W.W.W.D? (What Would Warhol Do?)

Another morning, another entry. Saw intriguing doco last night: My Kid Could Paint That.

Here's the lowdown: Marla paints abstract expressionist works that take the art world in America by storm. From humble beginnings on the walls of the local coffee shop Marla's work makes it to the major modern art galleries in New York. Stuff she's dribbled paint on is selling for $20,000. Then someone proposes the theory that her work is not her own. The word "hoax" is whispered. Great stuff, right? Thing is, Marla is a four year old girl. Ooh yeaaah. This is a dream come true for people like me. Who doesn't love a hoax, who doesn't love a scandal, who doesn't love a cute kid story gone bad? (ok, maybe that's just me).

Clearly I'm not the only one... Artist and gallery owner Anthony Brunelli is actually caught on tape telling the director that even better than the art itself is the fact that Marla and her little brother Zane look like they could be in a GAP ad. Classy! It should come as no suprise that as a character in the film Brunelli comes across as the most opportunitistic sonofabitch who plays each side against the other. At one point he claims that Marla is a genius then, upon rumours of the hoax, promptly backflips, statinging that his whole hand in this affair has been simply to hold a mirror upto self-righteous modern art. "I specialise in hyperrealist works" he says dismissively, "modern art is really just a sham." This from a guy who spends his time painting pictures which resemble photos.

Things don't get neatly resolved. We never really know if Marla is totally responsible for her own work, but I think you'd have to be foolhardy in the extreme to even contemplate that a 4 year old has any concept of the "abstract" as a counterpoint to the representational given that all kids of that age are struggling to use art to get to grips with the representational world: "I'm painting a picture of the sun, and here's me and here's Timmy and that's my new red truck". At best all you can be sure of is that Marla seems pretty happy to sit around most days pushing paint around the canvas. More than once the film captures Marla telling her father (who, it is rumoured, is the real author of her works) "you tell me what to do" or more painfully, "I didn't touch that one Daddy, that was ALL Zane". Aah, kids, bless 'em.

What she did or didn't do seems pretty immaterial, really. What's most interesting is just how much people have invested in the notion of what constitutes "Art" and "Talent". One collector of Marla's work tells the camera tearfully that her work captures the poignancy of youth - it shouldn't come as any suprise that this particular art lover just happens to be a middle aged woman who teaches art to other middle aged ladies. We see what we want to believe we can see. Art, like religion is all about faith.

The demands of some faiths do, however, boggle the mind. In one of the most amusing scenes a dedicated "Marla collector" talks about the narrative in her work - he sees a green path, a blue door, two shadowy figures at the threshold, a blurred image that resembles a sonogram of a foetus. What, he asks Marla, stonefaced, was she trying to communicate with these images? Mr Collector finishes this anecdote by telling us that Marla only replies cryptically by saying, "I don't know" ("in her sly and knowing way" according to Mr Collector). Now, I don't know about you but when someone says "I don't know" I don't see that as a really, err, cryptic concept. And when 4 year-olds say it it tends to mean: "You bore me, old person, with this constant questioning. Give me a horsey ride and some ice cream and maybe you and I can discuss CareBears, but don't bring up that shit about the blue door again or I'll cry."

So, it's funny isn't it - where/how people invest meaning (not to mention money) in art...

This film touches so delicately on so many interesting ideas without ever whacking anyone over the head with things. First and foremost, the movie isn't so much about the "did she/didn't she?" problem but about a much bigger problem: modern art. One of the subjects interviewed talks about how her mother was so offended by Jackson Pollack because his work seemed to make a mockery of the "little people" (who liked their art representational and straight up); for her mother it was like a big "fuck you" to those people who just enjoyed the simplicity of being able to easily tell if something was good or not. And that's it in a nutshell really - How do I know if it's good if I can't even work out what it's supposed to be? Here's a comment I found in the Salon review of the film which summarises the love/hate relationship the modern public has with modern art:

As New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman discusses in the film, Marla's story appealed to two contradictory popular prejudices. First of these is the idea of prodigal artistic talent as a lottery prize handed out to random toddlers by God. Second is the notion that modern art (at least in its abstract or nonfigurative guises) is a pseudo-intellectual con game that has no standards and conveys no meaning, so the apparent success of a 4-year-old debunks the whole enterprise.

While I was watching this movie I could help but think to myself: "What Would Andy Make of All This?" Would Marla have been one of the new muses at the Factory? Or would Andy have privately schemed to get this little cutie-pie scrubbed out? Is she a further example of his preference for the brightly coloured "blank" canvas? Or would she have been capitalising on his market; outplaying him at his own game with her "GAP ad" cutsiness? I was heartened to discover that Warhol had some real foresight before his death: in a curious move that seems to preempt the existence of Marlas in our future Warhol was in the 80s making art tailored for children (read, displayed a kid height in the gallery). Sean, aged 8, noted that the paintings would look "sort of" good on his bedroom wall at home. Neat, I thought, given that "sort of" is about the only response you can give to Marla and her artistic authenticity.

