From the House of the (not yet) Dead

 

 

There is no question that artists (unlike, say, cartographers) are entitled to their own singular vision of reality. Some visions are striking, original, and unforgettable (Mantegna's Lamentation of Christ, Bacon's Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Basquiat's Boxer). Some are bland, kitchy, or derivative (Rococo paintings and sculptures, the works of Barnett Newman and Philip Pearlstein). And some are so badly undermined by their hilariously misconceived titles that their artistic merit (if they have any to begin with) is simply irrelevant. Rodin's most famous sculpture is one example. Are we to believe that a man sitting on a stone toilet bowl in anticipation of bowel movement represents a man immersed in thought? With 30+ years in academia I can claim to have seen many people, colleagues and strangers, immersed in thought. Some were reclining in an armchair, some were lying on an office sofa, some were strolling through a park or sitting on a park bench, and some were staring at the screen of their computers. None of them, however, looked like they were about to discharge the contents of their colons.

Had Rodin titled his sculpture The Defecator, it could be seen as a brutal pre-Duchamp commentary on the banality of representational art. Alas, Rodin's title makes this sculpture an embarrassment to museums and other institutions which proudly display copies of this work as if it were on the same level with Hellenistic sculptures, the sculptures of Michelangelo, or those of Brancusi and Giacometti.

I don't want to end this bit of aesthetic whining on a sour note, so I offer below a credible image of a thinking being.  Not the only kind of a thinking being, of course, but one who has been my friend for more than thirteen years, and whose image combines thought with mood and character - the combination which is rare (if not entirely absent) in the history of representational art.

                                                    *                      *                       *