Paintings from the Abyss—Recent Work by Robert Guerra

Bob Guerra is an intriguing personality, someone I’ve known for nearly ten years. He’s best known as an art director on numerous feature films, often working for the designer Dante Ferretti, whose work was recently the subject of an exhibition at MOMA. What is less well known is Bob’s work as a painter, the tone and style of which may surprise people who know him from his film work. 

The paintings I recently saw at his studio are distinctly political, though not in the sense of proselytizing for a specific point of view. Satirical, they are perhaps best considered as being in the tradition of George Grosz. In some ways, the draftsmanship and color palette remind me of Reginald Marsh. But there’s nothing dated about these works. What they manage to do is to hold up a mirror to our society, a funhouse mirror of sorts. And the picture isn’t pretty.

The first painting I saw isn’t particularly American, at least not immediately so. Titled Napoleon Crossing the Alps, it’s a parodic reworking of Jacques-Louis David’s ode to Napoleon. Here, Napoleon sits astride a monstrous carousel horse, but he doesn’t just sit, he is in fact one with the horse, an outgrowth of the horse’s body. Not a centaur, he is a travestied, composite creature. Together, they surmount a mountain of skulls and bones. The palette is red, white, and blue, a gray blue. To say this is about the vanity of war is to say the obvious. Nor is it simply about Napoleon. The effect manages to be both horrifying and darkly comical.

Hotel Haruspex might be said to treat the same theme, albeit more mysteriously. A general sits, wearing an elongated, cylindrical hat. To the uninitiated, this might appear to be a dunce’s hat. In reality, it’s a representation of the hat worn by the Etruscan soothsayer priests known as haruspex. These diviners read the entrails of animals. In the painting, the haruspex holds in his hands the entrails that emanate from a set of empty Roman armor, a mountain of skulls to the left. It is worth remembering that the Etruscans ruled the Romans for centuries, but were then defeated and subsumed, their civilization eliminated. Above and to the left is a film noir neon sign, the sort of sputtering sign that signals something deadly is about to happen in a 1940s movie. The sign, not surprisingly, reads, “Hotel Haruspex.”    

Forming something of a counterpoint to the first two paintings is another pair, The Male Politician and The Female Politician. Neither bodes well for the electoral process. The male candidate wears a carnival jacket, an idiotic grin besots his face as he sports an aging showgirl on his lap, a convention hat on her head. This could be the 1940s, but the ghostly image of the Emperor Augustus presides over them from the upper right, presaging war, murder, mayhem. The candidate is not an Augustus figure; rather, he is clueless, inept, skilled only at being reelected.

The Female Politician provides a similarly jaundiced view of our electoral system. Except that here, a woman who is not young supports an aging, ludicrous toy boy on her lap, more a ventriloquist’s dummy than a man. He bears an eerie resemblance to the male candidate in the matching painting.

The final work I saw was Venus Returning to the Place of Her Birth. She indeed holds a shell, but there the resemblance ends. This Venus is a gruff, wasted strumpet, still proud, but no longer a beauty. Fleshy, nude, she stands in front of a Dickensian industrial landscape, Satanic mills spewing smoke and soot, the home town she has returned to—both she and it are ruins of themselves.

This is not an easy painting to look at. Despite the defiance and pride, there is something sad about her, and about the bleak industrial scene behind her, which seems both outmoded and futuristic. Perhaps she is a product of this monstrous industry, as indeed we all are. 

The five paintings I’ve described represent one strand of the artist’s work on canvas, what I refer to as the satirical strand. A selection of these and other works can be viewed online at the Robert Guerra Studio.

Language Writing and Other Matters

Literary Modernism appeared to have run its course in the English-speaking world by around 1940, at least as far as fiction writing was concerned. New Directions published Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen, Grove Press went on to publish Beckett’s novels, the Nouveau Roman in translation, and William Burroughs, but that’s pretty much it. American novelists who emerged after World War Two may have incorporated specific Modernist techniques, but these were generally used sparingly. Even in the most lauded literary fiction, anything that might engage the reader’s intellect at the expense of his or her emotions was largely eliminated. Early Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Lydia Davis, Siri Hustvedt, and a few others provide the exceptions to this rule.

Poetry was a different matter, with the continuing work of Williams, Cummings, Stevens, Zukofsky, and Oppen, and the emergence of Olson and Creeley. By the 1970s, what became known as Language writing emerged. In New York, this was based around Roof Magazine, edited by James Sherry (1976-1979), A Hundred Posters, edited by Alan Davies (1976-1981), and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews (1978-1981). Michael Gottlieb has written an account of the New York group at this period, Memoir and Essay, published by Faux Press and Other Publications, which provides an engaging picture of the aesthetic concerns, intellectual preoccupations, and personal conflicts involved. Dozens of poets around the country were involved in the group. This was a major literary movement, with a focus on language and how it functions. 

