Category: Art Feature

I. Palette

What were those? Those were fiery

Craters.

No, those were the nights of childhood.

Madness and sky clung together

In that sleep

And surrender.

Surely you’ve been there many times before.

You’ve come a long way just to hang back.

Those were rosary beads shining out of the dark.

No, those were the nights of childhood.

No, those were fiery craters.

II. Tallis With Stripes From Judges 5:30

There was this place famous for its dye, the most

Prized of which was purple. The fabrics often came out

Fuchsia or maroon or magenta or bruise or lavender.

The fences and furrows were a bluish brown.

Storms and berries were the exact color of each other.

A certain occupied barn was especially purple

Because a little girl there knew all about adult love affairs.

The grown woman there knew a cold, vengeful rage.

Once the girl hanged herself from a violet rafter

When she had had about all she could take. The woman

Tomorrow climbed up and lifted the body from the noose.

She sprinkled it liberally with a clear liquid. Then

A little repentance entered the woman’s heart,

But too late: the girl had already come back to life.

In a perfect fury they fought, tooth, nail, and shuttle,

But with the most marvelous results. Once the mad

Shredding was over and done with, two piles of threads,

Verily heaps of skeins, beautiful, lay.

The pair set to work. Girls and women elsewhere

Likewise set up their looms, stretched the warp

Good and tight, and their cloth was in no way inferior.

But nothing lasts forever, especially preparation.

Sad come the days of greatest relief and happiness

When men’s mothers strain at festooned windows,

And every warrior among the returning wears

A prey of divers colours of needlework,

Of divers colours of needlework for both sides,

Meet for the necks of them that take the spoil.

There was a place famous for its dye, the most

Prized of which was purple. The fabrics came out

Fuchsia or maroon or magenta or bruise or lavender.

The fences and furrows were a brownish blue.

Storms and berries were the exact opposite of white.

Mary Leader is a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Memphis and the editor-in-chief of River City (http://www.people.memphis.edu/~rivercity/index.html), an internationally distributed literary magazine produced by the graduate students at the University of Memphis. Mary Leader has written two collections of poems: Red Signature (Graywolf Press, 1997) and The Penultimate Suitor (University of Iowa Press, 2001). The poems featured this, our inaugural week of DIPTERA, are from her new manuscript, Readiness.

If you would like to submit a poem of any length, style, level of experimentation to be considered for Diptera, please send your poem/s, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope to:

DIPTERA
Attn: Lesha Hurliman
460 Tennessee Street, Suite 200
Memphis, TN 38103.

Electronic submissions may be sent to lhurliman@memphisflyer.com. Please include a short bio. Submissions are not limited to Memphis residents.

DIPTERA is not an online Literary journal but something more like bulletin board, and therefore all rights to the poetry published on DIPTERA are retained by the author. Meaning, the poems published on this site can be submitted to any journal without our notification. We do accept poems that have been previously published as long as we are given a means of obtaining permission to post them on Diptera from that publisher.

Dip”te*ra An extensive order of insects having only two functional wings and two balancers, as the house fly, mosquito, etc. They have a suctorial proboscis, often including two pairs of sharp organs (mandibles and maxill[ae]) with which they pierce the skin of animals. They undergo a complete metamorphosis, their larv[ae] (called maggots) being usually without feet.

Untitled (Q-15) by Thomas Nozkowski

Some weeks ago at an art opening, artist and retired educator Larry Edwards, with trademark bluntness and comic panache, almost fell over when I casually esteemed a painter’s work as both confident and risk-taking. “Ah, c’mon,” Edwards groaned. The artist’s pictures, obvious cousins to Bay Area figurative and abstract expressionism, were “academic,” he said, insisting that there are so many wanna-be-Diebenkorns out there to have become a cliché.

Being someone who looks at way too many art-world retreads, I can appreciate Edwards’ criticisms and candor, and it is certainly difficult for a professor or critic not to become callous to the onslaught of second-rate Picassos, Duchamps, and Basquiats. Then again, if originality is the measure of an artist’s substance, what exactly in painting hasn’t been broached? Why paint at all? But whenever I find myself too dismissive of the familiar or conventional, invariably something comes along to catch me off guard. Thomas Nozkowski, whose work is on view at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery, is breathing new life into a genre that is routinely pronounced spent by liberating it from the encumbrances of art history or any pretense to originality.

