John Coplans on the Pasadena Art Museum

For a brief period in the 1960s, the Pasadena Art Museum (PAM) in suburban Los Angeles staged a sequence of sensational exhibitions of then-contemporary art. New Paintings of Common Objects (1962) is often cited as one of the first Pop Art shows. Exhibitions of Andy Warhol, Richard Serra and Donald Judd followed. Shocking as all this seems now given the staid, conservative character of Pasadena, it was possibly no less so at the time -- especially when director Walter Hopps, with little staff, money or international profile, delivered the world's first ever retrospective dedicated to Marcel Duchamp (seen above).

Within a decade, Hopps and a parade of replacement directors had been fired. The museum was hemorrhaging money and stood on the brink of financial ruin. Having rebuffed the institution's approaches in the past, wealthy capitalist-turned-collector Norton Simon intervened in the spring of 1974. Simon struck a devil's deal; he agreed to pay off PAM's debts on the conditions that 75% of the institution's wall space would be dedicated to his personal collection of Old Master paintings. The existing board of trustees would also be summarily dismissed and a new board created with 10 trustees; Simon would effectively get to appoint 7 of them. This plan was unanimously approved in April 1974. By November 1975, Pasadena Museum of Art had been renamed the Norton Simon Museum.



Artist and critic John Coplans published a scathing chronicle of these events in Artforum in February 1975 called "The Diary of a Disaster." While blame for the loss of Pasadena's then only contemporary art venue is broadly apportioned, Coplans offers a broader indictment of the structure of the artworld. Writing in the wake of Watergate, he puts it like this: "Ever more clearly today, especially because of recent developments on the American political scene, we understand that our institutions depend upon the character and behavior of those individuals who constitute the leadership."

What Coplans catalogues are the routine abuses of the museum's autonomy and institutional controls by power-hungry trustees or by unscrupulous directors who leveraged the museum's collections to raise the prices of their own collections. We read how Eudora Moore, head of the Museum's influential Art Alliance, sabotaged the budding contemporary art agenda with her populist shows of "California Design" that occupied the walls for long periods of time and diverted curatorial energies. Worse still was the tenure as president of the Museum's board of trustees of wealthy collector Robert Rowan who Coplans describes as "one of the most equivocating people it has ever been my misfortune to meet." Rather than hashing out decisions through the designated forum of the board meeting, Rowan mystified his office, secluding it like a latter day Louis XIV into his own private spaces: "He preferred to meet more informally, usually at the Annandale Golf Club, or at his own house. There were lengthy strange meetings, usually over lunch or around social affairs, at which nothing was really decided. Hating arguments, fearing any bad publicity, he either put off decisions or made them privately." This kind of absolutist, personalized rule abrogated the few checks and balances built into the art world, keeping the other board members unsure of how they could act and thus docile.

But, all of this makes for slightly strange reading when we recall that personalized rule is the very kind of thing that Coplans celebrates in the pioneering, maverick tale of Walter Hopps and his single-minded, curatorial vision-making. So, by Coplans' view, the art world seems to work when each category of agent has a dedicated function and sticks to it. Artists make art, curators curate and boards of trustees put up the cash and shut up! Should we really be surprised when, as ever, it doesn't quite work out that way?

1983 (A Merman Should I Turn to Be)

Aside from being the name of an exceptionally fine song by Jimi Hendrix, 1983 is the year of publication for a surprisingly persistent array of scholarly works. Old Ken has no real point with this, but I offer you the following list. Please feel free to update or editorialize as you will!

Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard UP, 1983)

Svetana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983)

Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge UP, 1983)

Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford UP, 1983)

Anthony Vidler, Follies: Architecture for the Late Twentieth Century Landscape (Rizzoli, 1983)

Yellowstone

"No more does man know Yellowstone than he knows himself." That is what Sigmund Freud said when he visited one of America's most famous national parks during a whistle-stop tour of 1905.



