WHY ON EARTH DOES GOD HAVE TO PAINT?
Centripetal Art.
By Rafael Chodos; Based on Selected Works and Writings of Junko Chodos. Giotto Multimedia, 2009. 336 Pages. ISBN: 978-0-9704042-8-2.
Price: US $35.00
Book Review by Peter Gimpel.
ORDER THIS OUTSTANDING BOOK FROM RED HEIFER PRESS, or GiottoMultimedia.com
The coffee table art book, traditionally the prestigious but impenetrable refuge of stuffy art critics, the best of whose texts are often unjustly and ironically condemned to serve as drab wallpaper to the beautiful reproductions they were intended to elucidate, has now been superseded. Hail the art book in which paintings and text form an indelible bond of passion, wonder, discovery and self discovery! The inventor of this welcome innovation is none other than Rafael Chodos (already praised on this site as the author of a monumental legal reference work on Fiduciary Duties), who has lately co-authored with celebrated Japanese artist, Junko, a jewel of an art book entitled, Why on Earth Does God Have to Paint?
In all truth, the idea of the art book as literature is not without precedent—notably Henry Miller’s delightful “To Paint is to Love Again,” in which that icon of literary sexual liberation and master of American prose recounts with chaste and joyous passion his love affair with watercolor painting. But Miller’s approach to painting was that of a child, exulting in the pure sensations of color and form and the simple joy of creation. Rafael goes much deeper, seeking, as the title suggests, the purpose and underlying meaning of the very act of creating. Why does G-d have to paint? What is it that impels a caveman or a Giotto or a Junko to paint—as though G-d needed someone to paint through? The question is enriched by a counterpoint of Junko’s own commentary, interlaced with excerpts from her diaries.
Rafael doesn’t actually answer this question, but by posing it opens up a whole new approach to the appreciation of modern art. The unexpected circumstance that Junko happens to be Rafael’s beloved wife of 38 years, and that Rafael confesses to being no more than a novice in matters of art only enhances our interest. This is not merely because Junko is a great artist, but also because Rafael’s years-long quest to understand Junko’s mind and her work gives him, and us, a unique perspective into the creative process witnessed not merely as an act but as a way of life. Rafael sees this process as beginning in the artist and continuing (rather than ending) in the viewer; whereas for Junko, the process really begins with the object—or “visitant”—that happens to catch her eye, enter her consciousness, and become one with her—working on her, changing her, and even healing her. Perhaps because Junko sees the finished work as a medium, and the viewer’s role as penetrating through to its transfigured essence, and perhaps because of the resemblance of that penetration to meditation, Junko calls her art “centripetal.”
Indeed, viewers of Junko’s art often confess to having been drawn in to something quite beyond the extraordinary colors, forms and media of which it is comprised. There is no convenient way to explain the powerful effect Junko’s creations can produce on our emotions, for what she creates does not typically belong to our world, but almost exclusively to hers. The wonder is that in contemplating her works face to face, as I did some years ago at the Long Beach Museum of Art—works which can strike one at first as inscrutable and overwhelming—I was transformed into something of an empath, able—almost beyond endurance—to feel the awe, the pain, the love, the torments, horrors, and aspirations of another being.
Surely this is what great art is and does. And it is here that I disagree with the term “centripetal” as a characterization of Junko’s art. For all great art, whether visual, musical or literary, shares this quality of drawing the reader/viewer/listener out of him or herself and into a brave new world of alien yet intimate revelation. As I have been moved by Junko, so have I been moved by Van Gogh, by Klee, and by Botticelli. It makes no difference to me that in Junko, or in Klee, the conventional frame of reference has been surpassed or even destroyed. It is not in the conventions that poetry, art, or greatness are to be found. And while I agree with Rafael that Junko’s work has little in common with the deconstructionist wave that swept over art from cubism—really from impressionism—onward to the present, I see the difference vastly more in terms of inspiration than mere psychology of perception. For whereas Junko’s contemporaries generally labor in a world devoid of hope, meaning and purpose , Junko, having mastered all the latest, most sophisticated tools of artistic technology, extracts pathos, urgency and regeneration from even the most humble detritus of nature and civilization. This places her squarely within the humanistic tradition so boorishly tabooed by our times.
Thus, for me it is not in Rafael’s conclusions but in his explorations that the uncommon value of the book lies. Among them, his tenderly searching account of how and from whom he learned to love and strive to understand art—not just Junko’s, but all Art—form pages worthy to be anthologized and handed down through the ages.
The Trouble with Wagner . . .
By Peter Gimpel
It is both ironic and sad that Randol Schoenberg, who argues that Wagner’s anti-Semitism is separate from his music, should hold that Jewish culture is inseparable from German culture! (www.jewishjournal.com/cover_story/article/why_wagners_music_deserves_a_second_chance_20090218/ ) Schoenberg is wrong on both counts. Wagner’s ideology of Germanic supremacy and Judeophobia is part and parcel of his operas, as anyone knows who has read or listened to the text of his self-penned librettos. Less obvious to the millions of Jews who—thanks in large part to the Nazis—grew up without their Jewish heritage—is the fact that Jewish culture—including music, poetry and the decorative arts—is essentially focused on Scripture, Law, Divine Service, and Kabbala. What Randol is referring to when he speaks of “Jewish culture” is the product of assimilation and Haskala—the so-called “Jewish enlightenment” that affected principally the Ashkenazi, or Yiddish-speaking, Jews of Middle and Eastern Europe (sizeable contingents of Jewish Civilization, notably the Sephardic, Italian, Persian, Iraqi, Yemenite, and others, developed just fine without Germanic assistance).