An interesting side note: In the Salon article a line from New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm - every journalist "is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." Once again, the second? the third? time in as many days that I've encountered someone advancing the theory that writers (of any stripe) are dodgy motherf$%^ers who live to make us hate them. Are writers like the new cops or what?

Reflections (Projections?) On Screens

Happily for me Salon just keeps on giving.

The review is for "What Happens Next: A History of American Screen Writing" by Marc Norman.
More interesting than the book itself are the reflections offered by Laura Miller. In particular:

Writers (of any sort) invoke deep suspicions in the rest of us and ought to be treated cruelly to keep them on their toes [witness, Sunset Boulevard]. Aside from a steady diet of Tuna sandwiches and milk and an indentured space in the darkened cell known as the "Gag Room" (seriously, read the essay) screenwriters were regarded as worse than hacks...

Norman attributes some of this animosity to the essential mystery of the writing process. To the tough, practical, working-class men who founded the movie industry, it looked suspiciously like loafing. "None of them were quite sure what a screenwriter did," he writes, "or even how he did it. Certainly he or she delivered an artifact, a screenplay, that worked or didn't, but where did it come from? ... Did it take them a year to write a screenplay, or only one day and then they waited a year to hand it in? There was no telling because nobody could see the work occur."

And here's something REALLY curious for those interested in literary connections to the cinematic:

Screenwriters have it worst of all because (and Norman really only grazes this point) writing is invisible and internal and movies are all about -- really only about -- what you can see. The movies need writers, and are intermittently struck with the desire to celebrate and enrich this one or that one, but can never entirely trust them, and vice versa. The movies and writing transpire in fundamentally different worlds. Norman winds up his book with a paean to the screenwriter's privilege in getting "to see the movie, first, entire, in their minds," but the whole point of a movie is that it's not in your mind -- it's right in front of your face, 15 feet high. Otherwise, it's a radio play, maybe. Or a novel.

A couple of points here--
There's a striking similarity between the suggestion of the screenwriter having access to the "movie in your mind" first and yesterday's recounting of JK Rowling as having a personal TV set in her head on which she could invent and rerun as many charming stories about Ron's socks or Hedwig's lineage. So, what gives? Writers aren't writing books in their minds but movies or tv shows. That's a pretty fascinating development in the conceptualisation of the creative work of the mind.

And another thing... This article makes the claim that screenwriters are in a bad way because they work with words but the medium for which they are creating "product"cares only about the visual. The suggestion being, what exactly? That telling and seeing are incompatible? That telling what you see is a fundamentally different thing from seeing what you see. Ok, fine. Then what?
What about this question of TRUST. Is this guy/gal doing the work I want them to? Or more importantly - are they even capable of knowing how to tell a story in images by using words? Don't trust a writer (a scriptwriter/ a cinematic writer) to capture something which can only be experienced firsthand. So then, are all these writers inherently suspicious because they take something and make something else from it? The answer is probably, probably. Certainly I'm feeling more suspicious than normal but I suspect that has rather more to do with the narrative lines of James Ellroy. And so, I offer this all too perfect moment at the closing of Miller's article:

from film critic David Thomson:

"a writer is like a divorce lawyer or a private eye: when you want them you have to have them; but later you despise them."

I love the obsessive quality in this characterisation...
And, we ask for them to hurt us. Ouch! That's some cold hard truth.

Big Mouth Strikes Again

Found this on Salon today:

"What happens when authors like JK Rowling can't stop telling their own stories?"
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/10/23/dumbledore/

What's interesting here isn't just that JK Rowling can't seem to keep quiet but that she's meddling in our minds in the most Eggersian way. When Barthes proposed the author was dead I don't think he had any idea that s/he might resurface, but just between you and I, I always had my doubts. When authors take control yes it's annoying but maybe it also tells us something else, maybe it tells us that these people can't stop furnishing their inner world - like obsessive collectors.

The article also makes reference to the "little TV screen" playing inside Rowling's head and how she really ought to keep such daytime dramas to herself. Using the TV screen is an interesting idea - like we're always re-running stuff on there all the time but it's inherrently private. Public stories AREN'T on TV screens they're on cinema screens, in books, controlled by people other than us. But TV? We're in charge of that. Writers have pens and paper, film makers have celluloid - but absolutely everyone, it would seem, has that little tv screen in their head on which they run through their favourite story lines and invent new ones.

PS. Hey, Dumbledore is gay!