The “Spectacle” of July 4th Fireworks Over Washington

Do Spectacular Visual Events Divert Us or Inspire Us to Think?

Each year, Pyro Shows travels to Washington D.C. for the Fourth of July. The east Tennessee company crams its fleet of flatbed trucks with enough pyrotechnics to make the annual spectacle of fireworks on the National Mall more spectacular than the year before.

            After dark on Monday, Pyro Shows will strut its newest stuff (live on PBS), firing hundreds of mortar shells from the watery safety of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool, each time hoping to impress us with new colors and designs, such as cubes, spiral, or fountains.

            It will be pure spectacle.

            As the estimated 1 million Mall visitors crane their necks to watch, they might be surprised to hear that, in some circles of the art world, “spectacle” is a dirty word. For the critics of spectacle, if a million people are fixated on fireworks, they won’t be doing anything to change society. They will only be thinking, “Wow! Look at that!”

           The Fourth of July in the U.S. capital city is a spectacle through and through. During the day, a gala parade marches down Constitution Avenue. Over on the Washington Monument grounds, people attending the Smithsonian Folklife Festival may well notice as well that the U.S. Navy Concert Band, perched on an outdoor stage, does more than just military marches: it also does swing, pop, and rock and roll.

            Years ago, art theorists began to worry about what spectacle does to people. When you have an art object, you have a spectator looking at it, but typically a spectator who is thinking hard about what that object is about. However, in the face of spectacles—such as movies or national celebrations—people don’t use their brains: they sit back and take it in. To use a Marxist phrase, spectacle becomes an “opiate of the people.” This attack on spectacle began in the 1960s, naturally, and it became part of the debate in the visual arts.

           One of France’s left-leaning theorists, Guy Debord, wrote a 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, which argued that society has become numbed into silence by the spectacle of patriotic events, advertising, showbusiness, amusement parks and all the rest. Under the influence of spectacle, citizens became passive, not active.

            In the decades since the 1960s, a more moderate version of this concern about spectacle has evolved. Today it is called “visual culture,” or being aware of how images influence us. Some radical concerns continued, however. Recently a group of art theorists in America has lamented that even installation art, the newest cool thing, has turned into mere spectacle: big, bright, weird and fun installation spaces with a “wow!” factor, not a message of critical thinking.

            This is not the only way to try to understand spectacle, however. An alternative view of spectacle is offered by Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom, whose new book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, is just out in paperback. He presents the case for “performance theory.” Among all species, Bloom says, only humans perform to gain attention. We enjoy seeing others perform, and we enjoy it more when it reveals the effort, skill, and process involved.

            When one thinks of spectacle as making a society passive and non-productive, television definitely comes to mind. How many Americans have their eyeballs glued to “Friends,” “Seinfeld,” or “American Idol?” Far more than join the Peace Corps or help at the soup kitchen. However, according to Bloom, there’s no getting around this desire to be non-productive: our escape into imaginary worlds—books, art, movies, games, and daydreams—is “by a long shot” how we use most of our free time. We are “participating in experiences that we know are not real,” but we enjoy them immensely, he explains.

            Bloom’s synonym for spectacle is performance. “We have evolved to take pleasure from virtuoso displays,” he says. Such displays require the intention of the performer and the attention of an audience. The more the audience recognizes the effort or process behind the performance, the greater the pleasure.

            That is why, research shows, we like real Vermeer paintings more than fake Vermeer paintings that look just as good. “The pleasure we get from an artwork derives in part from our beliefs about how it was created,” Bloom writes. When something is created by “cheating”—like winning a race on steroids—our sense of awe evaporates.

            Today, some social critics and the artistic left continue to remind us that in a “society of the spectacle” we could be entertaining ourselves to death. That may be so—but most of the time it is not the case. Besides, our enjoyment of spectacle seems to be a natural human instinct.

            Who is to say, for example, that people on the Mall will not be thinking critically when they see Pyro Show’s fireworks on Monday, the Fourth? One thought will be, “Wow! How did they do that?” After the spectacle is over, the critical thinking won’t end. A million people will be thinking, “Hmm, now how do I get to the Metro and get home?” The Mall is usually cleared safely in about two hours—a mass spectacle in itself.

China’s Famous Artist-Dissident Released from Jail

The Ai Weiwei Case Reveals the Complexity of “Art as Social Change”

Rarely does the leading political dissident in a country turn out to be its best known visual artist as well. Once again, that is the case with China’s Ai Weiwei, a thorn in the side of the Communist Party ever since he emerged as a trouble-making artist with a world-wide reputation.

