Capstone Works: Building A Dream Or Nightmare

There are a few qualities that make particular artists an absolute joy to study. One such quality is continuity between works. Not just a stylistic continuity, but a kind of visual game where the artist reuses symbols, characters, ideas, and even other works as a way of commenting upon their past and their future. I suspect that most of the artists that we consider among the absolute greats quote themselves, in one way or another, and rework the same ideas in different ways. This strikes me as something that an engaged (and an engaging) artist does; self reflection is just an essential part of the process of creation. What's particularly interesting is that this phenomenon is not limited to just one medium, but appears in, as far as I can tell, every medium of expression, ever. Whether it's The Beatles sampling their old music, Ingres repainting whole collections of his nudes into one single erotic fantasy scene, Kurt Vonnegut or Osamu Tezuka including the same cast of characters and archetypes across their novels and comics, or even the constant presence in Final Fantasy games of chocobos, moogles, Biggs and Wedge, and Cid, the impulse to self-reference seems to be nearly universal.

Sometimes an artist will take that to the next level, though, and create a kind of capstone work that summarizes all of the rest of their career and philosophy. These kind of works often draw very consciously upon other pieces in order to construct a kind of mirror that reflects upon the previous material and portal that shows a way into the future for the artist... or, in the case of some artists, a tombstone that signifies the end of their career.

I would like to do a multi-part article series similar to my Ways of Reading Gaga (and possibly overlapping as well--have you seen the video for Marry the Night yet?) exploring some of these keystone pieces and what they tell us about the artists in question, the process of creating art, and why the creation of such works is important.

To start things off, I'm going to delve into a few painters that work with these kind of key pieces as a way of introducing the idea. From there... well, we shall see where things progress from there.

INGRES AND SENSUAL FANTASY

Let's start things out with something a bit spicy, just to keep everyone paying attention. I'm talking about the capstone work of Ingres, his Turkish Bath.



Remember, folks, this article doesn't need my NSFW image tag because this is Fine Art and therefore nothing like the dirty, dirty smut that I was talking about last week!

Anyway.

What are the qualities of this work? Well, note for one thing how Ingres distorts the bodies. There's a lot of stuff going on in this picture, and little of it is anatomically correct. Of course, Ingres does this quite consciously, relying upon his understanding of anatomy to support these complex and often erotically charged warpings of female flesh. Problematic? Oh, absolutely. But it's undeniably virtuosic as well.

Ingres also quite happily warps perspective, just as Vincent and Cezanne do nearly a century later. Look at that lying figure on the left. Now look back at the group of figures on the right. This just isn't working right at all. They would have to be hovering in the air with the space tilting weirdly to make their large scale work with the lying figure's angle. Everything is tilting in a totally impossible way. It's subtle enough that it isn't immediately apparent, but it's undeniable as well: the picture just doesn't work.

The point of all this is to create an erotic dream landscape. Remember how in Inception the spaces can be warped in strange ways while still seeming fundamentally realistic? Yeah, that's what Ingres is trying for here. He's interested in realism only as far as it allows him to create his dream world. The driving impetus for this was probably, of course, the horror of the Napoleonic wars. Ingres's works represent a flight of fancy away from a harsh world. The subject matter reinforces this: he chooses to depict a Turkish bath, embracing an orientalist notion of free Eastern sexuality and sensuality that allows for an escape from European drudgery. He isn't interested in accurate depictions of the Turkish culture so much as he's interested in an idealized fantasy of that culture.

Alright, so now you know what's going on in the painting besides "Implied Lesbian Orgies Are Hot." What makes this a capstone work?

Well, for one thing, it summarizes Ingres's career and ideals. Check out his Grand Odalisque, for example:



We've got the same kind of distortions here as in his other work, the same charged eroticism, and the same desire to create a fantasy landscape. What's more, Ingres actually straight up quotes some of his previous works to make this painting. Check out his Grand Bather:



Yep, she's the one playing the instrument in the center of the bath house picture. He's taken the same basic pose and altered it to fit the new piece. Laziness? Probably not. After all, it's not just a time saving device but also a clever way of highlighting the fact that these works are just illusions. They aren't real at all, but the product of Ingres's oversexed imagination.

Ingres's Turkish Bath therefore reveals his conscious interaction with his previous work. He is reflecting upon his philosophy and his previous paintings and creating a culminating work that cranks the qualities of his previous works up to 11. It's a brilliant summary of the trajectory of his career toward this fantasy world and the creation of a dream landscape in opposition to the harsh realities of Napoleonic Europe. And the quoting of figures says that the elements of the dream are under Ingres's control.

