The Effort Outweighs the Meaning

I don't know.  Art is embarrassing when it's done right, when its motives are pure and the image comes from an honest attempt to make something sincere, even sacred.  In this case George Bush's desire to signify his begrudging respect/admiration for Vladimir Putin.  Lord have mercy, that amateurish skin-tone, those blank third-grade eyes, the sad scratchy lavender background.  This is the kind of art I always respect because the effort outweighs the meaning, and truly meaning here is pretty dumb and limited to the point it becomes profound, elegant in its monster-like simplicity.  The ears have a surrealistic bent, like homosexual sea shells.  And those baggy eyes, those thin lips like an obscene peanut shell.  There's a sensual quality here, a school-boy's love-letter, a sketch done in secret.  It's a joke, and it's not.  Power and solemnity get usurped by a truly stupid intent.  You can see George getting cross-eyed trying to get it right.  Trying to make it look right.  Trying and trying, and then one sunny morning he gets it.  He comes up with this denouement, this image from a dream, this image from history. 

I would love to own this godforsaken painting.  It needs to disappear.
 

Beasts of Burden

I'm trying to figure out my reaction to Beasts of the Southern Wild, a critic's darling from last year that seemed like it would be a perfect match for what I like in life and in movies, a sort of outsider-art aesthetic merged with an innocent/sci-fi/bible-story narrative, with a sweet ferocious little girl running the whole show.  Not to be.  I saw it a couple weeks back, after intentionally not seeing it when it was being hyper-praised, and in the cold light of day Beasts feels like a lot of sound and a lot of fury and you know what that means:  it signifies nothing.  There's a guttural, twee spirit here that reminds me of slapstick in silent movies, but in Beasts it's played for High Intentions, not laughs or even giggles, and the Max-Max-beyond-Thunderdome redux at the heart of the screenplay has a hasty sloppy blatancy that doesn't expand, only contract until you feel like you never want to see anyone ever, I mean ever, eat shellfish again. 

An exoticness haunts every scene, but it's a made-up, flagrant exoticness built on the way poverty is often portrayed in movies, as nasty and hopeless and crude, hyper-Brueghelian.  That lavishly accomplished crudeness is supposed to be the aesthetic I guess, but it feels phony because Beasts wants to be precious and mean at the same time, soulfully grimy and full of "life," but it has a lot more bark than bite, and the poetry gets flattened by the movie's undying need to show us how brave and fierce and heroic the little girl is.

And speaking of her, Quvenzhane Wallis is spunky and wonderful, but she does not have enough character to play.  She's a sweet one-note.  In fact all the characters in Beasts are like that, types and not people, rushing around trying to save themselves, but then again also making pit-stops along the way to say something sweet or wicked or profound. 

Sometimes outsider art can feel just as contrived as insider art.  When we used to go to the Folk Art Festival in Atlanta and do a booth, we were always surrounded by artists who wished they were "outsiders," and their paintings and sculpture felt feigned and even a little cynical:  slipshod, catastrophic paintings on old pieces of wood of grinning dogs and Martians, junky, collapsing "found" objects nailed together to create that effect that "outsider art" is supposed to give off, a sense of whimsy and oddness and exoticness.  But for the most part that Folk Art gig felt like a celebration of freaky wannabes, not the real thing.  And that's the Beasts' conundrum too. By trying so hard to be eccentric, the movie turns into a boring little folk song about the end of the world.

Size Matters

"Put any of MoMA’s art in that building and it will die. And certainly contemporary art does not work there. Even granting that the Williams-Tsien facade is singular (I once compared it to a Kleenex box), the proponents of this building love it as an abstract ideal of a space for art, a platonic thing apart, a fetish," Jerry Saltz has written about the razing of the American Folk Art Museum. 

Originally unveiled in 2001, the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien designed the American Folk Museum as a sort of paean to folk art.  That's probably what is killing it now.  Although there is a lot of debate and hand-wringing happening about the whole incident,  Saltz seems to be the spokesperson here for institutional truth: the reason the building needs to go is because it kills contemporary art.  The backstory is pretty simple:  MoMA bought the building in 2011, around the time the AFAM was running into major trouble as an institution.  AFAM almost folded last year, but is now back to where it started in a lobby somewhere.  And now MoMA wants to demolish the building in favor of more "big" space.

It's almost like a comeuppance, this tragedy, for any of us who ever had the unmitigated gall of taking something so small and insignificant as "folk art" seriously.  After all, Saltz is letting us know in his piece that "folk art" is not "contemporary art."  Saltz loathes Williams and Tsien's creation because it evokes the strange smallness and unnerving disjuncture that a lot of folk/outsider/visionary/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it art elicits.  He does not know how to categorize something unless it is categorical, defined by tradition, and I guess great big.

Comparing the bronze, beaten, carefully obtuse facade to a "Kleenex box" and then the whole building to a "fetish" is probably the way he sees most of the art that used to be, and would have been, showcased inside the thing.  Something is missing, Saltz is letting us know:  size.  Bigness rules.  Saltz, and the MoMA and its legions, are doing Gordon-Gecko drag here.  Those big MoMA works of art ("big" both literally and figuratively and historically) can't be housed within that itty-bitty Joseph-Cornell shitbox called a "folk art museum."

It's really kind of sad the disrespect not only the arcitecture is getting in this whole weird battle to destroy a "Kleenox box," but also the art that once was celebrated within it.  A lot of folk artists work small, with weird, inarchivable materials, in strange and platonic ways that look dinky and silly, I'm sure, to Saltz' eye, especially when compared to actual "contemporary art." 

If folk art is the Rodney Dangerfield of the artworld, then Saltz' "contemporary art" is the Donald Trump, and the Donald right now is saying, "You're fired" to art that doesn't take up a lot of space literally but that can expand in your head if you give it half a chance.  Same goes for Williams and Tsien's intricate, origami-lush little building. 

"You're fired, Mr. Kleenex Box."