Recently my husband and I moved away from the home where we lived for more than twenty years and raised our family. I’ve been reading through my old journals, essays, and stories. Among my poems I found this expression of how it felt to live in the center of so much swirling life, and why there seems to be such a vacuum left behind it.
Accepted knowledge is that mammals experience five senses–sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. References are sometimes made to, the sixth sense, a commodity some people believe to exist, and considered by others to be fictitious. When referring to things that cannot be expressed in words, as I have been doing off and on for the past few weeks, I acknowledge both our human capacity for sensual expression and the limitations of that ability. Frequently, feelings fail to transfer in the way we hope when we try to communicate them.
I couldn’t help thinking about this subject again a week ago last Saturday when my husband and I attended the Showcase St. Olaf at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. On that rare and honored moment, Orchestra Hall was filled with a palpable joy. The occasion proved to be both emotionally rich and a pleasurable experience. The written notes published in the Showcase Program illuminated the environment into which each of these lovely and exciting pieces was born.
Sometimes a piece of art can be simple, clean, or pure. But, art does not replicate life or the world as much as it tries to communicate some particular thing about it. This is not a simple, pure, clean, or clear world, and neither are the many dimensions of our lives. In the case of that lovely musical afternoon, the setting, the thrilled and joyous performers, the appreciative audience, and the accompanying written Program Notes all combined to enhance the heartfelt and previously written musical scores that were performed.
A few years ago I studied James Joyce’s novel Ulysses in a class at Hamline University. One question from that class. Did James Joyce try to place himself into the timeline of great literary artists by including acknowledged literary giants (Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare) in his own literature?
If one reads Ulysses with that question in mind, the evidence is present to draw that conclusion. There is also evidence in The Inferno to conclude that Dante associated himself with Homer. The contemporary painters, Glenn Brown and Odd Nerdrum, both list Rembrandt as an inspiration in the development of their own work. Brown acknowledges reproduction as one element he uses in the development of his paintings.
This past Wednesday, Tom Rassieur, the John E. Andrus, II Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, presented “Rembrandt’s Interest in Books on Art,” at Carleton College. Rassieur commented regarding his talk, “Rembrandt was opinionated, but he wrote very little about art. This talk investigates the possibility of discovering his attitudes through comparison of themes, practices, and transitions in his art to the stories, theories, and instructions was found in contemporary books on art.”
According to Rossieur, Rembrandt was an intensely competitive artist. By reinterpreting the works of his most famous contemporaries, Rubens, Tischen, and Raphael, Rembrandt, “took on the competition in his own time.“ Rossieur also stated that, “Rembrandt was associating himself with highly esteemed artists from antiquity,” by using the red, white, black, and yellow pallette used by Apelles of Kos, a well-known, ancient Greek painter, in his own painting, Lucretia.
Rembrandt Lucretia-1666
Minneapolis Institute of Art
James Joyce associated himself with Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer. Dante associated himself to Homer. Glenn Brown and Odd Nerdrum attached themselves to Rembrandt. Rembrandt attached himself to Rubens, Tischen, Raphael, and back on into antiquity. Art exists as a form of expression–to squeeze out, as in exhale, to emit, to give forth, to join.
Themes, Odd Nerdrum
My son, Byron, showed me this weighty, glossy-paged, hardcover coffee table book composed of the printed portfolio of Odd Nerdrum’s work this past weekend. Byron and I discovered Nerdrum together when I saw a detail of his painting, Flock, featured on a cover of Image Journal. I am not a serious student of Nerdrum’s work, but I have looked at enough of it not to be surprised to find much of his work to be thought provoking, often visually unsettling. Nerdrum believes work should be created and experienced sensually. He believes that this sensuality is lost in the modern era.
Nerdrum has included in his book, Themes, a number of prints of his paintings depicting naked people defecating. A number of subjects are at play here, to include freedom of expression. This is certainly sensual subject matter. My first reaction to those pages was to remember the quote from the E. J. Pettinger article in The Boise Review, “Since the Enlightenment the term kitsch has been nearly interchangeable with the term trash. To call an artist a kitsch painter is the blunt equivalent of calling him intellectually vacant, emotionally infantile and creatively derivative.” But, as my drawing teacher once explained to me, the measure of great art lies in its creator’s capacity to express feelings and receive a strong reaction, another way of saying what Nerdrum seems to be declaring by naming himself a kitsch painter in honor of sensuality.
Art - As I See It 