            On Wednesday, Weiwei was released from police detention after nearly three months, when nobody knew his fate. His disappearance stirred an international protest by governments and the art world. Few artists in memory have held a regime up to as much embarrassing scrutiny as the 54-year-old designer, filmmaker, architect, and blogger. One art critic describes Weiwei’s work as “social and performance-based interventions,” a good description of what political dissidents have always done.
            And as always, the complex politics of dissent has come into play around the Weiwei case. For a start, his father had been a famed patriotic poet before the Cultural Revolution. To Weiwei's credit, his own creative works have made him a cause célèbre in the international art world. With such stature, he seemed untouchable by the Communist Party, despite his flamboyant art at the Party’s expense. In hopes of generating cultural good will around the world, the Communist Party let Weiwei build studios and art centers. He was part of the team that designed the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
            Already in 2005, however, he had begun blogging against the government, eventually an effusion of nearly 7,000 blogs that some art critics call a work of social art in itself. Twitter was also his secret weapon. He criticized Beijing’s corruption, greed, and censorship. He especially condemned the regime’s complicity in the death of thousands of school children when shoddy school buildings collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
            The next year his blog was shut down. The regime closed his studios, once using a bulldozer. On April 3, the day he planned to leave for Hong Kong, the police intercepted him at the airport.  They raided his office, confiscated his records, and intimated that he had evaded taxes.
            Such “disappearing,” however, can ignite a worldwide protest, as it soon would do. So why did the Communist Party act so rashly? In one view, the street revolutions of the Arab world had unnerved China’s rulers. From experiences ranging from Tiananmen Square to the Falun Gong, moreover, the Communist government knew it could crack down at will—including with Weiwei—and then simply wait for the stigma to pass by.
            As Weiwei went missing, the art world made its own calculations. The first was to launch a bellicose protest. A global petition was signed by all the top art leaders and institutions. Artists canceled shows planned for China. Perhaps most visually, the Tate Modern gallery in London staged a second showing of Weiwei’s “Sunflower Seeds” art, millions of ceramic seeds handmade and painted by local Chinese in Weiwei's homeland.
            However, the art world did not go whole hog: it did not shut down in honor of Weiwie, nor did it boycott China. For the most part, business as usual commenced. As planned, Weiwei’s art continued to get first-class exhibitions from New York City to the Venice Biennale. His already-scheduled outdoor bronze sculptures, “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads,” stand today in Manhattan and London as a continuing protest to Beijing.
            Still, some artists believe the art world did not do enough. Maybe the Weiwei case, like the Berlin Wall, could have been the end of the Bamboo Curtain. It certainly would have advanced the artistic cause of absolute free expression, including, as Weiwei famously did, going naked in front of the Communist Party and the world, telling the Party to “f----” its mother.
            This is the more utopian view of protest. The British government has been constrained to a more realpolitik. One theory on Weiwei’s release is that it came just as a top Chinese leadership delegation arrives in England (after visiting Hungary and Germany as well). Apparently the Chinese want to avoid embarrassing questions in London.
            The English have a whole set of calculations to make as well, especially as China hands them the baton, as it were, for the next Olympic games. The calculations are as old as the delicate balance between human rights and political diplomacy. While it may have informed China that it did not approve of its treatment of Weiwei, the British government will not cancel a 12-city tour of British art in China next year, as some human rights activists have demanded. In defense of the tour, one British official said: “It is through cultural exchange that we best demonstrate the benefits of free artistic expression.”
            On Wednesday, the bearded, jovial artist was resting at home. The next morning he told reporters he was on "probation" and could not comment further. The government announced that he is restricted to Beijing for a year. Its Xinhua news agency said he was released because of his health and a “good attitude in confessing his crimes,” described as tax evasion.
            We can hope for the best for this brave, stubborn artist. His case reveals the trade-offs in human rights disputes. Should the free world’s protest be absolute, or should it be quiet and behind-the-scenes, using commerce to erode dictatorships? For his own part, Weiwei has not offered a platform to reform China. He calls for free expression. Indeed, that is why he became an artist, he says. In this the artist is like the impossible prophet of old. The prophet said, “Thus sayeth the Lord,” but without a practical way forward.
            Even so, embarrassing bad regimes and throwing light on injustice is the way to begin. As Weiwei insisted in a video shown recently at the popular TED conference, “Art is about social change.” He’s also said he is pessimistic. Even artists can know this: political change can take time. Free expression is easiest in art shows and hardest in closed, communist-ruled, societies.

