My Masthead

Perpetually posted at the top of my page is George F. Watts' painting 'The Minotaur' (1897). I am attracted to the piece in the most general aesthetic way possible; perhaps more importantly, it brings up some questions concerning interpretation that I think are worthy of addressing: how things become charged with meaning and how much the artist's interpretation counts.

When I first came across the painting (in the form of a small digital reproduction, much as it is presented here), I was struck by the pathos I felt for this character, most often portrayed as a monster. Here was an image of the infamous Minotaur, an accidental abomination locked away from the world, forced to live like an animal and feed on live humans, shown not battling Theseus or advancing upon a virgin but hanging out in his labyrinth, staring longingly out over the seas, alone. And what is that in his hand? Some fabric, a keepsake from his mother, perhaps? This vague blur of lightness: the beginning of an eternal spiral of personal concepts and metaphors. I found the picture beautiful and well-executed, and of course I related to the solitude and sadness I saw. We are behind him, looking in the same direction he is, gazing out with him, as opposed to being faced with the monster, the adversary. It fit in so well with my scheme that I decided to adopt it as the primary image on my blog, which I made primarily to make contact, a kind of lonely reach as I stare out into the world from my prison/home. I mean, I only felt like that a little bit, but like I said 'oh the humanity' etc.

Eventually it came to me that the thing under his big paw was a small crushed bird. When I decided to find out where the painting is currently displayed, I found some information regarding the artist's intentions, and they weren't exactly in line with my own.

According to the Tate's website the work was inspired by W. T. Stead's famous articles on child prostitution. Watts used the Minotaur in its persona as virgin-devourer, "gazing out to sea in eager anticipation of his prey; the small bird crushed by his mighty fist symbolizes the purity and vulnerability of youth." Victorian web prints the actual caption hanging with the painting: "In this terrible figure, half man, half bull, gazing over the sea from the battlement of a hill tower, we see the artist's representation of the greed and lust associated with modern civilisations."

No matter how much I believe in the equality of perspectives or the ultimate openendedness of virtually all art, when I hear the artist's aims clearly stated it is impossible for me to ever see the work again without that firmly in my mind. Thus the symbol became defective. I considered removing it, finding another "perfect" picture to begin each entry. Then I decided to keep it, but not to share this new information regarding its meaning-- I wanted to use the image in my way, and didn't want my readers' impressions of the symbols contaminated by the ideas of its artist or his present representatives (as it had been contaminated for me). Now I'm thinking my little story is better than no story at all, and that it's interesting that, due to this experience, the symbol for me has changed. Every sign is an infinity of signs; this painting also represents, among all possible things, the everlasting variety of meanings a given work of art can have.

The Forger's Place in Art History

I can't think of any topic that could tell us more about aesthetics and the nature of what's good versus what's not than art forgery. For example, that the value of a painting could go from almost $12 million to zero in a single year is astounding, and filmmaker/essayist Errol Morris tells that whole story in seven installments, complete with fantastic graphics, on his blog. The article's springboard is the fact that two authors both published books on Vermeer forger Han van Meegeren earlier this year, with no relation to or awareness of each other. Comparing and contrasting their two distinct approaches by interviewing each author, while supplying relevant information from the books and even supplementing it all with his own research, the article is far more interesting than either book, both of which I found boring and decided not to finish. Morris' article traces the various strands that allowed van Meegeren's fake Vermeers to find a virtually unquestioned place in art history. These include a respected, aging art critic in need of a last big find, a Nazi-busting cop with a debt to settle, the cultural self-image of the Dutch people, and the artistic zeitgeist during the Third Reich.

The most fascinating aspect of the story is the fact that to almost everyone today van Meegeren's fakes appear both bad and without the slightest resemblance to Vermeer, while at the time the collective perception was exactly the opposite. How were they fooled when it seems so obvious to us? van Meegeren was using the zeitgeist; he was making Vermeer a Nazi. More significantly, how do we know we can't be taken in the same way; that we aren't?

The whole article is long but very worth it for anyone concerned with aesthetic ideals/standards and how/why they change.

Free Flex Fables

I don't cruise blogs often, which is why I have been long oblivious to Comicsworld, where you can download a wide variety of comic books as PDF files for free.

A lot of the material available here is out of print, expensive, and very hard to come by, so the site is a boon to people who want to read certain issues for whatever reason, for instance Alan Moore's take on the UK's Marvelman, here called Miracleman, which will supposedly soon be available from Disney-owned Marvel.

I'd recommend even more highly the fantastic "mainstream psychedelic" miniseries Flex Mentallo by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. In many ways the work is both a reaction to and an extension of the comics climate of the time, in the aftermath of the psychologically analyzed heroes and pushed-to-the-max stories of the 1980s. Anyone interested in superhero subversion of the Watchmen variety should check this out; it definitely goes one or two steps beyond by ultimately offering a rewarding portrait of the phenomenon and reminding readers that the original point of superheroes was not to offer something to deconstruct but to provide us with personifications of ideas, models for ideals. The series is famously out of print because of legal disputes with the Charles Atlas company, despite the obvious interest of fans and Morrison's own plugs (he has even gone so far as to tell an interviewer it's his favorite of his own work).

This kind of thing is what makes the internet in general and this site in particular great, but the purveyors of Comicsworld take it a little too far for my comfort by posting things that are still in print or easily obtained, which is not as easily justifiable. Nothing, though, could ever diminish the value of this fantastic site (unless of course they started charging, which I guess shows my true colors).

Flex Mentallo originally appeared in the pages of Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, and any fan of the writer will be excited by this miniseries. A quick search for Flex images found me an annotated guide to the series that I haven't really looked at yet. Maybe it's great.