The Jewish attraction for secular learning certainly produced some wonderful gems, but had little to do with genuine Jewish culture, which is awesome, immense, stunningly beautiful, and largely inaccessible to the uninitiated. The two cultures, Ashkenazi-Jewish and Germanic, have been historically intertwined ever since Jews settled in the Rhine Valley in the 9th Century C.E., and the reciprocal influences of Jews and Germans have been felt in several areas—not least, the occasional slaughter of the former by the latter. However, intertwining is not merging. The two cultures are anything but “inseparable.” In fact, their respective strands are easily identified and quickly disentangled. Had Wagner known more about real Jewish culture, he might have been less worried about the “contamination” of Germanic art by Germanized Jews. The irony is that Randol has fallen into the same error as Wagner, the difference being that Wagner was ashamed of this “contamination,” while Randol is proud of it.
All this would be purely academic, were it not for the fact that Los Angeles has been setting the stage for its first “Ring Festival” with a carefully planned propaganda campaign replete with all the revisionisms, travesties and machinations deemed necessary to prune Wagner’s monumental cycle of its embarrassing associations and to stroke the city’s large, Holocaust-conscious Jewish population into meek acceptance. The machinations range from the sublime (a festival dedicated to music composed by victims of the Holocaust cannily mounted just prior to another festival dedicated to the guy who helped inspire their transformation into victims) to the ridiculous (the Eli Broad Foundation’s much touted donation of six million dollars—$1.00 for every Jew murdered by the Nazis???), as well as a number of revisionist articles like Randol Schoenberg’s, geared to absolving Wagner of his due share of responsibility for the Nazi mystique. According to most published comments ( see, e.g., http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/02/los-angeles-ope.html ), the principal travesty is Achim Freyer’s outré costume and set design (read Carie Delmar’s review and commentary on Das Rheingold, www.operaonline.us), obviously intended to mask Wagner’s Germanic chauvinism and to divert public and critical attention from his obsessive Judeophobia. Such massive efforts, however, are belied by our City’s groveling attempts to turn what ought to be a raising of musical consciousness into a Germanophile media circus with dissembled shades of Bayreuth. The end result cannot be anything but the glorification of the man Wagner, along with all that he stood for, and all that his legacy (according to many sources) still stands for.
Though I, personally, have never been moved to ecstasy by Wagner’s music, I respect his musical genius and fully understand and respect the enthusiasm of his musical admirers. I attended only one live presentation of his work, a so-so production of Parsifal with a translation of the dialogue projected onto a screen above the stage. I came away feeling physically nauseated by the jarring contrast between the beauty of the music and the pathologically childish absurdity of the text, which seemed more appropriate for Marvel Comics than for a classical work of art. In a highly perceptive blog (http://netnewmusic.net/reblog/archives/2008/11/ring_festival_l.html ), David Ocker explores this comic-book affinity with subtle humor while arguing for a populist “Wrong Festival” to counter L.A.’s elitist “Ring Festival.” (On the other hand, Carie Delmar of OperaOnline.US makes a strong case for diversifying the Festival from within: read her eloquent protest, “Carie Delmar Sounds off on LA’s Ring Festival,” at http://www.operaonline.us/.) However, after viewing Ocker’s gallery of comic-book Valkyries, I have come to believe that he is on to something of more intrinsic significance: the definitive production of Wagner’s Ring will be, not with surrealist sets and deconstructionist costumes, but with characters and scenery derived from action comics—the male heroes tall, athletic, and muscular, the heroines all statuesque and scantily clad alla Lynda Carter. Their musings and conversations will be projected inside text bubbles, just as in the comic strips. The villains, of course, will all be represented as Wagner would have wanted them: twisted, repulsive caricatures with exaggerated Semitic features.
Naturally, such a crass production would have been out of the question in Wagner’s Germany, where good manners and outward propriety were paramount among the educated classes. But here, today, in Los Angeles? What’s to prevent it? Such a production would be sufficiently campy to attract vast new audiences to the seductive world of opera. It might also help Wagner fans understand that the composer’s disreputability lies not in some separate capsule of personal failings and foibles, but in his having created a mantle of artistic and pseudo-philosophical dignity for comic-book-level ideas of racial supremacy and world dominion—ideas that, once unleashed in all their kitschy finery, would lead inexorably to gas chambers, armageddon, and the eternal shaming of that very cultural primacy of which Wagner was so proud.
Add comment March 20th, 2009
With his first published book of poems, Salmon Run, British-Columbian / GitXsan artist Michael Blackstock (Ama Goodim Gyet) displays a remarkable poetic inventiveness and literary talent. Though Blackstock’s poems do not yet, as a whole, display a complete mastery of matter and form, they do reveal a Protean imagination, grace, thoughtfulness, humor, and a spontaneity of vision not found in many of his more polished, university-published contemporaries.