In San Francisco, Ron Silliman was developing his specific avant-garde approach to prose poetry, as exemplified in his multipart work, The Age of Huts. From this volume, the section I still come back to is The Chinese Notebook, which can be seen as both a parody of and homage to Wittgenstein’s later work, one that is in fact influenced by that approach. Silliman also went on to develop a theory of reference in which he equated the realistic novel’s appropriation of reality with capitalism’s appropriation of the world we live in. Writers in the San Francisco Language group included Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman, and Lyn Hejinian, among others.

It’s worth nothing that John Ashbery published the first of his Three Poems in The Paris Review in 1970. With an oblique approach to prose poetry and to meaning, these works have a certain affinity with Language writing. Nevertheless, Ashbery comes from an earlier generation and is sui generis among the New York School of poets.

When I first met a number of the Language writers in the 1970s, what struck me was that the they were virtually the only writers I knew who were seriously attempting to build on the Modernist impulse and take an intellectual approach to writing. Whether all their work succeeds isn’t the point. What bothers me is that few readers of The New York Review of Books know of Language writing’s existence. A major literary movement has been virtually ignored by the New York publishing world. This despite the fact that Rae Armantrout, one of the original Language writers, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2010. Ashbery’s seminal Three Poems was at one time published by Penguin, but is currently out of print. What does this say about the literary culture of corporate publishing?     

Now, the major publishers aren’t really in the business of publishing poetry—that’s left to small presses and to university presses. Nevertheless, when we come to fiction, it’s as if the major publishing houses steadfastly refuse to publish anything that makes any sort of intellectual demand on the reader. Emotion and easy reader accessibility are the primary criteria. I simply refuse to accept this as a legitimate approach. The phrase “dumbing down” occurs to me in a distinctly sinister light.

Postscript

I’ve avoided getting into a detailed discussion of the theory and practice of Language writing, which varies from writer to writer. Nor have I discussed individual poets and their work to any significant extent. An interested reader might do well to start with Michael Gottlieb’s Memoir and Essay, which provides a personal view of both Language writing and literary and bohemian New York in the 1970s. For an introduction to the aesthetic issues involved, as well as many of the individual writers, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is useful. Roof Magazine and A Hundred Posters are sources for important examples of the work. Then, it’s a matter of looking up books by the individual writers, nearly all of them published by small presses.

The thing is, there’s an enormous amount of work to investigate.

The Publishing Wars

The struggle between Amazon and Hachette drags on, as it has since February. It’s safe to say that Amazon’s tactics have been heavy handed and coercive. Nevertheless, an enormous amount of nonsense has been written defending Hachette and the major publishing houses. Numerous Hachette authors, most notably Malcolm Gladwell and Stephen Colbert, have rallied to the publisher’s defense. A much larger number of self-published writers are supporting Amazon. What is going on here?

The main bone of contention is rumored to be Amazon’s effort to reduce Hachette’s percentage of ebook revenues from 70% to 50% of gross. No one knows whether this is actually true, as the companies aren’t providing any figures. Nor do they appear to be “negotiating” in any meaningful sense. Beyond that, there is the feeling that Amazon wants to position itself as the sole arbiter of ebook prices. This potential loss of decision-making power in the marketplace is what particularly irks traditional publishers, perhaps even more than the issue of the percentage “take.”

Various officers of the Authors Guild, an organization of which I am a member, have rallied to Hachette’s defense. The problem is that whenever Richard Russo or anyone else pens a lengthy missive defending traditional publishing, they provide one side of the story, conveniently leaving out a number of essential points. Namely, that the typical publishing contract is a highly abusive document and that in writing a book, the average author earns less than minimum wage. 

No matter how this turns out, rest assured that no one is going to suggest that authors have a say in the pricing of ebooks. Writers and their books are simply the pawns in this game.

It seems to escape notice that authors published by Hachette have everything to gain by demanding that the publisher split net ebook revenues 50-50, as is done with all other media sales (eg, paperback and movie rights.) If anyone were to actually do the arithmetic, they would see that this would more than make up for any reduction by Amazon in payments to the publisher.

No one wants Amazon to rule the world, or to cut the publisher’s percentage of ebook revenues. But writers should try to win the best terms possible from each of the parties involved. And remember, we’re talking about multi-billion dollar corporations, not benevolent but beleaguered mom-and-pop operations.