Okay, you're right. Freud didn't really say that. Bertold Brecht did. Anyway, the point is that the Yellowstone is a darn strange place.



It is filled with wildlife ...



... and geological features that seem to be alive. This, I believe, is called a travertine mound, formed of calcium carbonate projected upward in water from geothermal activity below. The colors are produced by algae that love this curious chemical preparation.



Here we see another such accretion masquerading as a Jean Dubuffet painting.



But, if we riff on the mud, dirt and other humus-like materials used by that painter, then we might say that—like Dubuffet—Yellowstone is a geography buff's delight.



Check out those basalt columns!



Take a gander at these towers flanking the frozen waterfall! Well, all Old Ken can say is that seeing crazy places and tall towers like these make me want to tell some equally tall tales. Fun times!

Anger/Pater

Talk of truth being stranger than fiction barely covers the odd case that is Kenneth Anger. A child star in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Anger has alternately been a maverick maker of avant-garde films; an intimate of "the Great Beast," Aleister Crowley; a lover of Manson family murderer Bobby Beausoleil; and chronicler of Tinsel Town tittle-tattle in his notorious (and banned) volumes of Hollywood Babylon. His films like Scorpio Rising cut between images of gay biker culture, Nazi propaganda and a Sunday-school film of Christ on the way to Calvary -- all while set to the tune of '50s pop songs like "He's a Rebel." Mick Jagger provided the droning soundtrack to Anger's truly disturbing film Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969), while Anger reportedly put a debilitating spell on Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin when the guitarist failed to produce a serviceable soundtrack for the film Lucifer Rising.

What are we to make of this? Is it all so much ghoulish, drug-addled nonsense? Perhaps cynical, headline-grabbing sensationalism?



Old Ken recently had occasion to ponder said questions while screening Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-1966) and perusing bits of Hollywood Babylon, a book that begins with Anger marveling at the ruined set of D.W. Griffith's epic film Intolerance (1916), which we see above in full glory. Under the "Egyptian blue" skies of southern California, Anger muses, an unspectacular cast of petty businessmen and capitalists-turned-filmmakers had dared to recreate Babylon -- to restage the triumphs, the excesses and the cruelties of ancient Mesopotamia. And lured by these baldly commercial business interests, chiselers and chancers from small towns across the country descended on Hollywood where they were transmutated into truly luminous beings: stars.

Among academics, the "star system" is now a standard topic in respectable cinema history. More broadly, we are largely inured to thinking of movie actors as "stars," "idols," or even "gods" of the silver screen. As I engaged with them, I began to feel that for Anger, a character with some very peculiar ideas about gods and idols, these seem to be more than mere facons de parler. What his writings and movies seem to explore is the premise that films are magical spells and that actors should thus be understood as stars in a much older esoteric or Hermetic sense -- as celestial beings connected to elemental forces and wielding supernatural powers.



Consider Anger's entry on Lana Turner in Hollywood Babylon. The chapter begins with a graphic description of the physical, er, endowments of the mobster who Turner took as a lover. We read of their exuberant love-making, her beatings at his hands and ultimately his grisly stabbing by her traumatized daughter. If read literally, all of this might sound like some lurid gossip little better than the tabloids (from which it was, in fact, likely harvested). But, if considered in a more general way, these stories of outlandish virility, sex, violence and explosive rupture of kinship systems read like something directly out of Aeschylus and the "primitive" gods of pagan antiquity.

This, I think, is the point. Anger wants us to pay attention to the ways in which these cinematic luminaries command the power, influence and even language of ancient, pagan beings. Telling in this regard is a journalist's description of Lana Turner which Anger quotes: " 'She is made of rays of the sun, woven of blue eyes, honey-colored hair and flowing curves. She is Lana Turner, goddess of the screen. But soon, the magician leaves and the shadows take over. All the hidden cruelties appear. She is hounded by vicious reporting, flogged by editorials, and threatened with being deprived of her child... '" The woman described her could be Cassandra or other tragic heroines; the point is that such mythical, pagan beings have been (in some important sense) resurrected on and through the silver screen.