GOYA'S BLACK PAINTINGS

Stared at Ingres long enough? Yes? Feeling all warm and fuzzy inside? I bet you're hoping we're going to move on to another nice, pleasant set of paintings, aren't you?

TOO BAD!



On the opposite end of the spectrum from Ingres is Francisco Goya with his absolutely horrifying, absolutely brilliant Black Paintings. Like Ingres, Goya painted these at the end of his life and they are, in many ways, a distillation and commentary upon his life and philosophy. These are an interesting example of the kind of capstone works that I'm discussing because they don't borrow from existing works in quite the same way that Ingres and some of the other artists I might discuss later on do. Rather, they largely concern themselves with a summary of Goya's perception of humanity after witnessing the brutality visited by Napoleon upon his native Spain, and the ruinous rise of unworthy monarchs after the restoration of independence. He does so by similarly descending into a world of dream, but his is the nightmare to Ingres's sexy fantasy.

Consider "Saturn," above. I put the name in quotes because it's a little uncertain as to just what Goya was depicting. The name, after all, came later from art historians, in a move that strikes me as an attempt to bring what is an otherwise horrifyingly incomprehensible scene into at least somewhat more manageable mythic terms. The anatomy of the titan in the picture flows weirdly and he devours the body of the smaller figure with a manic sort of self horror. Look into those staring eyes and the raised eyebrows: the figure is clearly mad, but he also seems consumed by gut-wrenching terror. That's right, this being that devours humans whole, that has the strength to actually put indentations in the back of his prey (look closely at the way the fingers dig in...) is scared of something.

It reminds me somewhat of that iconic bug-eyed madman Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's "M":



The most unnerving part of Lorre's monologue there is the quick set of shots of crowdmembers nodding in empathy. Not to stray too far off topic, but this is actually a perfect encapsulation of Goya's horror: the idea that this endlessly pursuing inner beast lurks within countless people, perhaps even all of us.

Although "Saturn" is phantasmagorical in nature, this kind of monstrous horror is a theme that Goya considered quite often in his life. His two major print series--the Capriccios and the Disasters of War--show all sorts of crazy scenes of horror and destruction. Some, from the Disasters of War series, are more down to earth, although they retain the Saw-style torture porn focus of "Saturn". And others from the Capriccios are just... well...



Yeah. 1

So, the Black Paintings, in their dark depictions of humanity:



and in their phantasmagorical qualities:



serve as representations and summaries of Goya's career. I think perhaps the ultimate keystone of the series is this large piece:



Look at the way the giants float impossibly, defying gravity in their throes of horror over the dwarfed human riders. Note also the fact that Goya here is, in fact, returning to an old theme. Those soldiers down at the bottom? They're not directly quoted, but it's hard not to see them as corresponding to the soldiers in his Third of May:



The massacre of innocent civilians that Goya so abhorred and protested after the end of the Napoleonic Wars has grown in his mind and become a war of impossible giants, overshadowing all. The real horrors of war have twisted and become something deeper, more primordial, an impossible, incomprehensible force that dwells in everything.

There has been some recent doubt as to whether these works are, in fact, Goya's. I frankly can't say; I'm not a Goya scholar, although I do love his work. I honestly don't know that it matters, though. If these were not Goya's original works, they were the works of someone close to him, and they stand just as strongly as a summary of his ideas and style. They are still, ultimately, capstones upon Goya's work and process, and if they are the work of another, clearly they are the work of someone who thought long and hard about how to pay homage to the master.

WHY CAPSTONES?

What these works show is that a capstone work can be a keystone to a body of works. Yes, the switching of terminology in this article was deliberate.2 A piece that summarizes an artist's career can also serve as a nexus point that ties the other works together into a cohesive philosophy, or recontextualizes them in a way that adds new perspectives. Next time perhaps I'll delve into some artists of other media that more explicitly borrow from their past work in order to create this kind of commentary, but for now I'll leave you to contemplate Goya and Ingres and the way that capstones can be used to construct an entire philosophical facade.

Whether it is a construction of erotic imagination or a construction of unrelenting nightmare is all up to the artist that puts that last stone in place.

As always, feel free to leave comments, complaints, or, best of all, your own interpretations, or e-mail me at keeperofmanynames@gmail.com . And, if you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Xanga, Netscape, or whatever else you crazy kids are using to surf the blogoblag these days.

1 Incidentally, I was originally going to include one of the Disasters of War prints there. I ultimately decided that they were just a bit too gruesome to subject someone to without warning. Some of them are significantly worse than even Saturn up there.