Traveling Exhibits Take Leonardo da Vinci to the Hinterlands

The Mysterious Renaissance Artists and Scientist has Unending Appeal

Leonardo da Vinci is on the road again.

            As an artist who still evokes mysteries, Leonardo is a natural topic for traveling exhibits. Intrepid students of the Renaissance polymath could spend a month in Italy to see many of his paintings, drawings, and inventions, and then dash over to the Louvre in Paris to see the "Mona Lisa." The alternative is to wait for a Leonardo road show to arrive at a regional museum. At least two professional exhibition groups are making that possible.
            This year, Grande Exhibitions displayed its “Da Vinci—The Genius” in Des Moines, Iowa, and now it is in Louisville, Ky. The glowing high-tech exhibit offers replications of Leonardo’s accomplishments in science, art, and engineering. Another traveling package, “Leonardo da Vinci: Man—Inventor—Genius,” has just opened in Spokane, Wash. In this vivid display, the Exhibits Development Group showcases 60 small models of Leonardo’s inventions and life-size reproductions of 23 art works, roughly the complete set of his paintings.

            To their credit, such projects often are geared toward modest-size museums, reaching under-served populations, though in the past they have passed through over-booked places like New York and Chicago. Given the Leonardo appeal, the exhibits also travel the world, from Asia to Central America. Apart from these serious educational projects, Leonardo always lends to various blockbuster story-lines and headlines about his mysterious past, which lasted sixty-six years until he died in 1519. The current buzz in Hollywood is about a movie to be called, “The Mona Lisa Code”—the filmmaker is in search of an actress who looks exactly like Leonardo's painting.

            In his own day, Leonardo's suave looks and resonant name were enough to be an attraction. Once his talents were known, he was summoned by dukes, bishops, and kings to paint or advise on engineering. He left behind quite a paper trail—of the purported 20,000 to 30,000 pages of notes he made, 7,000 survive and now are compiled in five priceless codices (one owned by Bill Gates, for example, another by the Queen of England).

            We know the most about Leonardo from a fellow painter, Giorgio Vasari, who a generation later gathered biographical data to tell Leonardo’s story in his encyclopedic Lives of the Artists. Vasari, himself an accomplished artist, was born 500 years ago this summer. As the “first” art historian, his quincentennial legacy has been a topic of celebration. Ever the realist, Vasari passed down the observation that while Leonardo was brilliant, he dabbled in too many things. His distractions meant that he finished few of his artistic exploits.

            For the wider public, we are still recovering from the shock and awe of the Da Vinci Code, an America novel that broke publishing records in 2003. As a murder and detective story, the novel had a natural draw. Its emphasis on a purported symbolism in Leonardo’s art work—the secret “code,” that is—certainly helped book sales as well.

            The nub of the Da Vinci Code is that the symbolic composition of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” reveals that Jesus had a wife and child. Leonardo knew this because, of course, he was in the secret group that cared for that family line, down to present-day France. When a murder at the Louvre opens the story, the victim is spread eagle on the floor, mimicking the famous “Vitruvian Man” that Leonardo drew to illustrate ideal human proportions.

            It doesn’t take a novel to generate Da Vinci mysteries. Famously, Sigmund Freud claimed to have figured him out. Artists have tried to decipher the deeper meaning Leonardo gave to “proportion” and “mathematics” in art. The un-mystical Leonardo da Vinci, with his drawings of plants, anatomy, and weaponry, has become a favorite of science museums as much as art centers.

            His female model for the “Mona Lisa,” believed to be one Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, also is making headlines. First, archeologists said this year that her bones may have been found in a convent in Florence. Then another Italian scholar, as scholars will do, got her own headline by claiming that the Mona Lisa model was actually a man.

            Either way, visitors to the two traveling exhibits this summer can look at the painting reproductions up close, see cutting-edge video presentations, and enter Leonardo’s mysterious world. Like the exhibits, he too was quite a traveler. Born in the town of Vinci in Tuscany, central Italy, Leonardo was so talented that his father took him to Florence at age fourteen to study with the master painter Verrocchio. Leonardo’s opportunities rose considerably in 1482, when he was summoned by the Duke of Milan to be a painter and engineer.
            That being an age of local warfare, however, the French would eventually occupy Milan (1499), sending Leonardo on the road again for sixteen years—to Venice, Florence, and Rome—carrying his notes and paintings with him. Finally the king of France recruited him (with honors and a villa) and Leonardo died and was humbly buried in France three years later.