Nozkowski’s show consists of easel-size paintings that are seemingly in tune with old-school inclinations, where complex biomorphic shapes imply spatial ambiguities similar to Jean Arp’s reliefs, as in Untitled (Q-7), or affect a Philip Guston-ish cartoon, as in Untitled (Q-10). The work maintains an ease that is derived from the simple acknowledgment of painting’s past, particularly of modernism, while not really feeling the need to court it, to be ironic about it, or to otherwise be critical of it. But the pictures are not merely recursive either. The unceremonious and ambivalent attitude toward art history serves to dispense with the idea of originality straightaway so as to concentrate on the heuristic routine of resolving a painting. In this regard, Nozkowski swings from one familiar motif to the next, producing images that are both obstinately banal and consciously dispassionate.

During a 2001 interview with painter Gerhard Richter, whose entire oeuvre seems to be a meditation on the disputed validity of painting, Robert Storr asked about Richter’s decision to paint from photographs as a method to remain neutral, to avoid a singular style, and to maintain the freedom to paint disparate subjects. “It was the opposite of ideology,” said Richter, “and to be as objective as possible offered a legitimization for painting since you were being objective and doing what was necessary, enlightening, and so on.” Nozkowski (and curator Hamlett Dobbins) minimizes theory too in favor of the modest endeavor of painting one discrete picture after another, typified by his remark that “every painting is a way of learning to say one thing clearly.”

In an essay written for the exhibit, Dobbins sums up Nozkowski’s method by emphasizing his force of intention and the pursuit of pictorial “rightness.” “When an image isn’t realized, the slate is scraped or wiped down; there is a correcting and editing of what came before, and as time passes, more moments are realized. Elaborations are made and images are revealed,” writes Dobbins. The pictures retain ghosts of previous layers, murky stains, scars, and little imperfections from excessive handling and countless revisions, giving them the quality of a relic.

The first grievance anyone usually has with abstract painting these days is that plying such territory amounts to navel-gazing formalism — patently regressive and content to trifle with aesthetic arguments that have long been settled. Matters are, of course, not that cut-and-dried, and Dobbins, an abstract painter himself, is certainly attuned to the way that picture-making is first and foremost an idiosyncratic enterprise and that the subtle iterations in the studio are wedded to the fluctuations of daily life. “The artist’s view can give and sway, the same way recollections of a time or place can be altered by a heavy lunch, the rattle of the subway, the thickness of the hot Memphis air,” according to Dobbins. The more confessional Richter asserted that “the notion of neutrality and objectivity is an illusion” since “every painting includes my inability, my powerlessness things that are subjective.” Richter further maintained that it is precisely that subjective quotient which thus reckons the works “legitimate to be painted.”

If that remark is in diametric opposition to his prior quotation, it is only classic Richter to make contradictory statements to interviewers, to feign ignorance, or to just be reticent to articulate much at all, which ironically only foments the very intellectual and aesthetic suppositions about his work among the ideologues from whom he ostensibly cowers. A similar, if more subtle, paradox holds true for Nozkowski’s noncommittal swagger. In an art world that is widely characterized as being in a posthistorical condition — i.e., all genres of art are retreads, ultimately — brassy ambivalence is just another polemic.

Through December 11th.

Seek My Face

Essential Acker:

The Selected Writings

of Kathy Acker

Edited by Amy Scholder and

Dennis Cooper

Grove Press; 335 pp.; $15 (paper)

Rip-off Red, Girl

Detective/The Burning Bombing of America

By Kathy Acker

Grove Press; 201 pp.; $14 (paper)

I’m not easily destructible as I allow them their destruction. this begins this dense hardly understandable material. through illusion and fantasies who are reality. necessities. you will have to try to understand.

— from The Burning Bombing of America

Kathy Acker, to be certain, was not an author who created easy, cover-to-cover reads. If profanity, violence, pornography, poetry, or nontraditional literary forms offend you, then you might want to steer clear of her entirely. But if you enjoy (or can at least tolerate) these things, then a foray into Acker’s world can be as rewarding as it is challenging.

