AWED BY PURE ART

anselm kiefer

 

The planets must be in a learning arrangement for me the last few weeks. Yesterday, I watched that Bela Tarr film, Damnation. I didn't know it until I came into relation with others at the coffee shop wine-tasting; I was in something of a mild trance. Awe had overwhelmed me. I stepped in the door in a spell of Awe unaware it was a spell. I had walked out the door at home immediately after the end of the film. It put me in such a state of Awe from the first scene to last that I saw the entire film in a state of metaphorical breathlessness. I was in the presence of art, the real deal art, pure art, art without money its motivation. My need at the moment I thought I could over-ride. I needed to watch the film again, starting that moment. No. I wanted to see friends at the wine-tasting. Out the door I went. Drove to town, walked in the door and it was a huge, tightly packed crowd of the suburban middle-class. A few of my friends were close to the door, so I spoke with half a dozen or so, decided not to have any wine, to keep my last $5 of the month I'd been holding toward the wine-tasting. I didn't want to stay. It was like coming out of a great movie in a suburban shopping center in the daytime, driving onto an interstate to get home at 75mph with a pack of cars bumper-to-bumper, side-to-side like nascar. It was too much psychic energy for me to handle.


I was in my art mind of full appreciation, mind blown to smitherenes discovering an artist I didn't know of. It was like the time I discovered Zhang Yimou's films, Suzanne Bier's films, Kieslowski's films, vonTrier's films, Ole Bornedal's films, one at a time, thanks to netflix. It was like the first time I saw Robert Motherwell's Homage To The Spanish Republic in one of its many forms, the first time I saw a Rauschenberg face-to-face, a Warhol soup can, a Rothko, a Kline. I think it's called inspiration. It causes an in-breath. In-spire. Inspired, I gasp for air, breathe in. I sat inspired for two hours. I walked into a room of people talking over each other as fast as they can go. The door at my back pulled me like a big electro-magnet that picks up cars in junk yards. I tried to resist the pull. I wanted to stay. I drove to town. I skipped the show at Woodlawn for this. For what?  I left the city to get away from the white suburban middle-class and now they've moved into my world that was once the boonies and now is the exurbs, suffocatingly, lowering the water table alarmingly. They've taken over the coffee shop. They've taken over Air Bellows. The artists pay attention to them because they show money and like to have nice things.


I've heard myself defined as "strange" by the ruling class wannabes. They're the management class. They don't know how to do anything. I'm speaking in generalizations that are rule of thumb, and not necessarily accurate. I'm going by looks-like. And using the humor of exaggeration at will. There are exceptions to every rule. The exceptions prove the rule. But they sure do know how to give orders. As long as I've lived here, every time a group of local people get together to do something of a beneficial nature to the community, the white suburban middle class comes in and says, I know what you're doing better than you do. They take over, the local people (white working class) back away and let them do it better. But they don't do anything. They only tell other people what to do. Suddenly they don't have anybody to tell what to do, and that's the end of it. I and everyone who is from the mountains have seen this pattern so many times it can't be counted. They can't communicate with mountain people because nobody tells anybody of these mountains what to do without paying. Off the job, they don't take orders. You get somebody who can't talk without telling somebody else what to do, starting sentences, you-oughta, you-needta, you-better, you-should, you're-supposed-to, and put that person face-to-face with somebody don't nobody tell what to do---words exchanged in the same language but no communication.


I found I couldn't connect with even my friends in conversation. I was so in a zone of Awe that I wasn't even present. The electro-magnet of the night outside the door pulled me to it in my need to breathe. I wanted to get back to the house and see Bela Tarr's mastery again. No amount of empty chatter was good enough to keep me from it. I needed it like a junkie needs a fix. Had to have it. The moment it started I dove into the long, slow first scene that is haunting. It goes on and on with camera in a fixed position, it keeps on going until I wonder where this is going, then the camera very slowly moves to the right and gradually into the story. The man the story followed was not a star, was not a hero, was not even somebody who stood out from the others. He was a kind of everyman in that he was revealed through his increasingly debilitating hopelessness, people saying to him, "you'll come to a bad end." Intense feelings between the characters, complex feelings told visually with minimal talking. The older woman with stark Magyar features and white hair was like the seer of the story, the Greek chorus. She advised him to stay away from "that woman," the woman he was pursuing who was married and wanted nothing to do with him. I paused the film and took a picture of her with my camera.


I thought of keeping the film through the weekend and watching it a couple more times, but decided to send it in Saturday mail to have it at netflix as fast as possible so I can have the next one, The Turin Horse, in the mailbox as soon as possible. And then the next one. A Bela Tarr film festival at home next week. One of my friends I was talking with at the wine-tasting couldn't connect with me being over-whelmed with Awe by a movie about despair. Do I love despair? No. I love art. I have been equally overwhelmed by a work of art about feel-good. I had to say, "I'm not afraid of despair." Despair is a poison word in American vocabulary. It's not positive. Definitely not PC. Best handled with denial. Equal with I-don't-approve-of-violence is I-don't-wanna-hear-of-despair. Depression that evolves into despair has been swept under the rug of denial like everything else that's real, that has to do with authentic living, living one's life. There is a difference between living and posing. Bela Tarr's films are about living. It's the posing films that are made for boxoffice.

robert motherwell,

homage to the spanish republic 172

 

 

 

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DISCOVERING BELA TARR

clyfford still, pastorale

 

 

 

Today I've been in a state of awe most of the day. A few days ago I came upon by chance an interview with Hungarian director Bela Tarr. It was a ten minute or so interview that held my attention every word he said. By the time it was over, I needed to see his films. Found I already had his film Damnation in my netflix Q. I ran it to the top of the Q and a couple days later it was in the mailbox. That would be today. I was fired up with the beginnings of a new painting, Edwin Lacy banjo, Scott Freeman mandolin, from waist up, focus on faces, instruments and fingers. This one is to be like they're standing in front of a yellow Barnett Newman painting. When I'd had enough of painting, I put the disk in the player and sat back to see what was next. In the first scene I knew for a certainty I was in the presence of art unfolding before my face. Severe black and white, high contrast, bringing David Lynch's Eraserhead to mind, though only for the stark white and black.

