E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Art has a touch of evil It has long been debated, in and out of aesthetic philosophy circles, whether art and the arts should also have a moral, or political, or even religious, function - and of course, throughout human history (and art appears to be a primarily human object, in the many sense of that word), art has been many things to many people and societies. It is only really, however, in our own recent time, of 'cancel culture', that the art object, and the artist, have become so conflated, as to become one, indissoluble and undivided. Even when Oscar Wilde was dismounted from his seat as the great playwright of his age, and wrecked in a brutish prison, his plays, books, stories, and poems, were not banned; and, conversely, even when Lady Chatterley's Lover was causing a great deal of legal and moral consternation, its author was not a total pariah. Even, albeit controversially, Wagner , the arch Jew-hater, is performed in Israel. We know the author of Ali...

Anyone looking for an astringent corrective to the postmodern hypertrophies of the Tarantino style will find it in the beautiful and profoundly intelligent new film from Joanna Hogg, The Souvenir , executive produced by, among others, Martin Scorsese, and starring Tilda Swinton and her daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, as a fictional mother and daughter in 80s London. Like Once Upon A Time In Hollywood ... The Souvenir is especially interested in framing a narrative around film, and directing film - in this instance, the hero is a young woman, from the English upper class, who has become a film student, and is seeking to make a film about working class life in a part of the country she barely knows. Hogg allows us to see how a film student (her in actuality looking back in memory) might film and tell the story of her own aesthetic awakening, through the medium she loves - through the story of her sentimental education, as it were, as a naïve lover, swept up by a Heathcliffian slight...

ARTIST OR FINANCIER? Recently, the Canadian government increased by 400% its funding for the arts, while arts funding in Australia and the UK continues to be slashed; this has led to a massive wave of joy and exuberant hope among the Canadian artists I know - musicians, composers, dancers, painters, poets, writers.... hope that in America we assume will not bear fruit in 2017, as Trump slashes cultural funding ever more. Justin Trudeau gets culture, and I am proud he is our PM in Canada. However, there is a different intensity of vision, which I have, and share no doubt with other practitioners of the creative arts and industries. It is this, simply this: Cultural and Creative production, activities, processes, projects are not just one other thing to do, not a hobby, a side-line, an option, but, actually - THE HIGHEST ENDEAVOUR OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. Scientific and medical research is incredibly vital; religious meditation and conjecture equally so. But only the arts can fu...

Mr. Casaubon Regrets  “You’d rather read a book than talk to me.”                                                 -- ex-wife to the author  “It’s nothing personal, my dear, But books are always different And you’re not.” David C Ward David C. Ward is an historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian institution where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman , Abraham Lincoln , and 2010’s award winning “Hide/Seek. Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” His poetry has been published in PN Review and other venues; his little collection Internal Difference was published by Lintott/Carcanet in 2011. On October 12, 2012, Ward will open “Poetic Likeness. Modern American Poets” at the Portrait Gallery. I...

David Hockney - who I long dismissed as a graphic designer slash hedonist with a line in pools and big glasses - has grown into his 70s as a grand old man of painting.  His vast new exhibition in London is movingly brilliant. It confirms him as a genius, as, room by room, the sheer scale of his old-age vision blooms into visually splendid life.  Hockney has become an expert on seeing things with an eye unjaded by the camera, a master of perspective and its lack, and someone who, like Hardy , notices things.  His unabashed rural East Yorkshire empiricism is, to me at least, the best thing to happen in the arts in Britain in decades - it is so fresh, naturalistic, simple, and yet profoundly engaged, with the seasons, with time, with trees - one could hardly ask for a more universal theme.  Hockney, a superb draughtsman, is able to render thistles, twigs, leaves, grass, and shoots, as well as fields and hedges, lanes and blossoming or bare bows, with aplomb, flair, ...

