Mis-Match” dramatizes the battle between high-quality and low-grade forces, symbolized by pairs of boxing gloves, pails and sponges. A crowd of caricature spectators nods approvingly at the contest, cheering it on indiscriminately.

Norman Tuck’s primitive mechanisms are childishly simple versions of important technologies. His scrap-metal clockwork and tricycle-wheel generator use the idea of play as a means of illustrating fundamentals.

At the opposite extreme of formal sophistication, Jerome Kirk’s elegant balancing acts swing into motion at a touch. “Two Rings,” a pair of pivoting circles, is the most graceful of his three pieces, all of which rely for their appeal on the interaction of cutout metal shapes.

Steve DeFrank’s paintings are also hand operated, allowing the viewer to vary the imagery by turning the pictures in sections. “Things That Gush,” showing a volcano, Old Faithful and a drill sargeant, is especially intriguing, exploiting the analogy between human and elemental explosiveness.

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A Collection Of Curiousity

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My impression of 19th-century sailors is that they were regular guys, meat and potato types (on land, that is). One wonders what they would make of the ephemeral exhibition that occupies the old part of the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor on Staten Island, where old sailors used to retire.

Perhaps “Blood Remembering,” the five-artist group show, would summon up the call of the siren. The show’s curator, Tim Guest, who is a freelance curator and art critic, says the exhibition is “inspired by the body’s virtual sensations” and “the sheerness of physical experience.”

With this description, it is not surprising that the five installations are low on visual components. But it is an exhibition that grows in resonance the more you circumnavigate it.

A table, by Charles Ray

The installation by Charles Ray simply titled “Table” is a Plexiglas-topped table with such items as a carafe and a bowl arranged on it so that at first you think you are seeing a Giorgio Morandi painting rendered as a transparent sculpture. But prodded by the notion that there has to be more, you eventually notice that the bottoms are cut out of the dishes; if you stick your hand in, it goes right through the table. This simple upsetting of everyday expectations produces a faint ache.

The purity of Mr. Ray’s piece is met by the glossy white urinal sculptured by Robert Gober for his untitled installation. Of course, a urinal in an art gallery is a comment on Marcel Duchamp and the beginnings of Dada, but Mr. Gober embroiders by including two mounted squares of linen on which flowers are painted. The pansy is intended to signal the derogatory appellation. This installation has much of Oscar Wilde’s mordancy but little of his wit.

Patty Martori works solo for one installation that consists of a slender cabinet on a table, under which are a pillow against which is pressed a mock rifle. It’s a strong totem pole about secrets and the chance of being found out.

In another work, with Jack Pierson, Ms. Martori has concocted a lewd picture out of photographs and flotsam and jetsam about the lives of contemporary sailors to emphasize their persistent fringe existence.

Meanwhile, floating above these installations are seven wood sculptures by Mary Carlson, depicting elementary eyes under lids. They are very stylized, especially black spheres under attenuated arches with some of the mystery of Egypt and the authority of the CBS logo.

In another show at the center, two Staten Island artists are having their first extended exposure. Both Robyn Ellenbogen and Alfredo Arcia are good painters, but the idiom in which Mr. Arcia works is more elastic and therefore more exciting right now. He is billed as a “visionary realist,” and that is akin to the venerable Magic Realism.

Essentially, Mr. Arcia paints everyday life, but with a twist: his world is populated by tigers and lizards and by people who disrupt dinner parties by dancing on the table or by trying the trick of pulling off the tablecloth while leaving the dishes. He would concur that things are done with mirrors, for the mirror is a frequent device in his work.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Arcia, originally from Venezuela, is influenced by the Surrealism in Latin American fiction. To underscore that his vision is fictive, Mr. Arcia paints in a flickering manner, using subdued colors. It’s ghostly work while remaining robust.

Ms. Ellenbogen is best seen as a lyrical abstractionist, but her lyrical line tends to be elegiac or solemn. She is expert at disciplining line so that it conjures up the “storms at sea and fires at night” advertised in the press release, or whirlpools, autumn leaves and a woman’s breast. It is exciting to declare that the whole world can be evoked out of one intense motion, but Ms. Ellenbogen needs to become more varied. Her drawings point the way to this.

Linking the two exhibitions, that of these painters and “Blood Remembering,” is a narrow passageway with an abundance of windows. It is currently transformed into an installation with an expressly nautical theme, “At Sea” by Alan Michelson. Mr. Michelson is an artist in residence at Snug Harbor, and it is not hard to understand that his year there prompted an interest in the history of the place.

