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Perriton Maxwell, 1899 and 1921
03/03/2010 · Alexander Keefe

American avatars, pt. 3: Poe, 1842
03/01/2010 · Alexander Keefe

THE ”Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body, and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men ; and the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half-an-hour…

Edgar Allan Poe gets points for this passage, the third episode in my ongoing American avatar series.  Why?  Because he capitalizes the word like a monument.  Because instead of going into a bunch of obvious, heavy-handed exoticizing, Poe trusts the word itself to subtly charge his sentence with the dangerous energy of some alien world.  Nothing more needs to be said of the Red Death:  “Blood was its Avatar and its seal.”  The disease’s mystical, liquid appearance on the skin, its arrival from the uncharted inner universes of its human carrier into visibility is also, simultaneously, the red-wax seal on that wretched creature’s fate.  Cast off from humanity, transformed into the physical sign of a horrendous, numinous Other, he is a post-human and a pariah.  Rarely, if ever, has the word “avatar” been used to such precise and devastating effect in American literature.

addendum: Baudelaire, 1855

La Mort Rouge avait pendant longtemps dépeuplé la contrée. Jamais peste ne fut si fatale, si horrible.  Son avatar, c’était le sang, — la rougeur et la hideur du sang. C’étaient des douleurs aiguës, un vertige soudain, et puis un suintement abondant par les pores, et la dissolution de l’être. Des taches pourpres sur le corps, et spécialement sur le visage de la victime, la mettaient au ban de l’humanité, et lui fermaient tout secours et toute sympathie. L’invasion, le progrès, le résultat de la maladie, tout cela était l’affair? d’une demi-heure.

addendum: Price, 1964

American avatars, part 2: Walton Ford’s birds
02/25/2010 · Alexander Keefe

Next stop on the desultory voyage a l’avatar Americain is this huge watercolor by Walton Ford. I was flipping through his recently published super-deluxe Taschen coffeetable raisonné the other day at the public library and was especially struck by Ford’s Indophillic early 90s series “Avatars–The Birds of India.” The style of the series is the same as what you see elsewhere–retro Audubon-esque, done large on paper, with lots of ersatz marginalia scrawled across it in various scripts and media–and the theme is one he apparently returned to a lot in that decade, a theme I will loosely term: the scourge of Westernization in India. I may be oversimplifying but basically, in this bestiary of his, the allegory runs something like this: the nasty identical-looking starlings who arrive in hordes and fuck, eat, peck at and otherwise exploit beautiful, unique-looking native South Asian birds?   Those are either lame tourists or even lamer old Orientalists. The beautiful ones getting ravaged? Well, those would be the natives. (It should be noted that NRIs don’t exactly get a free pass–they tend to hang out with starlings, let’s put it that way, as do parrot-collaborators.) Where he really nails the theme, however, is in the words: on one side you get the straight native dope (in this one I see some tantric symbols, some Sanskrit, and some earnest-looking all-caps wisdom: what pros in the Indophilia biz simply call “the classic”) and on the other, a bit of reductive western claptrap (here a nasty-looking blue jay–allegorically speaking, this is a tour-guide from Minnesota–squawks out bullshit explanatory texts sampled, it would seem, from various outdated surveys of Indian art, culture and society). The vulture and the stork? Don’t worry: both authentic natives. Both abound in ancient Sanskrit stories. But that little pink piece of flesh they are fighting over? That’s on you, West! Stay home!

Addendum: I almost forgot to add that I came across another Walton Ford recently, not at the library this time, but as the infographic to this Financial Times piece on the Indian art market called “Indians in Trouble.”  Is this not a weird choice?

American avatars: the devil and Mr. Lyman
02/18/2010 · Alexander Keefe

I am going to burn down the world
I am going to tear down everything that cannot stand alone

There were so many American avatars before Cameron’s. Among them: the biweekly underground zine/mouthpiece of the banjo-playing acid-folk pioneer and charismatic hippie cult leader Mel Lyman, self-published between 1967 and 1969 in Boston.