Morgan Harlow reviews The City with Horns by Tamar Yoseloff We must embrace the gift of the street, The glare of chaos, of things being various. The frail instant needs us to record it; The mute made audible, still life animated.                     (‘Mannequins on 7 th Street’ for Robert Vas Dias, after Anthony Eyton)                  Tamar Yoseloff’s The City with Horns is a timely collection, communicating “The mute made audible, still life animated” of the abstract expressionist avant-garde art movement during the last century alongside the buildup to the current global economic crisis which has brought the world as we know it to the brink of chaos. With its echo of George Oppen ’s ‘Of Being Numerous’, the poem ‘Mannequins on 7 th Street’ rings with particular acuity at a time when peo...

Sad news.  One of the greats of British art, Richard Hamilton , has died.

Sad news.   Lucian Freud , one of the greats of British post-war painting, has died, at the age of 88.  I had the pleasure to see him several times as he dined at his table at The Wolseley.  Yesterday, according to The Guardian , that table was draped in a black cloth with a single candle on it.  Freud, whose paintings sold for tens of millions, was famously linked to Sigmund Freud , his grand-father.  I recall studying his work in art history class back at college in Montreal; we were all taken aback by and impressed with his attention to genitals, and to the gross realities of human fleshiness.  Later, in London, I looked into his late self-portrait and recognized in its slashes of dark colours genius, and dark self-reflection.  Genius can be complicated, strange, ugly, and attractive, all at once, in a compelling way; the best art usually is.  I am not sure Freud was a person you'd want to meet unless you were a beautiful woman, or someone t...

Sad news - one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century has died - Neil Fujita .  Fujita made a stylish, indelible mark on the 60s and 70s with his album covers for classics like Brubeck 's Take Five , and the book covers for hugely-bestselling paperbacks The Godfather and In Cold Blood .  Fujita overcame racism and internment to become a vital part of post-war American culture, and is a remarkable figure, if not a household name.

Katrina Naomi reviews What The Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo by Pascale Petit That Pascale Petit originally trained and worked as a sculptor is evident in these finely wrought poems. While many of us may work in response to paintings (or other art forms), I suspect that few would be able to create and sustain such a vivid and varied full-length collection as What the Water Gave Me . Every poem takes a painting by the celebrated Mexican artist Frida Kahlo as it starting point. I’m an admirer of Kahlo’s paintings and feel I know her work fairly well; therefore I wondered what Petit could show me that I hadn’t already ’seen’ or experienced for myself. The answer is, plenty. I’ve thought about writing a collection in response to two of my favourite (very different) painters - Paula Rego and Stanley Spencer - but would worry that a whole book dedicated to each would be dull. Yet there’s no such worries here. I don’t think Petit could write a dull poem if she tried. And for th...

Not mine, actually, but Michael Lawrence 's.  Lawrence is a fascinating, multi-talented painter, sculptor, and writer, based on the Greek island of Hydra, where he has his studio.  Lawrence, widely collected by Hollywood types like Oliver Stone , was greatly influenced by his mother and father, who were, if not Hollywood royalty, then within the palace walls: his father was famous film noir actor Marc Lawrence , who often played memorable heavies; and his mother was novelist-screenwriter Fanya Foss .  They moved to Italy in the 50s, and befriended many European and expat artists and actors there.  Returned to LA as a teen, Michael went to high school with Jim Morrison , of The Doors .  Lawrence's exuberant, joyous, playful, and colourful paintings, prints, sketches, and watercolours are inspired by Fellini , Tati , and in general represent a carnivalesque vision, referencing poetry, film, and other cultural signposts, as well as the sunny, sometimes erotic, life...

Jane asked for it - and Eyewear delivers. Not coal to Newcastle, but Cole to Holland - the restricted view of Olivia Cole that Jane Holland wanted to see: the cover of her debut from Salt, reviewed below by Mel Pryor . Enjoy.

Sad news.  The 98-year-old French-American artist, Louise Bourgeois has died.