            Naturally, that is why five of his most famous paintings, including the “Mona Lisa,” ended up in France, now in the Louvre. His texts are spread around the world. But today in Spokane and Louisville, the wandering Leonardo is all in one place—thanks to the traveling exhibits.

When “Anti-Matter” Becomes a Serious Matter for Art

Discoveries of the Large Hadron Collider Link Art and Science

When it comes to “land art” on a grand scale, the Large Hadron Collider’s 17-mile circular tunnel is no mean artifact. As the proton-smashing tunnel operates under the border of Switzerland and France, it is bringing us closer to material “reality,” an important part of art-making.
              This week scientists reported that the Collider had briefly trapped atoms of anti-matter hydrogen, a first in physics. This is only a step, though. The Collider’s ultimate goal is to detect one of the most basic particles of the universe, called the Higgs Particle (for Mr. Higgs, a Scottish scientist). By smashing protons at unprecedented energy levels, the Collider hopes to tease out this fundamental fragment of nature.
              As a circular earth tunnel, the Collider is a candidate for the annals of land art. It could stand up nicely alongside Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” in Utah, Christo’s 24-mile “Running Fence” in northern California, or James Turrell’s “Roden Crater” in Arizona. Inside its guts, however, the Large Hadron Collider is producing something that transcends art. This illustrates the difference between art and science.

            Science and art overlap in many ways, from admiration of creativity to recognizing that the universe does indeed include elements of chance, chaos, uncertainty, and probability. A century ago, all the rage in modern art—some Cubism and abstraction—was to find the fourth dimension suggested by the discovery of x-rays, waves, and non-Euclidian geometry (curved space), and to represent that unseen dimension in paintings.

            All of this was before Einstein’s theory offered a more complete idea of how energy and matter are interchangeable at the smallest and the largest scales of the universe. To say the least, it has been difficult to paint the Theory of Relativity. What the Einstein revolution in physics has left unanswered, however, is what the Collider is after: What was the first packet of energy like before matter came into existence?

            In the Standard Model of physics, the universe originated with a huge explosion. As that energy cooled, it left behind matter and various forces—the four basic forces—that hold matter together. At the moment of the Big Bang, all the forces were united as a single packet of energy. When Mr. Higgs asked how that pure energy turned into a universe with mass (that is, matter), he proposed that some very early universal particle-field (the Higgs Particle) slows down pure energy, as it were, to congeal energy into mass.

              As this week's “anti-matter” headline illustrated, the very existence of matter is a mystery. Logically, at the Big Bang, matter and anti-matter (probably in the form of hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant matter) would have been in equal abundance. They would cancel each other out. After the Big Bang, there would be zero, nothing, nada. However, somehow, matter out-numbered anti-matter. We are here.

            The forces in nature we are talking about are either so small (binding nuclei) or so large (gravity curving space) that they do not show up in our daily lives. Because of them, however, we have elements and a place to stand in the universe. We have the ability to produce oil paints and land art with dirt and bulldozers.

            To do its job, the Collider must presume that the forces of nature are operating by predictable patterns, that is, by laws. Nature is law-abiding and that is why we can know about it. In science, this knowledge is obtained by proposing reasonable hypotheses and testing them. The good hypotheses survive and become workable theories, which is the closest thing to “truth” in science. For example, the Standard Model is the best theory going, the best “truth” we have so a far. So at great expense, the search is on for the missing piece in that theory: the Higgs particle (also called the “God particle”).

            If art and science are often at odds, it is because art, while having many ideas, does not test them. Often art will deny that a “real” nature exists, saying that nature is constructed by human imagination. In recent decades we’ve heard of the dematerialization of art, the belief that imaginative ideas alone can make anything possible. Sorry, says science: only some things are possible, according to the laws of physics.

            Despite this impasse, art and science do share the impulse of curiosity, and some scientific hypotheses are curious indeed. Nevertheless, science views nature as averaging-out uncertainties. The result is bedrock, reliable Nature. To proceed, the scientist must presume that reality can be found “out there.”

            As in the days of the fourth-dimension craze, art continues to tickle our fancy for science-fiction and fantasy. With computers, we are entering imaginary virtual worlds (though, again, based on the iron laws of physics). Over at the Collider, fantasy games can’t be a substitute for simple brick-and-mortar science.

              The Higgs particle may not exist. Mr. Higgs may have taken the creative leap-of-the-century in proposing his ultimate particle. In the end, the Collider may be more land art than successful science. Still, when the protons smash each other to bits under Switzerland and France, the search is to know reality. Something holds Nature together. This allows us to make things that hold together as well.