I am going to shove hope up your ass
I am going to turn ideals to shit

The “shadow-Dylan” Lyman was many things, but he was no Indophile: his notion of the avatar comes via many layers of mediation, as part of our shared inheritance that is the Great American Weird, a sepulchral gift from Emerson perhaps. Ultimately, for Lyman and his followers the wisdom of the East was the “Eastern cop-out,” no better than the other “false resolutions,” no different from what they called the Christian cop-out, the African cop-out, the Humanist cop-out… Lyman’s revelations were meant to be as American as acid and Frankie Valli and Benjamin Franklin. It all reminds me of Nietzche, in his final, lunatic days, signing his letters alternately “Dionysus” and “the Crucified One,”  no longer able to keep them apart.  Lyman wanted to be the Avatar of a Bacchic Christ, not of a Krishna.

I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble
and then I am going to burn the rubble
and then I am going to scatter the ashes
and then maybe someone will be able to see something as it really is

Echt post-Orientalist psychedelia from a megalomaniacal, hipster madman and his maenads:

Denture Shop, Rawalpindi, India, 1946
02/01/2010 · Alexander Keefe

In 1960, the Sierra Club published an influential book of photographs called This Is the American Earth, co-authored by photographer Ansel Adams and critic Nancy Newhall and featuring 85 black-and-white photographs by Adams and other photographers, accompanied by Newhall’s text.  A classic of environmentalist literature, the tone is in line with its authors’ aestheticized vision of a nonhuman, wild Sublime: nature is good, man bad… sing to America the endangered pristine! And Nature’s radical modernity! And don’t spell out your town’s name on a hillside with rocks!

What resulted was a heavily redacted vision of this American earth–its “thisness” neatly confined to the space between its covers–one in which proto-photoshop techniques were used to maintain artificial boundaries between the designated spheres of nature and culture; the camera’s power to index reality sneakily deployed to presage and prescribe it instead, issuing a visual signpost to a utopian, ecological modernity: technologically masterful man in well-planned cities on the one hand; vast stretches of unpeopled (actually, de-peopled) wilderness on the other.   Clean.  With that in mind, it was perhaps inevitable that India, in This Is the American Earth stands in as a kind of a parable, an emblematic Other to Adams and Newhall’s sanitizing eco-moderne.

India appears in one of just two two-page spreads in the book, and its close juxtaposition with the other two-page photograph–which immediately precedes it–is telling:  the first consists of an aerial, panoramic photograph of sprawling, dystopian Los Angeles by William Garnett; rows of identical suburban homes proliferate and march into the deadening distance, into the unplanned highway monotony, in what a reviewer in the New York Herald Tribune described as the “shocking revelation of a prison city.” Garnett’s photograph sets the mood for what follows: Ferenc Berko’s own aerial overhead, this one of pilgrims bathing in the river Ganges. The implication is clear, albeit strained: this is not the American earth, this is the nightmare vision of overcrowded unchecked human sprawl, the dangerous outcome of “reckless breeding,” if we aren’t careful this is where we’re headed. (Such a tour de force, scaring the suburbanites like this with Hindus!)  Newhall and Adams offer up India as a racially coded encapsulation of their worst fears, as a call to arms for the protection of the American landscape (from people) and as a poignant reminder of its embattled exceptionalism.

If it isn’t already an old saying it should be one: beware storyteller lest you become a parable. And look, now the master narrators have become the narrated: I reductively offer up Adams and Newhall as exemplars of mid-century Indophobia, and the shoe is on the other foot! So much for the editors, but what about the ambiguous figure of the photographer, Ferenc Berko?  He was a Hungarian emigre with close ties to Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus “New Vision,” and he was on the move in the 30s and 40s because of the Nazis. I have written elsewhere about the weird and wonderful history of Hungarian travelers in India, their border-crossings and games of identity. Berko was no exception. He was, by all accounts, deeply sympathetic to (his notion of) Indian culture, and must have cringed when he saw a photograph that was intended to capture and express something of his admiration for Hindu spirituality used instead as a harbinger of imminent American doom, as a vehicle for mobilizing the fear of a black, overcrowded planet.