Now, there is a rich tradition in the history of art of thinking about these kinds of revivals -- what the famous German cultural historian Aby Warburg called the "rebirth of pagan antiquity" in the Renaissance. From Old Ken's perspective, though, the most powerful of these is to be found in the notorious account of the Mona Lisa set out by Walter Pater in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873). Because I think this happens to be one of the strangest and most incredible descriptions of an artwork ever, I will quote it at length. Let us marvel together:

"The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.

"She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea."

What I think Anger's films are trying to do, though, is not just to symbolize these strange forms of persisting divinity but to summon them. This helps to explain the strange nature of the "plots" of many of Anger's more explicitly occult films like Inauguration... and Invocation..., both of which depict rituals and ancient deities. The films are, as Anger stresses, spells that act to connect with and summon these powers.

Family, Resemblance

Here you see a photograph of my grandmother, Edith Hunter, giving a talk at a luncheon for Vermont Public Radio (VPR) commentators. After a celebrated career -- and after a celebrated career as a commentator -- my grandmother "retired" from VPR several years ago. She's struggled with her health especially in the past year. But, feisty as ever, she began to stage a remarkable recovery over the course of the past fall. She took up her commentating again and, less than a month ago, had hip surgery. So, here she is, post-operation, giving a speech to an audience of fellow commentators.

But, how do you know that this is really my grandmother and not just some photograph I picked up on the street or found on the internet? Do you want to say that there is some kind of family resemblance to Old Ken? If you are committed to saying this, I think my grandmother may wish to have words with you. (Be forewarned!) Alternately, if you know my grandmother, you could appeal to your knowledge of her or perhaps to other images of her and then assess (presumably using criteria of resemblance) whether or not this particular picture likely also designates her. For usually, we like to think, photographs do designate particular persons.



But, what about images like these?



Which one better resembles a unicorn? As philosopher Nelson Goodman pointed out over forty years ago, this is a nonsensical question. There is no such thing as a unicorn, so a picture can't resemble one. But it is no problem to say that there is a certain category of "unicorn pictures" that visualize unicorns or other mythological beasts; the history of art is full of them. And, Goodman argues, so too it goes for portraits. It's easy enough to distinguish between a man-portrait from a woman-portrait -- or a portrait from a landscape -- without having any knowledge of whom these portraits might designate. Or, indeed, if they designate anyone at all. Plenty of those can also be found in the history of art.



Take this portrait of the stern looking fellow before which my grandmother was speaking at the VPR commentators event. Does it designate someone (as we know that man-portraits need not do any more than landscape-pictures need designate some particular piece of real estate)? And if it does designate someone, who is it? I put the latter question to my grandmother and here is her response: "Don't you recognize Daniel Webster!!!! 'It is a small college but there are those who love it!!!' Shame on you."



"So much for Old Ken's fancy-dancy mumbo jumbo," you may be saying. Clearly, he should be spending a little more time studying the Great Men of nineteenth century American History and a less time with those funny ideas about images. But, hang on. What's this? It's a follow-up from my grandmother on this very topic:

"I cannot let Daniel Webster rest until I have explained to you why Daniel Webster is so important to Dartmouth College. In 1819 a group tried to take over Dartmouth and turn it into a state run college. The group that wanted to keep it private hired Daniel Webster to represent them and argue their case. It was at the beginning of his
career, I think. He ended his argument with these now famous lines: 'It is a small college, but there are those who love it.' I was talking with John Wright who graduated from Dartmouth and he said he did a lot of research on Webster, and nowhere are these lines actually written down in his writings."

So, in addition to our range of Daniel-Webster-pictures that we have to trust actually resemble Daniel Webster (trust, because even if we could exhume his body, it would not provide any interesting evidence regarding his physical appearance in the nineteenth century), we also now have a class of Daniel-Webster-statements, which we want to associate with him and his ideas even though we don't have textual evidence to prove it. The historian's dilemma!