A publisher would no doubt argue that being squeezed from above by Amazon and from below by authors would put the company in an untenable position by reducing its profit margin. Which I find darkly humorous, as the overwhelming majority of professional writers I know simply cannot make a living from writing books, whether fiction or nonfiction.

What no one is admitting is that Amazon’s hegemony is the result of incompetence on the part of the major publishers. Now, a business can be incompetent and still make money, for many years. But when the landscape changes, the incompetence is revealed, dramatically so.

Postscript

To the average reader, this discussion must seem dull as dishwater. People want ebooks that are significantly cheaper than hardcovers and trade paperbacks. The famous authors who have been backing Hachette are highly privileged individuals who are treated well by their publisher and receive very large advances. In contrast, the vast majority of writers with a publishing contract receive miniscule advances and are treated rather shabbily by their publishers.

Maybe it’s time for the serfs to rebel. Or at least to demand better contracts.

For a revealing look at what ebooks mean for a mid-list author, take a look at George Anders’ recent piece in Forbes.

To view the overwhelmingly negative and often acerbic remarks directed at the Authors Guild hierarchy by both members and nonmembers, check the Comments section on the Guild’s blog.

Dante in Hell

The Divine Comedy is one of the pinnacles of world literature. The first section, the Inferno, is nevertheless an extreme work, perhaps the most extreme ever written. Reading it for the third time in as many decades, it occurs to me that I really do need to move on to the Purgatorio and Paradiso. For however fierce its poetry and striking its visual imagery, the Inferno represents a repulsive and indeed repellent view of the world.

I regret that I know Dante only via English translations, though even I can get some sense of the verse by reading the Italian aloud from a bilingual edition. The translation I tend to use is by John Ciardi, though I’ve looked through and consult the Pinsky and Hollander editions, among others. Aside from the sound, there is the miraculous visual sense, which does manage to come through in translation. It is the poet’s supreme mastery of visual description in the Inferno that led certain Victorian writers to refer to Dante as the “master of the disgusting.” I would add that the only writer I know of who manages the grotesque in an analogous manner is William Burroughs in Naked Lunch—it’s just that Burroughs writes from a diametrically opposed moral viewpoint. Previously, Dante’s worldview didn’t bother me, I simply regarded it as a given. This time around was different.

The main problem with the Inferno is that Dante the author is playing God. For it is he and he alone who decides who winds up in hell, including which level of hell they are consigned to and what punishment they receive. It might be possible to shrug this off, or to claim that Dante was “divinely inspired,” but then we hit upon one stubborn fact: Dante has consigned no fewer than five popes to hell, including Boniface VIII, who was pope in 1300, when the action of the poem takes place. To us, in the twenty-first century, this may be amusing, but in the early fourteenth century, it was deadly serious. The papacy was a major political force in the Italian peninsula, and Boniface was a political enemy of Dante’s, the patron of the Black Guelphs, as opposed to Dante’s Florentine faction, the White Guelphs. The question is, why wasn’t Dante excommunicated? Why wasn’t the poem banned?

Remember there was no printing in Dante’s time. The Divine Comedy, when completed in 1321, was circulated among Dante’s friends, mainly fellow poets. The poem’s prestige mounted from there. By the time the papacy became fully aware of the Inferno, Boniface was dead and in disgrace, and his successors were less interested in preserving his good name. Beyond this, Dante in no way encourages sin, quite the reverse in fact. In time, the Church probably saw the Inferno as a useful means of frightening people, and incorporated a certain amount of the poem’s imagery in its doctrinal descriptions of hell.

What we encounter in Dante is a panorama of souls who are tortured in ways that are often far worse than any crime they may have committed. The sadistic nature of the punishments needs to be emphasized. These are tortures devised by a vengeful human being. And the punishments are shockingly grotesque—Ugolino gnawing the brain of his enemy Archbishop Ruggieri is just one example.

Where Dante might be construed as genuinely heretical is not in his treatment of the papacy, but in his taking upon himself the divine prerogative of judgment. Not even Aquinas would dare to do this.  And the logic of Dante’s judgments doesn’t stand up—he has consigned the flatterers to a far lower region of hell than simple murderers. Mythological characters who rebelled against Zeus are sent to the furthest depths. Brutus and Cassius reside next to Judas Iscariot as the worst of mortal villains, eternally devoured by Satan. Follow this chain of reasoning, and the assassination of Julius Caesar is morally equivalent to the crucifixion of Christ.   

In answer to this, the distinction between Dante the creator of the self-enclosed world of the Inferno and Dante the naïve and awestruck protagonist of the poem needs to be understood. In the fourteenth century, readers of the poem generally believed that Dante had in fact been to hell, purgatory, and heaven and returned to relate what he had seen. Few modern readers approach the poem in this way.