His installation is a simple one, but the poignancy is immediate. On either side of the passageway is a “photo transfer mural,” which is essentially a photograph mounted on the window. One is a contemporary theme: homeless people congregated in Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan. On the other side is a 19th-century scene: sailors seated in the same passageway that is the locus of “At Sea” waiting for lunch.

Other, surrounding windows are covered with blue gel evoking the ocean. Mr. Michelson is saying succinctly that we’re all riding on the same wave.

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Warhol: Glorious!

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Andy Warhol’s bleached face–as memorable as the billboard stare of Dr. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby–presided over his moment; when he died most commentators, with the honorable exceptions of Robert Hughes and Jonathan Yardley, bent the knee. I myself consider Warhol the best, but can’t quite dismiss him. It is too easy to accuse “Andy,” as he was known to strangers, of being a glitzy self-promoter, a painter who went to seed, or the end of Western civilization as we know it. In the playing out of his life, there was a certain genius. Warhol was a floating, almost immaterial presence, seemingly there and not there, a kind of angel of the zeitgeist. When damning an angel, one should remember to admire the wings.

A more fitting image? Not likely!

It is not the painting that matters most about Warhol; but, for the record, his early pop painting was important. Together with the other pop artists, Warhol mixed up art with mass culture, a mix-up that has regularly enriched and exhausted modernism. In the tradition of Braque, Picasso, and Schwitters, who opened art to the street by adding newspaper, bus tickets, and the like to their work, Warhol let the glimmer of the modern media into his art. He fixed our attention on the repetitive, throwaway images among which we spend so much of our lives. He established the objective, iconic power of a Campbell’s Soup can or a newspaper photography of a car crash in New Jersey. In doing so, he seemed to slow down mass culture and to speed up art.

Having begun as a commercial artist, he was well positioned to examine the power of the media. At first, there was something impressively precarious in the way he worked the edge between art and commercial design–as if the unexpected union had thrown each off balance. When seen in person, not in reproduction, the early paintings always look surprisingly like paintings. This provocative imbalance between art and the media is lost in the later work. There it no longer matters much that a painting is a painting: the union between art and fashion has become indivisible. The late paintings display a commercial slickness, a sugary appeal, that suited the taste of Warhol’s celebrity clients.

Many date this change to 1968, when Warhol was shot by a deranged woman from SCUM (the cheery acronym for the Society for the Cutting Up of Men). It was thought that Warhol then turned more sickly and passive, becoming Andy the media man, celebrity’s pet, the founder of Interview magazine for whom one star–Mao or Liza Minnelli–or one trademark–the hammer and sickle or the label for Absolut Vodka–was very much like another. To say that he sold out, however, is like saying that Picasso painted. Warhold was a master of the trend. Recognizing that art had moved into the mainstream, that the outrage of the avant-garde had become the titillation of fashion, he turned his own celebrity into a performance that brilliantly mirrored certain key contemporary attitudes.

Consider, first, the appearance. It wasas unmistakable as a good advertisement. (There’s some talk of marketing an Andy doll.) The silver wig and the lost stare, the ghostly way of walking, suggested that he was hardly made of flesh and blood and bone, but was instead a kind of human negative, or a human being seen in the afterimage of a camera flash. Reinforcing this image were some of his famous habits. Warhol liked to carry a camera and tape recorder to parties, where he would snap and tape the celebrities. The old ways of conversing, in other words, were no longer quite sufficient. Life was more interesting when mechanically enhanced; small shiny machines could filter the experience of eyes and ears and mouth; recording would supplant memory. The perfect Warhol event would be a party of machines, attached to famous people, interacting with other machines also attached to famous people, before an audience of photographers from the press.

At a party, Warhol was a shiny surface that reflected the goings-on around him. If you asked where the there was there, you seemed to be missing the point: After all, what do two mirrors have to say to each other? He was both audience and star, fawner and fawned upon, leveler and snob. He did not discriminate any more than a mirror would. A mild “Wow” sums up his philosophy of response to others, although he could nonetheless be funny. (I remember his asking Sophia Loren in an interview if, when she played opposite the very short Alan Ladd, she stood in a hole.) In keeping with the philosophy of “Wow,” he appeared naive, almost childlike; many people have testified to his sweet, generous nature.