That said, Essential Acker and Rip-off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America (two short early novels of Acker’s that were recently rediscovered and just now published) are an interesting window onto the career of one of 20th-century America’s most brazen female novelists. Though perhaps novelist is not quite the right term. To quote the author in Rip-off Red, Girl Detective: “Narratives are purely for shit. Here’s the information go fuck yourself.” Whew.

Stylistically, Acker, who died in 1997, is often compared to William S. Burroughs, owing to both her roots in New York City’s writing scene and her insistence on pushing the boundaries of, and redefining, form. Sometimes, she was entirely successful in this endeavor. To this end, the draw of Essential Acker, in particular, lies in its career-spanning chronology. Over the course of nearly 30 years, as Acker became more adept at defining her own experiments, the reading experience became clearer, more digestible.

Her themes remained surprisingly consistent. Acker’s heroines and heroes are sexual creatures, hopelessly indulgent in the physical realm, yet they never seem to cave in to hopelessness or self-pity. It seems that the author’s personal politics, those of a self-empowered, book-hoarding outlaw who at different points in life worked as both a 42nd Street sex-show performer and a college professor, were solidified early on. Herein lies Acker’s most powerful exploration: Through her writing, she continually focused on creating a reality in which one could exist comfortably in the male and female realms simultaneously. Her characters run through her meandering prose with the battle cry “[A] (wo)man wants to control his/her life,” as crystallized in The Burning Bombing of America.

The trouble with Acker’s work is that it’s difficult to discern the boundaries between autobiography, fiction, metafiction, and even plagiarism. This last, a self-conscious choice on the part of the author, eventually forced her to make a public apology to Harold Robbins over material “pirated” from his work. But Acker’s main obsession was the power of language to change reality, which included borrowing scenes and characters from other works with the goal of redefining them.

It’s easy to get disoriented in Acker’s universe if you’re mired in the conventionalities of literature. Nevertheless, she was ultimately successful in putting the complexities of politics, sex, and identity under the microscope and emerging with something that was uniquely her own. To truly find one’s self, I suppose, one must get lost along the way. — Jennifer Hall

At a recent soirée, a compliment for a review of mine was capped by the backhanded admonition to “keep writing — don’t get a day job.” Ouch, I sniveled silently. The sting of the remark was due in large measure to its truthfulness, given that the liberty I enjoy to pursue the speculative vocations of artist and writer is subsidized by the consistency and relative stability of my loving spouse’s profession. Like anyone in the arts, I labor under the anticipation (or grandiose illusion) of a value-added payoff, so the reality check was not at all appreciated. As I digested the aside with conflicted emotions and gathered my composure, the incident triggered thoughts of the wrathful beings who inhabit much of “Worlds Of Transformation” at the Brooks Museum, a collection of sacred paintings (tangkas) from Tibet.

The depictions of these ferocious deities — ablaze and billowing smoke, with bulging bloodshot eyes and gaping mouths, riding beasts or trampling enemies, wielding terrifying weapons, slurping blood from skull cups or engaged in seemingly volatile sexual couplings, often simultaneously — concentrate such symbolic force not as an embrace of violence and aggression but as an antidote to one’s own destructive self-grasping. The Indian saint Shakyamuni Buddha (the historical Siddhartha Gautama), distinguished in many of the 30 tangkas on view by his saffron-colored robe and begging bowl, recognized that the afflictions of beings are spawned by hope and fear and that the path of equanimity and compassion is one’s salvation from suffering.

The contemplative traditions of Tibet have sought to cultivate the unique method of transforming the base material of afflictive thoughts and emotions into enlightenment gold. Perhaps the narrative behind the several tangkas depicting Yamantaka Vajrabhairava, one of the most fierce dharmapalas (protectors) of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon, will help elucidate:

The story goes that a yogi occupied a cave for an extended retreat and was so absorbed in his meditation that he was unperturbed even after poachers chased a water buffalo into the cave. The men cornered the animal then butchered and ate it. In the firelight, the poachers noticed the motionless form of the yogi still absorbed in his meditation and, for fear of being fingered by a witness to their criminal act, straightaway chopped off his head. The accomplished yogi, returning to his body to find it headless, groped about and inadvertently donned the decapitated head of the water buffalo, flying into a blind rage, devouring the poachers and terrorizing the countryside, annihilating everything in his path as an emanation of Yama, the lord of death.

