TRIPPING

In 1967, after dropping acid and then dropping out, Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert visited a yogi in India and became Ram Dass. In 1971 he published an account of that transformation, an illustrated guide to mindfulness called Be Here Now, that became a bestseller in the United States. The book offers a kind of everyday Zen: move beyond the physical, be your own self, approach everything with love, keep yourself grounded.

While the book’s tenets are no longer surprising, its graphics remain transgressive. Each of its 221 pages reproduces an original large-format cardboard artwork, crafted with rubber stamps, pen and ink by Dass’ commune-dwelling friends. The paper’s dark texture and rough edges, the wonky text alignment and kerning, the shifting font sizes and styles, and the eclectic sampling of Buddhist, Hindu and Christian iconographies, all shape a mood of happy, hippy unorthodoxy. It’s this lack of pretentiousness that makes the project difficult to dismiss or satirize; it’s entirely innocent.

The text is relaxed, conversational and repetitive, lit with flashes of poetry. Dass describes the radiance of his guru, Meher Babu, “. . he’s smiling at you/like the other Marx brother.” But it’s the composition of each page, the dance of text and graphics, that conveys, in a flash, feeling, like a good graphic novel. The book’s stories, songs and musings bend, shrink and swell around the icons and images: dazzling mandalas, idyllic landscapes, smiling sadhus, and naked ladies with long legs and long hair. Rather then religiosity, the mood is one of wonderment and gentle self-reflection. Dass observes, right at the beginning, “We watch the entire drama/That is our lives/ We watch this illusion/with/unbearable compassion.” And one really can’t disagree.

October 22, 2017 by Nalina Moses

PEACOCKING

Darwinism is an essentially cruel mechanism. The notion that an animal – that is, each one of us – is handed, at the moment of conception, a random genetic assortment that will determine our fitness and, therefore, survival, doesn’t leave much room for those qualities we understand to be essentially human: perseverance, hope, inspiration, fidelity, industry, creativity, and love. So all the talk surrounding Richard O Prum’s book The Evolution of Beauty, about Darwin’s theory of aesthetic, clears the air.

The book proposes that beauty in animals – a perfectly symmetrical face, a strong musculature, an auspicious coloring – which has typically been thought to be an indicator of fitness, might have nothing to do with fitness at all, but with the mutable tastes of the beholder. And, in nature, as it often is with birds, it is the woman doing the choosing. Taken to its logical conclusion, then, women’s tastes are driving evolution, and male beauty exists simply so that women can have their fancy.

A hopeful corollary, for men, is that male beauty is not always fated genetically, but often performed. So birds sing, fly, dance, and make colorful and shapely nests, all of which are traits that make them beautiful to females. It’s a theory of beauty that’s at once dismal and forgiving. Dismal in that it values appearances (color, profile, proportion, spectacle) above other factors (character, strength), and permits women to choose mates for pleasure. Forgiving in that any male has the opportunity to give it a try, to put on a show, and to succeed beyond what has been coded for him in his genes. (It is also a powerful scientific argument for fashion, for both men and women.)

I had a kooky hippie-ish Health Education teacher in the seventh grade who, when describing puberty, told us that women became wide at the hips so that they could bear children, and men became wide at the shoulders because that made them more attractive to women. And that might be exactly right.

Photograph courtesy of Alexander McQueen. Spring 2008, La Dame Bleue.

October 14, 2017 by Nalina Moses

PAST PERFECT TENSE

Sculpture provides most of the crowd-pleasing spectacle at MoMA’s group exhibit Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends. There’s a stately standing screen that once served as the backdrop for a Merce Cunningham dance. There’s a framed set of (real) bed linens with a (real) pillow. And there’s a stuffed goat, smeared with paint, with a car tire hung around its belly. These pieces are all sly, sophisticated fun.

But Rauschenberg’s most affecting works are his paintings, particularly those he completed in the late 1950′s, called Combines, that incorporate things: calendars, signs, textiles, feathers, and, most famously, cuttings from magazines and newspapers. These canvases have a quiet, luminous charisma. Though layered with found images and paint marks, they remain spare, uncluttered, with broad areas of primed canvas showing through. Though they have assertive, expressive brushwork across the top, they maintain a cool temperature. They are composed judiciously, with just enough elements to weigh themselves down. Many don’t have a visual center of gravity, organized instead by stringing elements, floating, along a high horizon or a vertical spine. Although collaged, they present a continuous seamless finish. Their materiality, their thingness, is subsumed in their pristine organization.

These paintings are, like all good paintings, about the surface. And they are also, more deeply, about time. There is a haunting elegaic tone to them. Despite their avant garde form-making and media-mixing, they are, in their composition and coloring, respectfully silent. Their blank backgrounds and newspaper cuttings have yellowed over the decades, giving each work great grace. These paintings, from the most robust, revolutionary era of American art, now seem ancient, nostalgic, recalling a pre-machine, premodern age. More than any other modern art they are testimony to craft, to the cooperation of the hand and the eye.

Robert Rauschenberg, Factum II, 1957, Mixed media, The Museum of Modern Art. Photo courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

September 18, 2017 by Nalina Moses

THAT OTHER WORLD

Are some media, in their very forms, more powerful than others? I’m not a movie person, but the last few I’ve seen have had an impact on me disproportionate to their artistic merit. As a child I spent time in India with my grandparents at their homes in Tamilnadu and Kerala. Lion, with scenes set in Madhya Pradesh and Bengal, and starring an eight-year-old boy, brought back a sense of the county’s landscape and cities. And White Sun, set in a remote hilltop village in Nepal, and featuring two school-age children, brought back very particular memories of my childhood visits.

Though White Sun shows an entirely different country, geography, language, and era, many of its details are familiar to someone who has spent time in rural India. The movie shows us a line of mens shirts hanging on a rope strung to between two rafters, a woman coaxing a cooking fire by blowing through a mournful-sounding brass tube, the primeval darkness of a street lit only by stars. More remarkably, the movie brought back memories specific to my childhood. One sequence recalled the slope of lush, untended forest at the back of my paternal grandparents house, navigated by a run of steep stone steps, through monsoon rains. And one character, an orphaned boy from a neighboring village, reminded me of how unsettled I felt during those visits, without a deep understanding of the language and the customs. The film left me immensely sad that my grandparents and their ways of living are gone, and that my own daily life is, in comparison, sterile, less charged with sensuality and meaning.

Is there something essential about film that has the power to stir strong feelings? The form encompasses so many others: painting, speech, story, music, movement. And the film camera, in addition to its narrative, captures layers of incidental details that build its own convincing world. That other world, so particular, can catch on violently to a viewer’s. Is this a testimony to the richness of the medium, or to the viewer’s desires?

White Sun, 2016, by Deepak Rauniyar.

September 10, 2017 by Nalina Moses