 

 

It wasn't long before I was seeing Eastern European Existentialism in the raw. I am no stranger to existentialism in that I first read Camus' The Stranger at age 21, in awe that I was reading a novel that seemed like I might have written it. I identified with it so much, the writing indeed felt like I wrote it. I knew nothing about Camus or existentialism at the time. Somebody I'd recently met handed the paperback copy to me the day before I set out by plane for Norfolk, Virginia, to start my two years of involuntary servitude. Camus' writing resonated with me like nothing I'd read. At the base library I found several paperbacks by Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, essays, plays. I devoured them, every one. It all resonated with me like it came from my mind, though a far more intelligent mind than mine, but he carried my own thinking that much. He articulated for me elements that were floating around in the stew inside my head and ordered my own thinking, at least a good start. All through the time in the Navy I read novels by Simone deBeauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre on the French resistance  in WW2, identifying with my resistance to military mind, a continuation of daddy mind. In that time of my life I felt like a black teenage boy in the back seat of a patrol car, hands cuffed behind my back.

 

 

As my reading progressed, I went beyond existentialism to the place that I look back and see that line of thinking limited to the human mind. Eventually, I transcended and don't identify with the philosophy like I used to. It is a word I never liked to use, because it was so pretentiously used on the whole. It almost always sounded pretentious when somebody used the word. Yet, in Europe it was taken seriously. It meant the same as intellectual used to mean. This may be why wherever I go in Europe I'm told by somebody, "You're not like other Americans." I don't know many existentialists among people I've known along the way in America. It's a foreign way of thinking. America is about smiling a lot and making a good impression, selling self with attractive personality. Hopelessness? Deny it. Prozac, Zoloft and a host of other aids help make life more like television where actions are devoid of consequences.

 

 

Bela Tarr's film Damnation put me into a trance of Awe. I didn't realize I was actually in a kind of trance overwhelmed by awe. Directly after finishing it I drove to town to go to the wine-tasting at the coffee shop. I was not there. I walked into a big place jammed with the suburban middle class that I came to the mountains to get away from. I stood there, in effect frozen in place, unable to enter the crowd and start talking politically correct suburban-speak, smile like I'm on tv, a commercial for myself. Why? What am I selling? Nothing. Then why put on the dog? Why be there? After visiting with a couple of friends, I exited and came home. The only thing I wanted to do was watch Tarr's film again. I was in a place inside my head that didn't have room for anything else. I put on my house clothes and settled for another couple hours in Bela Tarr's mind, a fascinating place to go, the mind of a pure artist. The man is a serious thinker. I heard him say in an interview that he makes a film as he sees life. I've an idea he and I see life very similarly. I have my own that is not his and he has his that is not mine. In this film he was dealing with hopelessness. I think I've transcended my own hopelessness. In this world, living by mind, hopeless is the only way there is. It's all in how we adapt to it. In America we tend to deal with hopelessness by denial. I'd guess that's fairly universal.

 

 

The visuals in Tarr's film are there with Fellini visuals, von Trier visuals, Kurosawa visuals. I see it with Fellini's 8 1/2, Pasolini's Oedipus, Kurosawa's Rashomon, von Trier's Medea, Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman In The Dunes, in Tarr's own way, as each of these films is made uniquely in the director's own way. Tarr will hold a scene for a long time. Somebody walks through a still scene from one end to the other until out of sight. This was how he ended it too, the man just walked into the frame from the right and walked through the scene and out the left side. A point was made during the film that characters in a story disintegrate when the story is over. The man going through the story has problems with egomaniac mind, his need to destroy women, eventually ends up in the slag heap of his self. A couple times people told him he would come to no good end. In his debasement, he left the people he was among and walked into the netherworld of slag heaps where he came face to face with a dog. He went down to all fours and barked back at the dog. They barked and danced around each other until the man eventually cowed the dog that went away whimpering. He'd told a woman, another man's wife, that he would do debased things for her. She still wasn't interested. He explained how and why he had murdered his previous girlfriend. Seduction was not his talent. 

 

 

He walked away in hopelessness after learning he had no support from anyone who knew him. In his world he was a self-centered waste of fresh air. I felt like what story there was watched this self-absorbed man, who couldn't connect with anyone authentically, walk out of the story into disintegration. And the visuals were jaw-droppingly incredible. It was a visual abstraction from start to finish. Vertical lines, horizontal lines, squares, rectangles, angles, light and dark. His scenes were long and still, with a little bit of motion, like steam rising from something on a stove, fog outside. He'll have a scene with nothing moving except all the way to the right in the background a small fan turning slowly. In an interview he said that he puts light on the part of a given scene that is the focus of attention. The rest is context. I went to youtube to see trailers to some of his other films. Went to netflix and put them all at the top of my Q. A Bela Tarr film festival will be happening here next week. It's kind of like falling in love to discover an artist whose work satisfies me all the way and leaves me in a trance of awe. It was something like when I first discovered Steve Reich's music. I hear Music For Eighteen Musicians in awe every time I've heard it over the last thirty-five years. It's music I listen to like watching a movie, sit back and let if flow by.     

 

  

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