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Reviewing Jed Perl: Art In Paris

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Classic look, truly reverential.

The title of Jed Perl’s collection of essays on members of the School of Paris is a tribute to the subject of one of them, Alberto Giacometti, whose book, Paris sans fin, was published posthumously in 1969. Paris sans fin is composed of a rhapsodic text by the artist, and 150 crayon drawings, transferred to lithographic stone. Sans fin indeed: the 150 drawings are a fraction of the full Parisian suite. And Paris indeed was endless in the sense that it is but an external fact that there are 150 drawings: the suite could have gone on and on, sans fin.

Giacometti appears to have seized upon whatever struck his eye, whatever happened to be there-a scratchy tree, a nude model, a lamppost, a corner of the famous strewn studio on the rue Hippolyte-Mindron, some mounted animal skeletons, parked cars on an anonymous street, a distant dome, the Pont Alexandre III, even the Eiffel Toweraspects and fragments of the dear world he was about to leave, urgently transcribed perhaps in the knowledge that he was leaving it, and as if he had to get as much down as he could, as a kind of graphic testament, before he did so. There is the common form of death, where one leaves behind all the marvelous bits and pieces of a world that goes on and on sans fin though we are no longer there. But there is another form of death, when you remain but the world goes, to be replaced by another in the life of which one is an outsider. The Paris of Pari5 sans fin, and certainly the Paris of the School of Paris, is in this latter sense a world gone dead. Jed Perl writes as an elegiast of something shimmering and irrecoverable.

But since that world has gone, the title collides against the powerful cadences of the Book of Common Prayer: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen,” which gives another sense of endlessness-that of eternity. And perhaps Giacometti’s Paris, like the Paris of Matisse and Picasso and Derain, exists in two temporal dimensions-a part of history we can know about only through evidence and testimonials such as Paris sans fin; and outside history, like the Platonic Form of a way of life, a mode of civilization, a criterion against which to measure the shortfalls and the fitful successes of the present. More interesting in many ways than what he writes is the posture from which Perl addresses his subject: Paris as something that has ended, and as something endless because ideal. Writing of Balthus, he says, “Parisian art must have signified . . . the perfection of sensibility: the ultimate transformation of feeling into paint.” Parisian art must signify that to him as well, but unlike Balthus, he is living in an art world revealed as flawed against that image of that perfection. But Perl also writes this way: “One continues to hear, as late as the 1950s, of the revelations Paris can provide . . . one could still meet Brancusi and Giacometti, and study with Leger, while scraping along on almost nothing.” In the 1950s time and eternity intersected, one might say, and it was still possible to live the life of Paris as an ideal form. One could still converse with artists and writers who defined the ideal, with the sense that there would be others to take their place, and that Paris would continue to exist on two levels at once, like Rome and the City of God-sans fin in both senses. And then at some point it stopped having a present.

I was one who got to know Giacometti, whose pals studied with Leger, who scraped by on almost nothing-and for whom, at a certain moment, Paris just became a past, a place where people went to eat well if they could afford it, and New York became the only present with a future. And perhaps because of the excitement in seeing that future being made, Paris even stopped being an ideal, just because, somehow “the perfection of sensibility” stopped representing an aspiration for art. And here is Jed Perl, a young critic, writing in New York of that vanished Parisian present under an ideal that is still vivid for him. And one wants to know what it says about the world today that a sensitive young art writer should turn back to Paris in its golden moment as if it implied an imperative.

Perl has a mind more ruminative than reflective, and he comes through these 11 essays more as the transcriber of feelings than of thoughts. In a way, his style as a writer corresponds to that of the extraordinary work whose title he has adopted for his own. The individual essays are sans fin in the respect that though they end, they do not come to an end. Each, like Giacometti’s Paris, is a sequence of observations, of some facts he has nosed out, of vignettes and anecdotes, setting one foot in front of another, with a lot of pauses and pointings, and some passages of soft moralizing; and reading through a given essay is like what taking a walk with Giacometti might have been, ambling, stopping as the artist took out his crayons, drew your attention to something often quite ordinary, perhaps because of its ordinariness, Perl’s pieces are little expeditions, meandering through a body of work, or a particular exhibition, like the one in 1984 of Matisse’s work from Nice in the 1920s that everyone had written off, or of the shockingly randy works of Picasso’s last decade, also until then written off. The essays are as satisfy ing and as unsatisfying as such promenades can of their very nature be. There are no flashes, no dazzling interpretations or penetrating insights or stunning explanations. In compensation, Perl is one for whom the artist he writes about is like a landscape he seeks to make his own.