After discovering his power too great to overcome, saints and lamas began to supplicate the deity Manjushri, the embodiment of wisdom, for protection against Yama. Manjushri, in his limitless compassion for beings, manifested as Yamantaka Vajrabhairava by assuming the very likeness of Yama but magnified exponentially, sporting nine faces, 34 arms brandishing weapons, and 16 legs, utterly subduing Yama and transforming him into a protector of the Dharma.

This story illustrates a recurring theme in Tibetan cosmologies — that of hideousness and intensity overcome by an even more devastating image of itself. Tibet, before the introduction of Buddhism in the 7th century, was a feared militaristic culture, and no doubt, the remnants of that legacy live on in the wrathful deities and the spiritual implements germane to the practice of Vajrayana Buddhism, taking the form of various maces, swords, daggers, axes, and lassos, as portrayed in the grisly Realm Of Yamantaka and the Dharma Protectors. The adaptation of the instruments of destruction and death to the purpose of spiritual practice mirrors the path of the tantrica, where the very poisons of self-grasping become the implements for the transformation of consciousness.

Robert Thurman, an author, educator, and respected Buddhist scholar who will lecture at the Brooks on Sunday, September 22nd, at 2 p.m., says that Yamantaka Vajrabhairava’s array of weapons and “universe-devouring ferocity [are] only for destroying the universe of self-addiction and self-obsession,” symbolically “reflecting evil beings’ horrific nature back to them magnified infinitely, petrifying them with terror, immobilizing them in the inescapable prison of infinite voidness, sustaining them and teaching them with inexhaustible patience, and finally transmuting them, their deepest hearts’ life energies, into the blissful world of altruistic goodness.”

Of course, the “infinite voidness” to which Thurman refers stems from the Buddhist notion that phenomena are devoid of any intrinsic identity but arise in relation to one another in an endless cycle of cause and effect. Ultimately, the no-nonsense bluntness of wrathful means, by putting everything on the table (including awkward social collisions), ruthlessly penetrates base emotions, cravings, aversions, habits, and qualities that would otherwise be regarded as anathema to a spiritual path, transforming them through the recognition that they are nothing more than vacillations of the mind.

“Worlds Of Transformation: Tibetan Art Of Wisdom and Compassion,” through October 27th.

At the end of the year, Mark Nowell is relinquishing the helm of ArtFarm Gallery of Fine Art and the arts publication Bluff, enterprises the metal sculptor initiated to focus attention on the artist community that has occupied the Marshall-Monroe neighborhood since the mid-’80s. “This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever been so distracted by a cause, politics, [and] being the member of a community,” he says. “But now, I want to go back into the studio.” With the loss of Nowell’s persistent leadership and recent speculation regarding the area’s redevelopment by the city, the future of ArtFarm seems increasingly fragile.

The earliest motivation for ArtFarm, says Nowell, was simply to coordinate an arts festival and open house to encourage patronage in the neighborhood. Later, the effort was expanded to create an artists association when the area, dubbed the “Edge” in 2000, was targeted as part of the Center City Commission’s Memphis Medical District Master Plan. Following four ArtFarm festivals in the past several years, this summer’s “EdgeFest” on August 17th was the first organized by the Edge Community Association, a “big brother” to ArtFarm that encompasses the interests of not just artists but a variety of businesses and residents in the area, including bars and restaurants, a Baptist church, a tattoo parlor, and several garages. Mike Todd, president of the Edge Community Association, says the moniker better characterizes the neighborhood’s geographic orientation to downtown while also celebrating its “eclectic heritage and cutting-edge perspective.”

