Books: The Picasso Papers, by Rosalind Krauss

I've never been fond of Picasso; a few of his early blue paintings are pleasing enough, and for a brief moment, when I was writing a short paper on Les Demoiselles d'Avingnon, I became somewhat infatuated with that painting. Similarly, when editing a friend's paper on Guernica, I looked long and hard enough at that picture to find myself attracted to parts of it. But, on the whole, Picasso, for me, is a cold, unfeeling artist, and a shape-shifter more out of necessity than innovation, as each of his so-called styles is really another failed experiment.

In fact, the only treatment of Picasso that I've ever found remotely compelling is from the children's cartoonAnimaniacs, in episode 45 of the first season, in which the three cat/dog siblings barge in on the morose artist in his studio, insisting on a game of Pictionary. Somewhat against his will, they begin to play, but his classical drawing of a guitar isn't recognizable to them. "That's not a guitar!" they whine petulantly; "That's a guitar!" and scribble up a cubist confusion of the stringed instrument. This goes on and on, until Picasso's dealer walks in them and finds the Animaniac's drawings. Mistaking them for Picasso's own, he determines that they are genius, and snatches them all up to hang in his gallery.

Aside from being terribly entertaining television (quite the oxymoron, if you know me), this scenario is brilliant in its comfortable acknowledgment that cubism is just some crazy, experimental bullshit. Enter Rosalind Krauss*, whose Picasso Papers examine only two periods of the artist's career: cubism and the pseudo-return to classical drawing (which she calls pastiche). Krauss' main thrust, though it takes some excavating to suss it out, appears to be that cubism was a genuine form of artistic expression, but the post-cubist return to classical drawing, a pattern of pastiche in which the artist made copies of figurative paintings and photographs in the style of the French neo-classicist portraitist Ingres, was fraudulent, a psychoanalytic reaction against the mechanization of art (brought about by the camera and popularized by Picabia) in which his hand nevertheless behaved mechanically. Krauss uses the unwieldy Freudian concept of "reaction-formation" to express this, adding to her academic stone soup a healthy dose of Andre Gide, including a lengthy expanse on his stories of gold coin counterfeiters, a dollop of Dostoevsky by way of Mikhail Bakhtin, a pinch each of Adorno and Derrida, and other various, unrelated references, just to spice things up.

What stands out, though, is not so much her insistence on academic name-dropping, for that is unfortunately standard issue in these sorts of texts, but her complete inability to understand the artistic process, the artist's creative mind, and the simple legibility of a work of art. Loathe to admit that a drawing could be anything so simple as a drawing—a doodle, a sketch, a study—she insists that every stroke made by Picasso is an intentioned stroke, which mode of thinking enables misreading after misreading (truly, over-reading) of collages and drawings which to me, being raised by an artist and knowing a few others, are very clearly just a mode of artistic play, experimentation, and questioning. Of course, Guernica is the product of years of studied work, not the spontaneous jouissance (to use one of the academy's favorite ridiculous words) of a genius, but these minor sketches and portraits, which Krauss studies as if they were made with an equal amount of intention, are actually no more than exercises, the fiddling around of a hand and mind idle between projects, and engaged in playful conversation with artists and intellectuals both contemporary and bygone.

I'm no fan of the generally backward views of The New Criterion, but in one of its old issues, Roger Kimball wrote a piece entitled "Feeling Sorry For Rosalind Krauss," in which he laments the academic's inability to truly see and thus feel works of art. Of another of her books, he writes, "Few books claiming to deal with art can be more optically unconscious than The Optical Unconscious." As I'm no where near as facile a writer as Kimbell, I will quote him again in wholehearted agreement: "Here is a woman who has devoted her professional life to art and ideas, but who clearly has no feeling for art, and for whom ideas are ghostly playthings utterly cut off from reality. . . Why, she must wonder, do other people seem to care so much about art and beauty when to her it is all an arid, narcissistic battleground? It is pathetic, really. Her writing and ideas are pernicious, but one cannot help feeling sorry for Rosalind Krauss."

