My calendar had the evening pencilled in for Rai Gaita’s lecture in his Wednesday series (see here), but my heart said, go see T.J. Clark talking about art. So I turned up at the Wheeler Centre along with about 100 other folk — which surprised me because he doesn’t seem very well known here. In London, the hall would have been full, packed, rafters. Clark is one of the great art historians, and a gifted stylist — The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers is, yes, that sainted beast: a seminal work.
The Death of Sight
TJC is extraordinarily articulate, intimidatingly so. The conversation with his interviewer, Antoni Jach, centred around his previous book, The Sight of Death — which I noted as one of my books of the year. Jach introduced the proceedings by referring to “The Death of Sight.” A telling slip because, as Jach pointed out, Derrida says that a misreading is a reading.
As I put it previously, the book is “written in a diary form over 240 pages, [as] art historian Clark looks at — inspects — closely, minutely, two Poussin paintings at the Getty Museum in LA. He looks at them every day for three months.” (Jach pron. Yahk) Jach and Clark explored whether one could look too deeply at something. TJC said that he had “invested too much in Poussin, but didn’t know where else to invest it.” The book was written during the time of 9/11 and there is a definite air of loss about it — like an elegy for the century just past as we enter the future on its own tragic note.
Art is the enemey of truth
During the session TJC read several poems about paintings (poems also encrust the book). He said, I do think a very good poem about painting can do something that most prose writing can’t … the biggest challenge with writing about painting is to get the mere materiality of painting.
It was a stylish evening with many excellent exchanges. Jach, a literary man about town, proved an exemplary host: modestly self-effacing but prompt with succint and well-informed questions, corralling TJC down useful avenues. One example of Jach’s acute ripostes: “What about [picture] titles — the way they interfere with muteness.”
(I noticed too what a beautifully rounded head Jach possesses, and he is capable of a stillness like a marble bust of a Regency gentleman.)
TJC’s next project is about Picasso, Nietzche and truth, titled Picasso and Truth. TJC told of how a friend remarked, Don’t you mean Picasso and “Truth”? Clark replied, No, on the contrary, it’s “Picasso” and Truth. TJC: Picasso’s notion of truth is a certain unbudgeable sense of space, the guiding [illegible] of his art … Art is the enemy of truth; art is the practice that knows life is an illusion — all the way down.
On his recently departed home: America is not a culture that believes in pessimism … or realism.
On England, the motherland to which he has returned: It is such an image-obsessed little island. It’s hideous, really.
I did notice that Clark, speaking in person, also manifested the same instinct or preference for art of a previous time that you find in his writings — ie, the art tends to stop around the Modernist period. I came across this unapologetic admission (pdf):
I am no expert on contemporary art. I am conscious of living, deliberately, in a modernist past, and of feeling a depth of identification with modernist artworks that has made it hard for me to give much of the art of the last twenty years its due.
And then he makes this very interesting remark, which will set many people resonating:
I should admit to a level of continuing anger at the caricature of modernism that has so often passed for characterization in the same period. Obviously, new movements need to take a distance from their forebears. Killing the father is a fact of artistic life. But killing a cardboard replica of the father, which bears as much resemblance to the real father as a wooden hobbyhorse to a horse – this seems to me utterly futile, and a guarantee of bad, self-righteous, simplistic work.
Clark talked about the solace of art — and that looking at the works he loved was exhilirating. I did want to ask a related question during the QnA but couldn’t find a frame. Something like: Decades ago, the critic John Berger wondered if the requirements of a moment of global politics outweighed the call of art. What is the place or point of art — making it and taking it — in a moment when the world is on the cusp of an existential threat? Is it no more than fiddling sweetly while Home burns? (This of course also recalls the elegiac tone of his book.)
A very generous speaker, Clark was willing to answer as many questions as the crowd could tender — his responses were considered and fluent and seemed to emerge from a deep well of understanding. Be sure to check out the Wheeler’s video page to watch the the Jach and Clark show. T.J. Clark also gives a talk this Friday evening at the Festival of Ideas.
[Process note: I miss many bon mots because (i) my scrawl ain't fast enough and it's illegible even to me, and (ii) sketching and noting are conflicting activities. Which explains this snippet of a morning's dream: I'm in a big tent listening to T.J. Clark lecture. At one point I'm trying very hard to memorize a remark, as I'm sans paper and pen. He says to the audience, 'We all share an animal nature -- which of you are communing, right now?']
Clark read out his poem “Félibien’s Dream.” Félibien was a friend of Poussin’s and an art historian, to be anachronistic. This is a “detail” of the poem, which talks about the Poussin painting, Landscape with a Calm (above):
But of course, he said. The blues are provisional, not preventive.
Any fool can see that the sky in the lake is empty. That was my way of saying
That painting is a false alternative — some years ago I noticed how many false things
I had accepted as true in my childhood — but that all alternatives are preferable
To the clod of earth in my handkerchief. (But that clod too I like,
it has the smell of pasture and the profile of a high cliff.)
The sky in the lake is simplified, yes. All the better for the unknown god
To lean over and use as a mirror, picking last night’s flesh from his teeth.