As an anthologist I enjoy the bittersweet experience of reading forgotten anthologies of yesteryear - those charming time-tombs. No point in observing that most art is futile and ends in oblivion for most artists; we are mostly not Horace . Save our souls, but forget our names. Chad Walsh that great Champion of CS Lewis from Beloit College edited thanklessly a long unused Scribners anthology from 1964, Today's Poets . 45 years later it mainly holds up well though we no longer speak of wild man poets. Ginsberg is absent. Walsh predicts great things for Walcott but doesn't particularly enthuse about Larkin . The great Eberhart is given his due. Carl Bode we don't much read now. Nor Gil Orlovitz . Good to have them here. Vassar Miller is an intriguing poet. However I most enjoyed encountering Walsh's Beloit friend, Princeton man, the poet Bink Noll . Noll, born in 1927, has the best poet name, no? I love the name Bink Noll. Anyway, he is too obscure now, but wrote w...

100 years ago today, Marinetti proclaimed the virtues of Futurism . There is something melancholy about such an anniversary, since it emphasizes the way that history has a way of becoming antiquated, and the new of becoming old hat. For the experimentalist wings of 21st century poetry, avant-garde work of 100 years ago continues to be a red herring with the scent of an elixir - a potent promise of renewed relevance - even though its historic course, as Danto argues (persuasively to a point) the age of manifestos is kaput. Still, poetic enterprise lacks any vim if it doesn't have some lead in its pencils, and that just may be a fuel driven by youth, energy, or even brash stupidity. Futurism retains its ability to shock and amuse, if not inspire, because its design style is impressive, and because its claims are truly destabilising. Much of what Futurism endorsed, of course, seems "morally wrong" - notably the celebration of the beauty of war - and hardly the stuff to...

For some, Andrew Wyeth is a mere purveyor of trite Americana, of kitsch, of illustrative, sentimental pap. Okay, he's no Rothko . He was not abstract. However, as the painting above shows, Mr. Wyeth was one of the finest American painters of a gothic-realist school, that managed to convey the uncanny aspects of the natural world once peopled, in a manner that is both classic and strange. Wyeth, whose work I love and so do not resist, is the Robert Frost of painting, with all the sins and positives that suggests. Then again, I grew up near the countryside, and spent much time on farms and in woods, as a boy. I knew such people, with their weathered faces. I saw those homes, those fields. As David Lynch (an unexpected cornpone-weirdo follower perhaps) proves, there is much power and artistry in mining the odd surface of everyday rural and small-town America.

Sad news, first seen on Silliman's blog : Grace Hartigan has died. Hartigan was an American Abstract Expressionist, and close friend of the leading New York School poets, including Frank O'Hara .

This is Eyewear 's 1, 111th post. It therefore seemed appropriate to discuss what Eyewear believes to be the best Anglo-American feature film of the last 50 years - Vertigo (1958) - which, in fact, is also exactly 50-years-old. Citizen Kane would have to be considered the best pre-1958 film of its kind. Kane and Vertigo have much in common - they both feature scores by Bernard Hermann , and both present stories of thwarted love, and deeply tragic lives. However, their differences are acute - Kane is American, various, lively, and overtly stylish, and in black and white - Vertigo , though stylish as well, is in profound colour, is actually very European, in tone and depths of Freudian and Nietzschean influences. Roughly, the dualities at the core of Vertigo , between the real world and the apparent world, correspond with the worlds of repressed and conscious desire; and life is aestheticised, in order to try to cope with tragedy - though in the process, Scottie loses both Madel...

Sad news. The major American artist Robert Rauschenberg has died.

Edward Burra was one of the great 30s British modernist painters - but has been mainly airbrushed out of the official record. It is good to see Jane Stevenson setting the record straight - perhaps an ironic way of wording it, since Burra was an eccentric, queer figure. Stevenson has identified a different kind of modernist style, "modern baroque", and describes it in the following way: "inclusive, protean, humorous, unafraid of bad taste, entranced by games with perspective; a modernism that finds Harlem dudes in camel overcoats more interesting than all the log piles in the world." My study of late-modernism in British poetry of the 30s and 40s suggests that such a baroque style also prevailed there, at times, and has been similarly marginalised. It is time to foreground such a style, especially when critics of "good taste" so often manage to ignore or downgrade some of the most thrilling, enjoyable, and provocative works. Art can also be flamboyant with...