No doubt the Purgatorio and Paradiso are more in line with orthodox Catholic teaching—in heaven, Beatrice expounds at length on various theological points and matters of doctrine. Many readers never make it this far. It is hell that readers throughout the ages have found the most compelling. Which may say something about all of us as human beings.

Postscript

Dante scholars will no doubt bristle at much of what I have said. Perhaps my thesis is the “elephant in the room,” something no one mentions but everyone is aware of. Dante’s moral and logical inconsistencies in no way detract from the aesthetic effect of the Inferno, which contains some of the most powerful and transcendent language ever devised.

Throughout the Inferno, there are a number of exchanges that take place between the protagonist and the damned. Aside from the Paolo and Francesca episode, my favorite is the scene with Farinata degli Uberti, who was a leader of the Ghibellines, archenemies of the Guelphs. Farinata and the protagonist acknowledge each other, politely mock each other, and ultimately treat one another with respect. All very medieval.

NYCB and Me

The New York City Ballet is a special place. It’s not just a ballet company, it’s one of the most important cultural institutions in the city, perhaps in the world. If that sounds boring, you aren’t paying attention.

The first time I went doesn’t really count. A quintessential New York day in early summer, 95 degrees Fahrenheit and 90 percent humidity. A woman I had met at a party a few weeks earlier had an extra ticket. She was taking dance classes at a studio on Broadway, a block or two uptown from the Beacon Theater. I was to meet her there. The room wasn’t air conditioned, temperature well over a hundred. I nearly passed out from the heat as I watched the streamlined bodies, limbs and torsos glistening with sweat, men and women moving through the air in ways I couldn’t imagine as possible. 

I had never seen anything like this, another form of existence, a shocking form of existence. Many of the people there 

were professional dancers. My friend Carla wasn’t.

The performance we went to was Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had recently discovered the Mendelssohn music and enjoyed it. I remember that early on, a girl in the corps fell. It was as if I had been slapped—I had always thought that dancers couldn’t fall, that it was physically impossible, as if they had glue on their toe shoes, or were protected by some invisible net, as at the circus. This made me pay attention more closely. Afterwards, Carla, knowledgeable about dance, was relatively dismissive of the performance. This was 1977, the height of the dance boom. Balanchine was still alive, 

and most performances were sold out.

Fast forward to 1989. Balanchine has been dead six years. The company is getting highly negative press, even in Vanity Fair. It’s not clear this enterprise will continue much longer. I decide I need to go back. And I am riveted.

The piece that captured me, that made me an NYCB and Balanchine devotee for life, was Episodes, one of Balanchine’s modern, leotard ballets. Webern’s music is astringent, seemingly without a beat. I felt that if someone could choreograph to this music, the least danceable music imaginable, and make it come alive, they were indeed a genius. Balanchine could still do this, six years after his death, thanks to his dancers. When I look at the program now, which I still have, I see that the cast included Maria Calegari, Diana White, Albert Evans, and Wendy Whelan. The thing is, Episodes is more striking, more modern, than nearly anything being created in 2014.

None of this proves anything, really. Except that truly great art, art that catches the eye and captures the soul, is eternal. This is something far beyond the comprehension of those whose business is the marketing of art. There is, after all, a difference between Rembrandt and Jeff Koons.   

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be. . .

Then again, maybe it is, a mixed emotion, part fondness, part regret. Thinking about the Mudd Club, Danceteria, all the other clubs and bars I used to hang out in from the late 1970s into the 1990s, it occurs to me that we were all seeking an elusive sort of excitement. Sometimes we even found it, for a night.

If you were to ask me, would I want all that time back, all those nights spent drinking to excess and pursuing women, I would say, “Of course.” Perhaps I might have done something useful with that time, read more, written more, had fewer hangovers. But I wouldn’t want absolutely all of it back.

The places I’m talking about were for the most part in Lower Manhattan: Barnabas Rex, Puffy’s, the Mudd Club, then all the places in the East Village, Le Canapé (where we used to close the shades after 4AM and drink past the dawn), Telephone, Counterpoint. Then later, uptown there were City Grill, O’Neal’s, Josephina, the old oak bar at Café des Artistes. All gone now, my favorite drinking establishments. Maybe you really can’t go home again, at least not from the same places.

As for writing, Dark Angels may have been initially conceived in the Mudd Club, but the nightclub depicted in the novel more distinctly resembles Area and MK, two conceptual creations of the 1980s. The plot has nothing directly to do with that era, as it takes place in the near future, but there are certain parallels. Remember what Avenue C used to look like?