Domestic comedy

[While watching The Kennel Murder Case (1933). ]

“Did you see that dress she’s not wearing?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“No One Was Like Vermeer”

My friend Stefan Hagemann alerted me to a song relevant to today’s post: Jonathan Richman’s “No One Was Like Vermeer.”

“Vermeer was eerie, Vermeer was strange. / He had a more modern color range”: I love it. Thanks, Stefan.

A guest-post by Stefan Hagemann
How to answer a professor

Tim’s not Vermeer

One’s abilities are also one’s limitations: to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Tim Jenison, the hero of Tim’s Vermeer (2013) is a technologist, the co-founder of a company that produces software for visual imaging. When Jenison looks at a Vermeer, he sees a special effect, a reproduction of the real: he even refers to Vermeer’s paintings as photographs and likens them to video images. This documentary, the work of Jenison’s friends Penn Jillette and Teller (the latter directed), tracks Jenison’s effort to crack the secret of Vermeer’s paintings (the use of optics) and recreate The Music Lesson by staging its scene and painting with the use of lenses and mirrors. Thus the film’s title.

But Tim’s not Vermeer (as he would readily acknowledge), and Tim’s painting is not a Vermeer. As seen on DVD, Tim’s not-Vermeer appears to be a doggedly literal and lifeless facsimile.¹ It seems likely that Vermeer’s paintings owe something to optics. But a painting is not merely a transcription, a reproduction of the real by mechanical means. Vermeer may be, as Jillette suggests, the greatest artist “of all time.” But why? Because his paintings look like photographs? The idea of art that runs through Tim’s Vermeer is sadly naïve.

I like what William Carlos Williams says in Spring and All (1923), a book of twenty-seven poems and a prose commentary on matters of imagination and representation:

The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation.

Art is not a transcript, not a copy, Williams says, again and again, in a various ways. His prose has a curious relevance to optics-based art: reversing the instruction that Hamlet gives the Players — “to hold as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” Williams insists that Shakespeare “holds no mirror up to nature” in his work. The power of imagination, rather, “is to give created forms reality.”

“Plagiarism after nature”: that’s what Jenison seems to think Vermeer is all about. What’s missing is a consideration of the artist’s imagination. The Music Lesson is, after all, a composition of Vermeer’s making, not something that he happened upon and transcribed. What elements went into the composition? What’s compelling about it? What might it suggest to a viewer whose interest in art goes beyond how-did-he-do-that?

What my relatively unlearned eye sees in The Music Lesson: an arrangement of planes, contrasts of light and dark, a variety of textures, a deeply quiet scene (despite the music-making) that has much to do with decorum and intimacy. The figures in the painting are alone and not alone: an artist’s easel is visible in the mirror. I am pretty sure that if I were to travel back in time to Delft, I would not see anything resembling this painting — except this painting.

An excellent site for learning more about Johannes Vermeer: Essential Vermeer. Here is that site’s page for The Music Lesson. For Vermeer and optics, start at this page: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura. And for a large version of The Music Lesson, try this one.

¹ In truth, a facsimile of a facsimile. Jenison received permission to view the painting (part of the Royal Collection of Great Britain), but he worked from reproductions.

Whitney, yecch

This exhibition will be the artist’s first major museum presentation in New York, and the first to fill nearly the entirety of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building with a single artist’s work. It will also be the final exhibition to take place there before the Museum opens its new building in the Meatpacking District in 2015.

The Whitney Museum now hosts Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, a gesture that says much about art and money and fame. As the Museum explains, Koons has “transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market.” Well, yes — and what a sad farewell for the Whitney.

Getty Publications Virtual Library

The J. Paul Getty Museum makes its backlist publications available to read online or download as free PDFs: Getty Publications Virtual Library. That’s generosity.

My big catch: Judith Keller’s Walker Evans: Catalogue of the Collection (1995).

[In my mind, I’m still in California.]

Re: corrupted files

For readers arriving from Boing Boing: please read this post, and this one. And think twice before sending a corrupted file to any instructor.

Watts House Project sign

[Art by Tina Villadolid, 2010. Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

When I saw this produce-crate-art-inspired sign, I had to take a picture.

The Watts House Project is “an artist-driven neighborhood redevelopment organization” that seeks to “promote and enhance the quality of residential life in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.” This sign by Tina Villadolid hangs outside the Platform, the WHP’s base of operations, across the street from the Watts Towers:

Tina visited the Platform back in the fall of 2009 and wanted to make a hand-painted sign that would speak to the artistic legacy of the Watts Towers neighborhood and WHP’s vision. She searched the grounds and found an old piece of slightly warped plywood, weathered by many seasons of the elements. She packed it in the back of her car and half a year later returned with a painting that marked the Platform as a site for neighborhood change.

“I chose the dahlia as the main image when I discovered that not only is it the national flower of Mexico, but that when Christopher Columbus brought the dahlia to Europe it became wildly popular in the Italian ornamental gardens of the renaissance. I thought it was a great link between Simon Rodia and the neighborhood he immigrated to. Also, the dahlia symbolizes dignity and splendor, which I thought was perfect.”

Related posts
Watts tiles
Watts Towers

[Nuestro Pueblo (our town) was Simon Rodia’s name for the Towers.]

Watts Towers

[Watts Towers, Los Angeles. Photographs by Michael Leddy. Click for much larger views.]

In a post about things to do in Los Angeles, I wrote, “Realize that photographs won’t capture the startling beauty of the Towers, which rise out of all proportion on a narrow dead-end street of one-story houses. Take photographs anyway.” Thus this post.

A related post
Watts tiles

Watts tiles

[Details of the Watts Towers, Los Angeles. Photographs by Michael Leddy. Click for much larger views.]

During working hours, Simon Rodia was a tile setter. And at home too. These photographs represent the tiniest fraction of the work that went into the making of the Watts Towers.

Related posts
Things to do in Los Angeles
Watts Towers

Paint samples

[“Laboratory worker at the research laboratory at the C & NW RR’s 40th Street yard, examining paint samples used on freight cars and coaches of the railroad, Chicago, Ill.” Photograph by Jack Delano. December 1942. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

Looking at the pages of Robert Ridgway’s Color Standards and Color Nomenclature made me think of this beautiful Jack Delano photograph.

Related reading
All OCA Jack Delano posts
Color dictionaries
Condiment challenge

[C & NW: The Chicago and North Western Transportation Company, whose devotees maintain an impressive website.]