Or not. It was probably a feeling he was much accustomed to. I was reminded of the episode when I was looking through the photographs from a mid-century retrospective of Berko’s black-and-white work at the Gitterman Gallery in New York last month. There are many highly modernist, intimate–and frankly erotic–nude shots of his wife Mirte, some of them proto-sexo-psychedelic trip material. Others revel in the modernist fascination with the built landscape, shot with a sharp, hard-edged clarity that points on the one hand back to Moholy-Nagy’s influence, and forward to the post-Independence nationalist modernity immortalized in Corbu’s design for Chandigarh. There is photogrammatic abstraction and photojournalese and everything in between. Urchins pee in a Bombay “suburb’s” gutter. A crowd forms on Chowpatty Beach; seen from above, the people dissolve into a vertiginous horde, threateningly faceless, eddying and swirling together until they, too, become material for a kind of restless, slumdog abstraction. Seeing these disparate photographic genres side by side in Berko’s work from India brings a somewhat jarring realization that of all of them–the dreamy druggy nudes, the futurist architectural angle shots, and the street scenes–the street scenes alone have the kind of disseminative mobility, the visual portability sufficient to earn them access to the pages of something like This is the American Earth, or in the case of one well-known Rawalpindi street scene, Life magazine.

It is an arresting image, as displayed at Gitterman, at once anatomically surreal and grounded in the gritty Leica-snap effet de reel of the candid shot. We see man surrounded by multiple gigantic simulacra of dental prosthetics, darkly held there in the shadows of a grotesque and grotto-esque cavern of gleaming hungry teeth.  It is almost too much. We are ushered into some sort of carnival where the outcome is uncertain. Small is huge. And multiple. The synecdochical logic of “he made it by the skin of his teeth” is monstrously reversed, and the shepherd seems likely to come away shorn. What belongs inside is now outside. He is trapped in a landscape of signs, and none of them pretty: there are paintings of teeth, and sculptures of teeth, and even signs that say “teeth.”

This is a photograph with a lot to say, and so it is instructive to see how easily its tangled set of stories is muffled, stifled and stilled by Life’s photo editor; blinded in a white surgical light, the carnival is over. It is time for a different kind of spectacle, one with less patience for the shadows. The image has been cropped differently, and the resulting composition reduces the violation of scale that creates such visual energy at the heart of the print at Gitterman. But worse still, the image has been considerably lightened, as though opened up for a more thorough inspection by the magazine’s readers, comfortably exotic and extraordinary, well lit if possible: the man turns out to be the shopkeeper’s helper, or perhaps a household servant picking up a prescription. The shopkeeper himself peeks out curiously from behind his desk. The whole scene is an unveiling played for laughs, a quickie light drama of perception where the “huge red-and-white grins” are exposed for what they merely are, one more quirky detail of the bazaar. A quick snap, got you and I’m on my way.

the text:
“While passing through the bazaar at Rawalpindi, last stop on his trip from Bombay to Kashmir, India, Photographer Ferenc Berko glimpsed the shop front window shown above. Since all perceptive photographers cut their eyeteeth on the unusual, Berko risked missing his bus to rush back for a second look. He discovered the huge red-and-white grins were not gigantic elephant traps but merely papier-mache blow-ups put there to lure bazaar customers into buying normal-sized dental plates within. Photographer Berko snapped the store teeth, got back to the bus station just by the skin of his own.

Sahib, HPB aur Ghulam: Khandala’s verdant and perfumed abyss
01/24/2010 · Alexander Keefe

Rani Mukherjee wants to know what there is to do in Khandala.  H.P. Blavatsky has some advice for her, in From the caves and jungles of Hindostan, a sensationalist post-spiritualist travelogue of India, written during 1879 and 1880 for the pages of the Russki Vyestnik and translated into English in 1902. In this excerpt, HPB and her entourage are sitting out on their bungalow’s veranda in the famed hill station, trading stories about Atlantis and discussing Dayanand Saraswati’s theory that the Sanskrit word pātāla (i.e. “hell”) originally was used for the Americas (i.e. underworld), which were visited by ancient Indians via the Bering Strait. Suddenly, their innkeeper issues an ominous warning:

It was long past midnight, but we still sat listening to this legend and others of a similar kind. At length the innkeeper sent a servant to warn us of the dangers that threatened us if we lingered too long on the verandah on a moonlit night. The programme of these dangers was divided into three sections—snakes, beasts of prey, and dacoits. Besides the cobra and the “rock-snake,” the surrounding mountains are full of a kind of very small mountain snake, called furzen, the most dangerous of all. Their poison kills with the swiftness of lightning. The moonlight attracts them, and whole parties of these uninvited guests crawl up to the verandahs of houses, in order to warm themselves. Here they are more snug than on the wet ground. The verdant and perfumed abyss below our verandah happened, too, to be the favourite resort of tigers and leopards, who come thither to quench their thirst at the broad brook which runs along the bottom, and then wander until daybreak under the windows of the bungalow. Lastly, there were the mad dacoits, whose dens are scattered in mountains inaccessible to the police, who often shoot Europeans simply to afford themselves the pleasure of sending ad patres one of the hateful bellatis (foreigners). Three days before our arrival the wife of a Brahman disappeared, carried off by a tiger, and two favourite dogs of the commandant were killed by snakes. We declined to wait for further explanations, but hurried to our rooms. At daybreak we were to start for Karli, six miles from this place.

Aur kya?

The plant hunters: or, Adventures among the Himalaya mountains (1859)
01/20/2010 · Alexander Keefe

Illustrations from The plant hunters: or, Adventures among the Himalaya mountains, written in 1859 by Irish-American writer Mayne Reid, who specialized in pulpy adventure novels. On a side note, the young Vladimir Nabokov was a big fan of Reid, especially of a book called The Headless Horseman (1866), which Nabokov later remembered as his favorite childhood adventure novel…

Anish Kapoor
01/08/2010 · Alexander Keefe

Confession: I’ve walked by Anish Kapoor’s Chicago “bean” (ok, ok: Cloud Gate) one too many times, and if familiarity has not, in this case, bred any real contempt, it has bred something akin to disinterest. It is an expensive-looking, starchitectural funhouse mirror cloaked with the same solemn air of profundity that the art directors of BMW web-ads achieve with a far greater economy of means, and far less self-importance. In a sense, it is perfectly emblematic of the corporatized busy funness and funny business of the Millenium Park vibe in general, and of the AT&T Plaza in particular, where the orecchiette-shaped behemoth sits demanding attention, looking a bit like a random freeze frame snatched from a sci-fi film: the part where a giant malevolent metallic demonoid robot shape-shifts into a fast-moving blob of all-devouring, extraterrestrial mercury.

Stilled in the midst of this collosal machinic alchemy, however, it evokes neither awe nor terror. A far better aesthetic journey can be had perusing the many amateur youtube videos featuring the object in question. And maybe, in the end, this simple technique could stand as a useful measure of the efficacy of any art object these days—and provide a telling spectrogram of its aura: ask yourself which is more interesting, the work itself or the youtube videos made of it by tourists goofing around? The Cloud Gate as it were, or the beloved “Bean”? Either way, it is most accurately categorized as an art-ertainment mega-bauble, one short step away from the Wynn Las Vegas. Watch out, Chicago: the Great Whore of our contemporary and cosmopolitan (remember, this is Anish Kapoor we are talking about!) Babylon has lost an earring on the way back to her suite, stoned and speeding, after a long and weird night at the Cirque de Soleil afterparty.

Anish Kapoor has made a career out of this sort of midbrow accessibility, engaging and cleverly surprising, producing gentle aha-moments and a sense of having thought something big and ennobling. This American Life, Wes Anderson, The English Patient and Malcolm Gladwell are all staring at me right now saying: “what the hell’s your problem?”

My strong feelings on the matter notwithstanding, when I was in New York last month I stopped by the Guggenheim to see his Memory. It is a corseted and ruddy corten-steel zeppelin, somewhat deflated looking although still plenty bulging and tumescent, belted and bolted and stuffed into a room seemingly too small to contain its swelling immensity. And that right there tells you that Anish Kapoor’s preferred brand of heavy-handed populism is about to nail you with a David Copperfield-style ship-in-a-bottle effect. Don’t fall for it. It’s the sort of thing that appears to have worked some magic over cosmopolitan sensibilities in this decaying late-capitalist moment of ours but the imagineer’s spell, after all, isn’t that powerful. There is a whiff of Andrew Carnegie’s megalomania about Kapoor’s work, an atavistic steel-baron gesturalism that imparts an old-fashioned appeal (this one is patinated with powdery-looking rust, an au courant steampunkish touch), and there is the inescapable stench of rampant Jindalism as well, the icy and soulless stainless-steel rot of maximalized modernist minitude.