Of Paris sans fin, Perl writes: “The artist doesn’t invent anything. He apparently has no overriding idea.” “Hypotheses non fingo,” Isaac Newton declared, disclaiming the invention of any ideas or the possession of any overriding one. Newton once depicted himself as stumbling along the shore of a boundless ocean-the ocean sans fin-picking up, like a child, a few scattered shells. Giacometti ambled the rue d’Alysia in just that way, drawing a few objects from among the endless many. (“Formidable cel arbre!” one can almost hear him saying, as he strives to fix its essence in a few straggling lines.) Obviously, Perl is not in this class (who, after all, is?), but something of the same spirit animates the way he writes, feigning no hypotheses, inventing nothing.

Part of what I admire in Perl’s book, too, is his dedication to faded artistic stars, as if their light were still important for us. Derain, one is certain, will someday be restored to eminence. But Dufy? “Dufy’s paintings, like the dark, shimmering canvases of Derain and Rouault, and the pellucid ones of Albert Marquet-are difficult to judge within the continuum of history, and so they tend to be viewed as historical curiosities.” Leger? “He’s a man to come back to when the wars are done and peace is over the land.” Helion “Jean Helion is one of the great artists for our time.” What a shame there is no essay on Marquet or Rouault. Like Paris sans fin, it is an external fact, perhaps accidental circumstance, that there simply were no exhibitions of these in the period of these essays for Perl to ramble through, that he wrote only of those he happened to write about. His book is in no sense a study of the School of Paris.

There are, after all, theories of the history of modern art other than the canonical ones, where history leaps, like a viaduct, from island to island, and the islands that do not support a pier are not part of the march. But if one is to take on those readings of history, one has to venture some theory, to entertain an idea, and it is Perl’s limit as a critic that he does not try this, just as, I feel, it was Giacometti’s limit as an artist, even in Paris sans fin, that he had not solved the problem of drawing. Perl cites an episode from James Lord’s biography of Giacometti in which the latter was drawing Matisse’s portrait and the old master said, “Nobody knows how to draw… . You don’t either. You’ll never know how to draw.”

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Women, Techology And Art

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Technology, largely a Boy’s Own arena, has rarely been synonymous with creativity. But now, Virtual Reality offers us, threatens us with, some would say, direct interface between mind, body and machine. We not only create images and situations bur experience them, too. Using electronic stero-vision helmets or Eye Phones and Data Gloves we can determine input to a machine that traditionally outwits us and which lets us transcend our bodies.

The simulated worlds of Virtual Reality–whether an amusement arcade video game or an architect’s plan–are ripe with creation myths, plus the moral implications that go hand in glove [sic] with playing God. It is hard, however, to know who is Frankenstein and who the monster; these interactive robots are very democratic. Skeptics fear a world of moral anarchy where crime lies unpunished and where, more menacingly still, those virtual and, take note, sensation based experiences, are repeated in ‘real’ life.

This escapist subculture, with its defiance of our mortal coil, may seem particularly appealing to some artists. However, as Catherine Richards points out, it is an area still largely untapped by artists. The extent to which the participant really is in control is a matter of hot debate and not one which necessarily excites what cyberpunks might well dub the old school of artists. Furthermore, it is a privileged area, restricted to those with advanced computer skills and flash finance, as Paula Jean Steere remarks of DTP, also. But, is a world that is based on a delicate and fragile concept – the storage of data. Usually, this is of course done with hard drives and other external media, but as Apple Computer has begun to push cloud computing in general, there has been a severe push towards the potential for hard drive failure. With virtual reality, something that requires Mac hard drive recovery is a very real sensation that can unfortunately destroy the world that is predicated upon. It is only through new advances in the data recovery realm that changes have been made.

Computer animation, interactive computer-aided design and interactive video are still fields confined to specialists. Sally Mould, in discussing computer animation, is anxious to dispel| the mystique surrounding computer animation and technology in general and to encourage women users. Discussing holography Margaret Benyon, by contrast, dismisses technology altogether, maintaining a ‘hands on’ approach to her work. But while artists like Siobhan Wall have opted for the more versatile medium of video instead of painting, for most practitioners ‘techno-art’ remains far off in a sci-fi sky.

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