Archives for July 2009

No where is it better demonstrated than in the blog of James Maybe. He loves the former and dismisses the latter.

James Maybe on the mural below by Can Two:

I hesitate to even upload this crap to my site, but eventually the buzz about some artist rings so loud in my ears I have to do something. The above mural is typical of Can Two, who is doubly dammed for working in a medium that, to date, has produced exactly one artist worth more than ten seconds of your time, and for making his work “kid friendly”. Stylized, airbrushed, illegible text, uninspired color choices, urban hip-hop caricatures, sloppy composition. Instead of Bombing the Suburbs, how about we tar and feather the graffiti artists?

The idea that there are different kinds of intelligence makes the reactionary sector of the old school queasy. Its members insist on a vertical hierarchy, in which IQ aristocrats deserve to rule the IQ-merchant class and the IQ-deficit proletariat.

Among their targets is Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Basic Books, 1983). Gardner argued for more fluid version of smarts, including verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial,
bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, musical and interpersonal.

Nonsense, wrote Christopher J. Ferguson in the Chronicle of Higher Education, via AJ. Especially grating to him is Gardner’s contention that each child has mental strengths as well as weaknesses. Smart is smart, and dumb is its opposite. What about bodily-kinesthetic intelligence?

The great dancers of the Pleistocene foxtrotted their way into the stomach of a saber-tooth tiger.

Ferguson’s argument derives from Sparta, not Athens. It assumes a world in which survival is always at risk – bullets over ballet. Battleground tacticians are essential; painters are wasting our time.

No wonder they don’t want to fund the NEA.

In Potemkin‘s most famous scene, police stampede a panicked crowd down public steps, creating a diagonal killing ground. It lasts less than two minutes but extends its imaginative reach over time and circumstance. Whenever the forces of authority unleash themselves on a crowd, Sergi Einstein’s Sergei Eisenstein’s movie comes to mind.

The recent death of Neda Agha-Soltani in Iran (caught on video) echoes an earlier one in the film – a fatally wounded young women who falls against her baby’s carriage and sends it rolling out of control through the carnage. Under the stage makeup, the actress could be Agha-Soltani’s sister.

But if there is one figure who represents Eisenstein’s moment, it’s a middle-aged intellectual, his glasses shattered. In reacting to his sudden trip to hell, he serves as the audience’s stand-in.

Jeremy Geddes took out the blood but left the scream, instantly recognizable. (Nothing, detail, oil on board, 2005)

Celebrities occupy a similar niche. Richard Nixon owns the victory sign, which, since his use of it, has become ironical. He owns the word crook. It was passing from use but rebounded as part of his dubious negative.

There is only one Michael Jackson, and yet the shadow of his parade-float smile, the haunted look in his prematurely elderly eyes and his definitive use of white-face will will continue to slide through unrelated representations.

Geddes reminds us that Jackson would have made a hell of a joker. (Doomed, oil on board, 2005) Take that, Batman.