Mercuneutics

Kehinde Wiley came to the public eye in 2004. His first public exhibition was at the Brooklyn Museum. Here he exhibited a series of 18 large-scale paintings and introduced what has since become a familiar way working process. For  Passing/Posing , young black males were asked to view copies of European portraits, select their favourite, then model the pose. From photographs, Kehinde Wiley then created canvasses which projected urban images into historical masterpieces. In essence, Kehinde Wiley’s art is an art of transgression, one that re-colonises space for the Black male image. This method has had its critics. The methodology has been seen as a trick, nothing more. And the paintings have been describes as stiff and lacking expressive brushwork. In recent exhibitions, however, the play between artist and model, has brought new depths to the paintings. And the imagery has become less about urban hip-hop as complex questions of identity. The trick has revealed an artist who is a s

The Attendant: Isaac Julien  .  The film opens with a view of Biard’s Slaves on the West Coast (1833). In a mid-ground between natural light and darkness, the evils of slavery unfold—it is a scene in which Black slave traders participate in White colonial trade and a laid-back White civilisation controls with active violence. From here, the film moves to a shot of an art gallery. Not the Wilberforce Museum, but the Tate Gallery, London, whose white classical pillars represent an empire built on slavery and Greek, Platonic thought, the ideal love of White male for White male: Jamaican sugar paid for its creation. The fear that haunted slavery is then transposed into a single image, the Attendant’s black glove, and the connection between Black skin and Black leather, how high art turns Blackness into a fetish. Inside the hermetic space of an art gallery, visitors come to spectate the pictures. For these observers, they are stable images, but in the mind of The Attendant

L ewis Hyde’s probing work makes an interesting read. His style of writing, though it lacks the alchemical/poetic precision of Bachelard, is rich and provocative. It was Blake, almost 200 years ago, who imagined a world beyond good and evil and simple binary oppositions. He was able to dream beyond God, Ratio, Reason and Urizen. The other side of the equation was always needed. In one sense, Hyde’s work takes off from this point. He argues for “disruptive imagination” as a balance to order. His survey of the trickster gods shows the dark side of culture: a vital side of culture. Jung and Kerenyi, in the middle of the last century, wrote telling studies of mythology. Powerful, imaginative works. But there world was invariably a classical one. Hyde’s achievement is that he investigates and includes a wider view of mythology. His heroes are Hermes and Mercury, but also Coyote, Loki, and Eshu (of course!) Trickster makes the World is divided into 12 chapters, a sort of anti-Homer

The Attendant : Isaac Julien. * What was in Julien’s mind at the time of filming The Attendant ? Well, I would suggest three things need to be considered. 1) Julien knew his Mapplethorpe. He was well aware of Mapplethorpe’s favourite in-joke: cultural doubleness. At one point, Mapplethorpe had two art shows at the same time, one male nude exhibition in a famous high art gallery and a sadomasochistic one in an infamous low gallery. It was a huge joke— to be able to live in two worlds at once. This fact touched on another implicit joke in much of Mapplethorpe’s photography. By placing photographs of Black men in galleries, Mapplethorpe elevated the low to high. His classical photographs of Thomas (a porn star) were a consummate double-take. By placing sadomasochism in an art gallery—and an art gallery devoted to anti-slavery (in Hull)—Julien reverses the Mapplethorpe joke. He gives the sadomasochistic imagery a new context, an antidote to the poison. It is an extension of his co

Jared French was born on February 4th, 1905, in Ossining, New York. Aquarian by birth. He studied music, visual art and literature at Amherst College from 1921-1925. The Amherst motto  Terras Irradient would stand as a sign for his life as a painter, "Bring light to the Earth" as would his birth image. French's paintings in egg tempera are lit by radiance and the flux of water is a key archetypal symbol in his visual language. French became the lover and friend of Paul Cadmus and it is Cadmus' small and intimate portrait of him, in 1931, that introduces French to the world.  In this portrait much is coded. The viewer is placed in the lover's position, gazing down at a rumpled bed, suggesting rest after activity. The flowing, rotating hands intimate fluid energy in balance. And the fingers are bookmarks in an early edition of James Joyce's Ulysses , a book which was smuggled into the USA for the literary minded French. The illegal novel stands for anothe

Dolce and Gabbana likes to court controversy-- it labelled IVF babies as synthetic and mocked the eating manners of China during a fashion show. This parody of French's artwork has to be another nadir in terms of communication and moral judgement! Gold turned back into lead.