2 Although it only became deliberate as I was writing that sentence. Whoops, looks like this crap is ad-libbed after all.

Sing In The New Year: Helium Vola and Why We Study History

Fur Euch, Die Ihr Liebt is a fascinating little album. Well, alright, maybe not so little: it's a double album full of expansive songs based on, for the most part, medieval lyrics. The band behind the album, Helium Vola, works in a style they describe as "electro-medieval," a blend of choral harmonies, Gregorian rumblings, and synth and drum machine settings that blend together in what perhaps would be best described as a tapestry of sound. 1 And this album is built around an incredible concept:

Love.

Oh, alright, fine, this isn't exactly something new. People have been writing songs about love for millenia, and most albums are probably arguably about love. But that's actually exactly the point upon which Helium Vola's work revolves: contemplations about love are universal. This album isn't quite like other albums about love because it's actually a kind of metacommentary about our understanding of love through time.

It's as though Helium Vola traipsed into a pub one day, walked up to the grizzled old entity History and said, "Hoy, vat du yu tink of love?" (They're German, by the way.) And History turned to Helium Vola with a baleful glare, hacked a few times, lit its pipe, and began to reminisce. And slowly, slowly but surely, other denizens of the pub started to put their two cents in.

Is this sounding familiar yet?

See, this here pub/library/state of the art media center that we're in, complete with the crazy back room, Abraxis the Hideous Armchair Rat, and Lord Humongous over there, represents what us academic, pretentious types like to call "discourse." In my own weird way, I'm trying to give you, the reader, a concrete visualization of the conversations we have about things like media, art, philosophy, and history. The way we do that is by sharing our voices in the pub.



So, what Helium Vola is collectively doing is going out to the pub and collecting a record of the chatting going on. They're engaged in something perhaps comparable to what we scholars call "Historiography," which is essentially a historical analysis of other people's histories. Which is, of course, dizzyingly recursive, but try to stick with me here. Historiography is when you take a look at what other people have written about history and show how our understanding of history itself changes over time. What Helium Vola has done here is treat love songs in the same way. Their songs on this album are meta-lovesongs in that they analyze how our understanding of love echoes through history.

The first half of this two-disc album analyzes love from the perspective of its presence. Interestingly, these songs have a quite diverse tone to them, ranging from the overtly lustful (to the point of being almost self-parodying) Friendly Fire to the longing Blow Northerne Wynd, to the absolutely triumphant Ecce Gratum.

Now, these songs are not in a language I speak, for the most part, or in a language that, well, anyone speaks. A lot of the lyrics are in medieval dialects of German and French, Latin, and Provencal. And yet, the music effectively conveys the emotion of the song. Compare Blow, Northerne Wynd to Ecce Gratum:




We can puzzle out--through some familiar words, perhaps, or the tone of the music--a sense of meaning from these songs and the range of love experiences to which they speak. The implicit argument made here is that these lyrics, despite dating back to medieval times, are relevant to our own experiences.

This is one exceptionally powerful reason for studying the past and our interpretation of events. Interacting with this old material in new ways allows us to connect to our distant cultural ancestors. This is connected, arguably, to the point I made a few days about Christmas: one of the reasons for telling stories of the past, or telling stories drawn from the past, is that it affords us the opportunity to experience and share empathy. And, what's more, it demonstrates that art can resonate despite a lack of direct understanding. Remember how I called Ecce Gratum triumphant? Check out the translated lyrics:

Behold, the welcome and desirable Spring brings back joys. The brightly coloured meadow is in flower. The sun brightens everything. Now let sorrows depart! Summer returns, now the rage of Winter retires.

Now hail, snow and the rest turn to water and flow away. Winter flees and already Spring sucks at the breasts of Summer. He bears an unhappy heart who neither lives nor plays under Summer's right hand.

They who strive to enjoy the reward of Cupid rejoice and take pleasure in honey sweetness. Let us be at the command of Venus, glorying and rejoicing to be the equals of Paris.

The first half of the album is thus based around the traditional theme of love, its trials, its loss, its joy, and so on, and the lyrics are largely matched to the style and tone of the music itself, making the ideas accessible across time and language. The message is ultimately one of unified experience and empathy.