The attention generated by the neighborhood’s real estate has accelerated considerably as downtown redevelopment — the light-rail extension on Madison; the proximity of AutoZone Park; UT’s biomedical research facility slated for the site of the former Baptist Medical Center Campus — has effectively surrounded the area. The CCC’s plan for the Edge calls for the reconfiguration of the dizzy cluster of streets to enable increased storefronts on Madison, buildings designed for both retail and residential use, parking garages, and a 250-room hotel adjacent to historic Sun Studio.

The inevitable development of the Edge, hastened by Memphis’ emerging status as a hub for medical research, is ultimately beneficial to the once-blighted area and for Memphis at large, but it will require deliberate action by artists and the city to ensure the continued presence of an art community. As the Sohos and South Mains of the world can attest, the casualties of redevelopment are often the very occupants who gave the neighborhood its distinctiveness and charm. Gentrification is predictable, so enlightened municipalities have established decisive means of incubating artists’ activity and preserving cultural amenities as assets to redevelopment even while property values rise.

Claudio Perez-Leon, who worked for the formation of both an artist and community association in the neighborhood in 2000, holds the view that the artists’ only hope is to become property owners through tax incentives, tax freezes, or matching funds to purchase targeted renovations and infill development. Todd says a proposal for Tax Incremental Financing status, where all taxes generated by redevelopment remain in the district to foster further growth, might be useful for “providing down-payment assistance for artists purchasing buildings or rent buy-downs.”

Other means of retaining artists are rent control, subsidized studio spaces, or artist-relocation programs. Both Nowell and Perez-Leon cite case studies of such efforts throughout the country. The South Main Arts District’s response to gentrification, the much-touted “artist incubator,” is envisioned as a residency program that subsidizes artist’s living and working space for finite terms of occupancy, though, unfortunately, it still has no funding or location. Danita Beck, artist, independent curator, and project manager for the UrbanArt Commission, who recently returned to Memphis after living and working in Boston, witnessed that city’s South End District artists acting collectively to ensure rent control in designated studio spaces when the price of real estate ballooned.

“We need this. We need to keep this going,” Beck emphasizes. Her interest and involvement with ArtFarm began after she got back to town and discovered the limited venues for art exhibits, where “even restaurants and cafes had gone to more exclusive lists and galleries,” whereas the atmosphere at ArtFarm is accessible and open to experimentation and even risk. Beck believes that there is still a lot of potential for the continued presence of artists if they will organize and build some alliances, suggesting that perhaps even neighbor AutoZone Park and the Redbirds would be interested in the ArtFarm effort.

Beck is one of a team that will operate ArtFarm when Nowell takes his leave. The group, which also includes Melissa Barry, Teresa White, Monique Poussan, and Suzy Hendrix, has been working in the gallery for over a year and hopes to utilize the space as a cooperative gallery, according to Nowell. All have been instrumental in the coordination of several recent events at the gallery: the Summer Harvest exhibit, including two excellent and sorely underappreciated local painters, Frank D. Robinson and Corey Crowder, and the introduction of performance nights, the first of which featured Normal To Oily, a film by David Horan and Michael Schmidt, music and dance by Metal Velvet, and paintings by Wess Loudenslager. Nowell is confident that the gallery, where he will assume the curtailed duties of “maintenance man,” is in capable hands if it can just weather the redevelopment. He hopes that someone will step in to carry on Bluff.

To officially end his leadership of ArtFarm, Nowell has published a pamphlet which warns of possible gentrification in the Edge and is a final plea for recognition of the neighborhood as an official arts district to ensure that studios and working spaces remain safe and affordable. He believes that the fate of the artists’ community is at a crossroads, that the unique contributions artists have made to the area should be recognized and preserved as assets or they will be “squashed and dissolved because of rapid urban growth.”

“Are we going to have another bar district or do something to get artists to stay in Memphis?” crows Nowell, who insists that failing to nuture the “creative class” ensures a steady brain drain, as young artists leave the city for greener pastures. “Forget trying to get them to come here. Just get some of them to stay — the Carlos Villisantes and Robert Fordyces and countless others that have gone on, year after year, and move to Brooklyn, Miami, and San Francisco. People move. They don’t stay here, and it’s not being addressed! There’s no reason for them to stay. So let’s just start with an affordable studio district where you can be around other artists and start producing without having to worry about getting robbed.”