Hilda Doolitle belonged to the Pound Era. That familiar description does her a real injustice. The novel Her , written, in 1927, though not published until the 1980s, shows why. In 1927, Hilda Doolittle, by now known as the poet H.D. writes a wonderful analysis of the early Pound. He emerges not as biographies of Pound like to tell: the sun around which satellites, like H.D. revolved. He is subsumed into a different kind of modernism— H.D.’s version! And this is every bit as challenging as Pound’s. The novel concerns a love triangle. George Lowndes (aesthete and poet Ezra Pound) is in love with Hermione Gart (Hilda Doolittle). Hermione is infatuated with George and Fayne Rabb (Hilda Doolittle’s female love, Frances Gregg). The biographical nature of the novel and its relevance to the Pound industry have promoted one reading of the novel. Critics such as Gubar, Du Plessis and Guest have done much to revise their H.D. along Feminist lines, but really this is a core hermetical work

In his early, but fascinatingly complex poem Il Penseroso , Milton’s persona views Divine Melancholy. She is not the dark spirit commonly described by writers on the four humours, but a humanistic conception, a medial divinity (like the Holy Ghost) who lifts the individual, in an intellectual frenzy, towards God. As Melancholia appears, Milton writes: Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes: There held in holy passion still, Forget thyself to marble… (ll.40-42). Echoing Browne, Chapman, Tomkins, and Shakespeare, Milton outdoes them all with a conceit whereby the divine soul is caught between active rapture and passive passion, and in a moment of stasis becomes “marble”, a monument enduring time. There is something of this hermetic mood in the current exhibition “Antinous: the face of the Antique” at the Henry Moore Institute. In a perfectly white and silent space (two galleries and one alcove), a visitor is faced with images that are divinely melancholic. They express the ra

Notes on Thought and Vision has never rated highly among HD scholars. Barbara Guest describes it in embarrassed terms as full of “super” terms, by implication, a little too elitist and Nietzschean; too much of it reading like DH Lawrence (God, forbid!) on his philosophical coal-heap. It is interesting to note that the strong intellectualism of the pamphlet is associated with maleness. Rachel Blau Du Plessis sees the book as a response to patriarchy, to the Promethean actions of HD’s brother. But Janice S Robinson seems to be closer to the truth when she aligns it with female intelligence. The intellectual assertiveness within Notes on Thought and Vision takes a male muse in female form as its driving force, HD’s lover, Bryher/Winifred Ellerman. (Bryer insisted that HD used “he” as a form of address). The sheer brain-power of Bryer, her reputation as an intellectual debater, offers a source much closer to home, for HD, than patriarchs such as Lawrence. Because of its psycholo

Cavalcanti's canzone "Because a lady asks me" was prized by Pound as one of the masterpieces of love poetry, valued for the quality of its technique and its precision on matters of love. For Pound, this canzone was the shift from murky medievalism into a more modern, scientific frame of mind. Pound himself offered translations in his Cavalcanti and in Canto XXXVI. In The Cantos , the poem stands as a key text on light and love, the radiant energies under the auspices of Hermes that shine from the darkness of Eleusis and the Greek Mysteries. In writing about "The Differences", "Kinaesthetic Aesthetics: On Thom Gunn's poems", Stephen Burt notes that  "The Differences" gets wacky in the middle, declaring, "love is formed by a dark ray's invasion / From Mars," which turns out to be translated Cavalcanti." Actually, the poem is a continual variation on Cavalcanti's complex song, transmuting its Hermeticism into a

How did people pass the time hundreds of years ago? Not with crosswords. Not with sudoku. But with elaborate jokes it seems: riddles for courtiers. An intriguing, though small, exhibition of Da Vinci’s work draws to the close in the UK. Its final stage—touching England, Scotland, Wales, will be Cardiff…in the next few weeks. The exhibition contains a double-sided set of drawings, from around 1490, when Da Vinci would have been at the mid-point of his life. The miniature drawings are accompanied by short texts in Italian…made even more mysterious by the fact that they are written in left-handed mirror writing. The fascination of these drawings has to be the mind at play. The visual jokes work like this, a light-hearted Da Vinci code which puns on fragments of metaphysical mottoes. One line of pictures shows a hill+a frying pan+a very modern looking man with a clock face, a cartoon from Disney almost. These spell col + padella + fortuna /time’s fate which conceal

"The Double" by Jared French: is its imagery racist? Jared French was born in New York, 1905. Like many artists who followed European thought, he left the USA and died, in seclusion, in Rome, 1988. French was fascinated by mystery, but moved beyond Magical Realism into a world view that accepted Jungian trains of thought and mythology. Part of the mystery, in French’s work, comes from realism (quality figure drawing) and the surreal. “The Double” c1950 shows this exactly. “The Double” operates like a piece of music without a key signature…only at the end of the piece, in the Black figure, does the key become clear. Seemingly, “The Double” begins in its background. From an industrial background a Victorian matriarch emerges. Dressed in black, with a blood red wreath and crowned with a phallic feather, she stands (literally in the painting) for the linking of Eros and Thanatos, sex and death. She carries a shadowy parasol, but its relevance is not clear as yet. (Th