The second half of the album takes that theme and violently expresses exactly why this artistic process is so desperately important. You see, the second half of the album is about the absence of love and empathy, and its results. The music of this half is far more jarring, electronic, and often very strange. Check out the wavering tones of Maylab, for example:



Interestingly, though, although the songs remain largely unified in their darker tone, occasionally the music and the lyrics are juxtaposed together to create a scathingly bitter commentary on the moral abyss that is modern free market capitalism. Consider the mournful and solemn Quan Lo Pet, for example:



The song is soft and sounds almost requiem-esque, a mourning song for England, perhaps. The first, and most obvious, contrast is thus the difference between good old Maggie Thatcher's victorious crowing and the apprehensive but almost resigned tone of the vocalist. The second juxtaposition only becomes apparent if you understand the actual lyrics, which are dedicated to lambasting a less than perfect mistress. So, the song as a whole is a somewhat humorous but ultimately quite grim political invective against the rampant greed of Thatcher's ideology.

Perhaps the most powerful moment of the album, however, comes three songs near the end of the second disc. Come Talore, what can probably be seen as the intro track of the group, doesn't seem to be readily available online, but the other two are:




It's hard for me to truly express how overwhelming I find this. For those of you who don't know, Moorsoldaten is a concentration camp song, 2 and probably the single ultimate historical example of just what a systematic abandonment of empathy and love can do to a civilization. What I find so stunning about this arrangement is that the fade from the wrenching and forceful Darkness, Darkness to the plodding Moorsoldaten creates a sense of personal anguish paralleling historical suffering. TO round it all off with something a little more lighthearted, Helium Vola conclude the album with a song from the Spanish Civil War. Wheeee.

The second half thus makes a second argument for why we study history: to try and contextualize or understand atrocity and cruelty. Perhaps, through art, through music, and through taking the time to listen to the voices of the past, we can avoid the horror and suffering chronicled here. The old saw is true: we study history so that, with luck, we can avoid repeating it.

The first half of the album is thus a setup for the crushing second half, and the second half is thus an argument for why the emotions and experiences of the first half are so fundamental and essential to our humanity. It's a perfectly matched whole, and probably one of my favorite albums of all time. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of this is the presence of the opening song--A Voi Che Amate/Preghiera--at the beginning of both discs. The contrast between the two versions--one warm, the other foreboding--shows how the two albums are two sides of the same coin, and it takes only a recontextualization of material to highlight the complexities inherent to the art. This is ultimately perhaps the greatest message of Fur Euch Die Ihr Liebt. There are common threads in all the music, whether it be the presence of love in the first half or its absence in the second, and although the forms are stunningly diverse, they are all unified by common experience.

This, to me, is why we study history. For all its sufferings and traumas, for all its dark lessons, we can always put that first disc back in and be reminded of the fundamental shared notions of love, lust, friendship, and devotion which echo to us down the centuries.

History--and discourse--is a pub. But it's also a library, and a club, and a place by the fire where you can sit in your favorite chair, swirl your drink, and mutter "bullshit." And this experience is enriched by the presence of more voices, even if they do steal your chair like the unruly vikings they are. Helium Vola has sought to expand the voices by studying history and discovering the deep cultural and artistic value in the past. This is why we study history: to bring those older voices back into the conversation, even if they're just playing on the jukebox in the corner or the Victrola machine that the one-eyed bar tender keeps behind the bar. I have sought, on the other side of things, to make the pub more accessible to people that might not've strayed into its warm confines otherwise and engaged in the conversation. This is why I study history: so that I can understand it well enough to teach it to others, so they can pass on the knowledge and bring others into the pub.

Ultimately it's all about sharing that common understanding of the world. And, hell, we can extend the metaphor to all the other strange stuff I babble about on here. In a way, this can be seen as just a broad argument for why academia exists, and why I want more people to understand the Liberal Arts.

So, ladies and gentlemen, as we ring in the new year, I want to tip my hat to history, and to historiography, and to Helium Vola. It's been nearly half a year since I embarked on this strange adventure, and I'm quite pleased with where Storming the Ivory Tower has gone. For the next few months, at least, I'm going to be cutting back on the posts somewhat. Three articles of this length per week is doable, but it's burning me out at an alarming rate, so I'm going to see how twice a week feels for a while. We'll see how things progress from there.

Otherwise, though, thank you, all of you, for coming along with me for this bizarre experiment. It's been a blast so far, and I can't wait to see where it goes.

As always, feel free to leave comments, complaints, or, best of all, your own interpretations, or e-mail me at keeperofmanynames@gmail.com . And, if you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Xanga, Netscape, or whatever else you crazy kids are using to surf the blogoblag these days.

1 Get it? Tapestry? Ha ha ha ha.

2 But not a Jewish one, as I initially thought and have since corrected. Check the comments for Red Metal Geek's comments on my error.