Preference for Fictional Fiction

Posted on by

In the absence of my boyfriend and thus a live-in excuse to procrastinate, I took fate and a glass of wine in my own hands and decided to watch a movie last night. We don’t have a TV and the boyfriend downloads any movies we watch, so to secure and watch a film is a feat for me.

Watching The Queen with Helen Mirren made me feel a little as if I were peering with binoculars into the palace windows. The film used the royal handling of Diana’s death as its plot; I felt like a I was reading an imaginative, physchoanalytic tabloid. (Is the news footage of Diana’s mourers real? I think I remember hearing it was.) It was a well-done film, but it shares much the same problems as the novella The Uncommon Reader, also based on Queen Elizabeth. It’s a weird mix of real and immagined. The Queen is even more factious than the novella, if only because the novella’s plot was imagined and the film’s was real. I prefer my fiction more fictional, and my biographies factual. It’s handled as if a conflation of art and life would take on a greater degree of realism, but it comes across as celebrity speculation.
I quite like it when Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde conflates art and life to dramatize themselves; it just feels different here. Is it a function of the Queen Elizabeth’s reticence that people like to imagine her private inner life or does her position as Queen transform her into a public figurehead at the service of the arts?

Meaty Topics: Bacon Retrospective at the Met

Posted on by
Head III, 1949
After some anticipation and debate about whether he was that good, I went to see the Frances Bacon exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. First answer, yes! He’s that good. What he does in terms of color and composition in his better works is great.

Three Figures in a Room, 1964

All Bacon’s paintings are visually arresting, and tend to remain interesting beyond any initial shock value. Maybe one’s value range for horror shrinks when you go into room after room of screaming popes, carcasses, and melting face portraits because I ceased thinking about the subject matter with revulsion. Well, a few still jolted me. Some of the pictures (often his more well-known pieces) left me flat. Perhaps it’s something about the nature of his paintings: that when one works, it really gets you, but when it fails and leaves you flat, you have to struggle to see why those flat planes of garish color, those undrawn fragments whose only lines entrap people, and that vacuous, repetitive sense of horror could ever move someone.

Head VI, 1949

In the middle of the exhibition, I wondered if Francis Bacon could paint. The obvious answer is yes, but it’s also a less obvious answer when you look at his beginnings. Bacon was self-taught, and he worked with a lot of art historical images. Taking images like Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, Bacon ripped apart and painted these images again and again. And he kept doing ‘studies’ as if he was merely practicing. I rather think he was. He said later in his life that he wished he hadn’t wasted so much of his youth in gaming and drinking because it had kept him from his painting. When I got to the last room of the chronological exhibition, I saw what he meant. Here were some beautiful works. Paintings that made me stop in my tracks.

Jet of Water, 1988

In his later paintings, done when the artist was in his 80s, you still see the amazing use of color with no fear and more balance that you might suspect. His composition, which for the most part had always been sophisticated–if only because he was aping the greats to get it–becomes sparser, apparently influenced by Modernism. In some ways, Bacon was both an early and a late bloomer. He was talented and always created stunning works in a visual vocabulary distinctly his own (perhaps his distinctiveness came not only from a unique outlook but a self-created technique) yet later he grew into a really accomplished painter as well.

Blood on Pavement, 1988

Blogging Street Art

Posted on by

Street art is a lot like blogs. It’s about an individual voice being thrown out into the public arena, adorning a public space with commentary. Some blogs might get a lot of attention, like the artists who covered the facade of the Tate Modern last year or Whole in the Wall, but most don’t. Trolling through different links or streeets, you never know what you come across, creating a landscape of surprise.

Blogs also might document street art better than Whole in the Wall exhibition I vlogged about yesterday. In the video, I said that the street art seems to be heading into a fine art, spraypaint-on-canvas-on-wall direction. I take that back.

Street art is still being done on the streets, and there are a number of blogs that document it. You can see how it plays against and becomes a part of its enviornment, often with a sense of humor (like Little People!), and how it can surprise you with an element of beauty where you would least expect it. So to balance out the white box and gilt rooms of my video yesterday, see these websites that document street art still in the street;