Memory wants so badly to be interpreted that it practically coerces it out of you. Jammed in to its undersized quarters, and forcing curious visitors to navigate uncertainly through the early-period Kandinskys and lavatory waiting-areas of the Guggenheim to take it all in, it is all about Memory, which also grows really big as time goes on, and also takes on a kind of slippery steel skin. The seams are visible, but they are tight. Nothing could escape from there… or could it? If you could open a window into it—but you can!—you would see a black square of absolute darkness—but I think I see a little light in there!—an unenterable black hole of memory and time past. I’m feeling like memory is empty and yet it is full. It is the past, but it is also endlessly protean and capable of creative change and refashioning! That black square sometimes looks flat and two-dimensional, like a painting, and sometimes looks three-dimensional, like a cosmic door. (I am at heart your guide on otherworldly journeys in time and space, says Kapoor with this, really working as a painter, but doing so surreptitiously by actually working as a sculptor). Much as in the David Bromberg joke about the original leather-bound edition of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet with all the significant passages underlined, here too every stinking word is underlined.

But you know I actually enjoyed myself standing there digging the op-art special effects emanating from this dead-black yolk of a hundred-year egg, this unplayable ocarina of the titans. It was much better than Cats, which is also about memories. I felt a yawning sort of gravity in front of that window-door, a dicey pull into the enclosed and yet bottomless black. It even felt safely dangerous for a moment. That and the fact that it doesn’t feature dildos (Chelsea’s galleries right now, wow, dildo-central)… it may be just enough. But if challenging and dark post-Minimalist beauty is what you’re after, go upstairs and see what Kitty Kraus did with a light bulb full of black paint and two panes of glass. Mr. Kapoor, if you insist on plying me with quasi-mystical promises, then offer me hard, maddening wine, not some sweet watery spritzer!

Chitra Ganesh
01/03/2010 · Alexander Keefe

Chitra Ganesh’s Lady Mollusk (2009) sits stonily, with the aura of a prophetess demonstrating an old and meaningful wound that is unlikely to cicatrice itself closed any time soon. To the contrary, it looks cosmically alight, spilling ectoplasmic fairy-dust like a mystical inkjet womb. Bubblegum shoelaces stream from her eyes sideways at a distant, dispersed set of heavens, and although this is one war that never seems won, what’s under attack here are clearly the poofy-sleeved perspectivalisms and vanishing points of the Western hegemon’s scopic regimes:  instead of concentrating our gaze on the lady herself,  these florescent laser beams shoot off at invisible horizons, pulling us wonderfully toward inscrutable objects that float, weightless, beyond the edges of the image. Newton be damned: chrome plastic bubbles form and dissolve in the air around her according to some hidden and unfamiliar physics, blinded and dully reflective. If I look closely I can see myself standing there tiny, entrapped and multiplied by fourteen, with no head, upside down.

There is a deep mock-Orientalist archival riff at work behind this piece, a bass note sample one hears looping away a lot in “Indian” (post-Saatchi, I can only use that in quotes because I don’t know what it means) art these days… often overplayed frankly. Here, happily, it actually advances the cause, giving its otherwise pixellated, digitally flattened, deliberately low-fi painted lady a set of ghostly black shadows, tiny points of unknowable nullity impervious to any kind of analog light. For more empirical thrills, we have to reckon with the coarse, black, sloppy, tangled braids turned loose from beneath her shawl—refugee tresses quickly tied and spilling forth onto the floor, coming at the viewer with an uncertain, possibly dangerous set of motives.

She’s obviously some kind of shamaness, a sorceress busy at a spell. The monstrous, many-eyed, tongue-pink nudibranch that she cradles like a Spanish guitar, backlit with a chemical phosphorescence and draped gently over her shoulder like a friend pulled from a house fire? That must be her familiar.

Thanks to Nitin Mukul for the photo!

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