*full disclosure: I took a graduate-level seminar with her at Columbia and she gave me the only C I've ever received in my life. If you think that means I have a bone to pick, and that my thoughts on her book are therefore biased, fine.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Ten

Today I stayed home alone with the intent of doing some laundry, or as they call it here, washing. I had just put the first load into the machine (as per our hosts' instructions, on "quick wash") when I realized that there was no dryer, and I would have to use the clothesline out in the chicken yard, which looks something like a twirling television antenna, on a massive scale. The "quick wash" was still going after two hours, when I gave up and instigated a force quit. By now, the blue sky had been swept over with a tropical storm, so I had to hang the clothes indoors while the second load washed. By the end of that (another force quit, this time after only 30 minutes or so), the sun was out again, and I hung all the clothes outside. There weren't enough pins, and a stiff breeze kept blowing our shirts out into the piles of dried corn husk, where the chickens pecked at them with mild interest. Aldo came home and we went to the park, practicing line drills as the sun set. In the dark, the sky broke again, and the rain came, hard. We ran home, but not until after we had finished our drills. In the dark, in the rain, in the nude, Aldo stood under the swinging antenna, pulling down our soaked laundry, while six chicken eyes, and hopefully no neighbors' eyes, watched.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Nine

This evening, we took a jog out to the park where we usually do our stretches, but instead of stopping in the clear grassy field where teams practice their soccer and rugby, we did a bit of exploring, following a narrow path through some trees and over a few bumpy knolls. It was twilight already, and the path led us into an overgrown no-man's land, with dried grasses up to our knees. All that open space, right there in the middle of the city, was completely unused—even for recreation. In the dark, we could hear the horns of cars we couldn't see.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Eight

Today, we woke up at an absurd, dark hour (5:30 AM) to run to the park and practice qigong. The sky was a wide expanse of velvety darkness, punctured by the light of stars, smeared by a streak that Aldo told me was the milky way. We settled in front of the Maori meeting house, a low, long hall carved with the primitive faces—big of eye and tongue—we had seen on the Maori dancers at Polyfest this weekend. We found these demons, designed to intimidate, rather inviting, but when we later told our kiwi friend where we had been, he shuddered, and told us that we ought not have gone there.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Seven

Today I tried to drive. I am a good driver, but I am accustomed to driving on the right side of the street, and today, like all other New Zealand residents, I had to drive on the left side of the street. I have been carefully studying Aldo while he drives, noting that here, one must make tight left turns and wide right turns, but what I didn't realize until I sat in the driver's seat was how hard it is to tell how near the car is to the curb. I nearly sideswiped an entire row of parked cars, and after driving about ten minutes to our destination, I was too afraid to park, and so, I kept on driving. One way to practice doing something that scares you is to do it whilst avoiding doing something else that scares you even more.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Six

Today we drove out to Manukau City, on the southern fringes of Auckland, for Polyfest. The Polynesian teens here are super styled out and remind me a little of the thuggy gay boys you see in New York's West Village weekend nights: half rapper's delight, half skater punk, with hipster flourishes here and there. My favorite look, rather popular among the young men, was the knee-length wrap-around skirt of traditional fabric with a Christian school uniform shirt, blazer, and tie, Maori fish hook hanging out of the Windsor knot, and a Sonic the Hedgehog-style haircut. The missionaries, it seems, were quite successful in leaving their mark. Aldo and I were chastised by a security guard for dancing too suggestively "in front of the children," a pack of hormone-crazed teens who had, unbeknownst to me, been watching us and giggling.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Five

Today, we went to see Jim to ask him whether we can park our car by the empty flat when we're in town. He must be 80 or thereabouts; his house is older—one of the oldest in Auckland—and he gave us a tour. He didn't much want us to park our car by the empty flat, but he did show us the secret room behind the kitchen, where a spice rack is actually a cleverly masked Dutch door. The room was filled with half-finished canvasses, for Jim is a painter, and his art hangs all throughout the house. He caught me gazing at a Byzantine Madonna and Child he had on the wall by the stairs, and said, "Oh, but that's not a painting, of course," perhaps flustered that I preferred it to his own Fauvist oil mashings.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Four

Today, I went to work with Aldo; he shares an office with a number of PhD students who sit in their cubicles working in silence, and there's an empty cubicle next to his where I can sit with my laptop. I was typing away when the silence was broken by canned demonic laughter—the ringing of a mobile phone. I only recognized it as such because when Aldo's mobile rings, it's with the bubbling sounds of a child's laughter. I wonder whether these laughing ringtones are particular to New Zealand; I've never heard them anywhere else.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Three

We live in a nice little shack behind the house of a friendly family. In their backyard, they have a trampoline, a treehouse, and some chickens. Today, I came out of the bathroom, and there were two chickens standing in the middle of our living room. It was easy to make them go back outside, but they had left us two nice little chicken poops on the rug. This is why I am always saying, "Chickens, go back inside your chicken fence," even though Aldo tells me the fence is to keep chicken-eating-creatures out, not chickens in. But anyway, what good is a fence that keeps chicken-eating-creatures out, if the chickens are also out? Chickens, go back inside your chicken fence.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Two

Today, while we were driving on the highway, we saw a man on a unicycle. He, too, was driving on the highway. Also, he was text-messaging. Aldo said, "That is a brave soul." I think the Kiwis are pretty opportunistic about extreme sporting.