The Venice Biennale Opens to Young and Old

The World’s Oldest Art Exhibition is a World of Polarities and Contrasts
 

Ah, to be young and in Venice!

              That will be the thought of thousands of curious art-lovers today as the 54th Venice Biennale, the oldest international art exhibition, opens to the public for its six-month run. To be old and at the Venice Biennale is also quite a treat, and youth and age are only the start of the four polarities that might help grasp the nature of this vast, global event set amid the canals of Venice.
              Old and young is a good polarity to start with. Every Venice Biennale has a central International Exhibit, organized by the top curator, who this year is the Swiss art historian and critic Bice Curiger. She has chosen to highlight that central exhibit with several large paintings by the sixteenth-century Venetian colorist Jacopo Tintoretto.
              If that seems far too old for a contemporary art event like the Venice Biennale, it was Curiger’s exact intention to stretch the timescale. To contrast the span of ages, she tapped the Renaissance, but she also made sure that of the 83 world artists shown in this Central Pavilion, 32 of them were born after 1975 (hence, no older than 35).
             The next great polarity in the Venice Biennale is that between patriotism and globalism. Held every two years in modern times, the biennale is organized around the official participation of nation states, whose governments (such as the U.S. State Department) sponsor their art delegations. The major states—called the 28 “settled countries”—have permanent facilities, or pavilions. Many more countries have set up national art exhibits in other districts of Venice. The patriotic participation this year is a new record: 89 countries compared to 77 in the previous biennale.
              At the same time, the Venice Biennale has a single “international” curator, the role played by Curiger. Once she had designed her Central Pavilion with its international theme—ILLUMInations—she can only encourage the national pavilions to try to harmonize with the hub. Thus, the entire Venice Biennale, aesthetically at least, might achieve a semblance of coordination. That harmony of pavilions will be for the critics to analyze over the next few months, but the intent is always there. The Venice Biennale, which has never stopped a war, at least tries to convey a spirit of art diplomacy among rival nations.
              The third polarity is how the biennale is playing two ideologies off of each other. The theme of ILLUMInations has openly pointed to the European Enlightenment as a source. Here we have unabashed Eurocentrism (especially the Western tradition of human rights, not to mention artistic academicism) taking a stand in an art world that generally gives full-throated espousal to multiculturalism and postmodernism. We’ll see what happens.
              A fourth and final polarity is art and business. Unlike the growing number of “art fairs” around the world, where buying and selling art at hard-nosed prices is the goal, the biennale is supposed to be free of commerce. Still, collectors are arriving in Venice on their yachts, as usual, and though this is no rialto or bazaar, much art will exchange hands at top prices.
              The artists know this, of course. After each biennale, a common lament by artists is how much money they lost in the sheer expenses of participating, though the prestige of being invited is considered priceless.
              Meanwhile, much of the biennale art—especially that which is conceptual—offers a criticism of capitalism. Take the American pavilion, which for this biennale has been organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
              The museum invited the Puerto Rican artist team, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, to present several large art works, all of them sculptures with elements of human performance. One is a giant pipe organ atop an ATM machine, and as visitors pull cash from the machine, the organ—which stands for capitalism and religion—groans with a Phantom of the Opera-type melody.
              The American exhibit also plays on the polarity of nationalism and internationalism. In one room of the American pavilion, Allora and Calzadillia have fabricated the airplane seats of two patriotic airlines—American and Delta—and have hired U.S. Olympic track and field team gymnasts, in patriotic US outfits, to do gymnastics over the airplane innards.
              This “mash-up” of two unrelated realities—airlines and Olympians—has an artistic message, of course: There is nothing more jingoistic than each country’s airline and Olympic team. This is all good fun, but as usual, art is saying something like: global community may be better than national pride.
              This brief look at polarities—young and old, nationalism and globalism, the Enlightenment and postmodernism, art and money—is one cursory way to grasp such a complex event as the Venice Biennale. (Imagine, there are now about 300 biennales around the world today, all children of Venice). Fortunately, the world has six months to catch up on the details of Venice—the actual works of art, which are incredibly many and varied.
              One more detail is worth noting. That is the “varnishing.”
              The Venice Biennale actually opened on Wednesday, June 1, with the “Vernissage,” the French term for varnishing. The term also means the opening preview of an art exhibition. In the old days, the salon exhibits in Paris opened when organizers put shiny varnish on all the paintings. In Venice, the Vernissage has its own shine: three days of dignitaries, celebrities, collectors, and the press corps previewing the far-flung exhibition before the masses arrive.
              The more art changes, the more it stays the same.