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Keats and Negative Capability in 2012

The famous concept Negative Capability, created and developed by John Keats inone of his letters, has to do with (among other things) imaginative fusion with aperceived Other. Negative Capability is vivified in Keats’ Odes- in particular, in “Odeto a Nightingale,” which has as a crux Keats’ attempt to imagine himself into theecstatic, boundless, untroubled consciousness of an Other drawn from nature. It’s aRomantic vision quest- it’s also a strain to think that a nightingale has anyconsciousness at all. Nevertheless, the poem is redeemed by complexities- Keatsuses his imaginative vision quest as a pretext to pierce the depths of humanity andhuman consciousness, and also of literature and language itself. I want to bringKeats, “Nightingale,” and Negative Capability up co-terminously with our present dayand present day-issues, because imaginative fusion is another facet of a humanisticapproach to the arts; also, more pertinently, because it has the potential to topplecultural narcissism and ego-based imperatives, which have dominated America n(and, to a certain extent, European) cultural mores since post-modernism won itshigh place in the 1960s.

Narcissism in America is a national epidemic- American society is stridentlycompetitive, and Americans are encouraged by custom to want to “beat” each other,reinforcing an identity that is harsh, singular, and not particularly fluid. If children inAmerica were taught that imaginative fusion with perceived Others was a positiveendeavor, (and there’s no reason why Keats and others of his ilk can’t be taught toteenagers), it wouldn’t have to be that ruthless and vindictive competition was asufficient and positive motive in life. The problem American schools would have withKeats is that he’s too complex; you have to use your imagination to understand his.Whitman, who’s comparatively unimaginative and not particularly intellectuallyengaging, does get taught; Frost, who’s even more lax, gets taught; and, for brightkids, there’s no moral or ethical lesson to be learned from them. Keats’ lesson, werehe to be taught, has to do not only with the power of the human imagination but withthe desirability of building and flexing imaginative muscles.

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How are American teenagers encouraged to use their imaginations? Americanculture is dull and repetitive, American schools are dull and repetitive, and the GreatRecession has deepened the sense of dullness and repetitiveness around Americagenerally. If kids in America today want to live purely with and for the material, and tointernalize solely materialistic values, they’re probably going to be disappointed.Materialism in America is suddenly a dead end, and the materialistic approach to lifea fruitless one. Teaching imaginative fusion to kids is an act of charity andcompassion; why train them to value a life they can’t have? Keats and the Romanticsare a taste that, if acquired, at a young age, can last a life-time. Adults tend to findthe oafish simplicity of Whitman and Frost difficult to respect. Teach kids to valuecomplexity and intellect; to prize their own imaginations and how a developedimagination can fuse with the world around it. It’s counterproductive and cruel toespouse materialism when material resources are scarce.

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Humanism and Crisis

One advantage of humanistic approaches to art to post-modern ones is that, if youinnovate within humanistic confines, timelessness can be courted. Simply put, what’smost representatively human is (and has always been) what lasts longest. Post-modernity prizes “in” jokes centered in a specific time and place; even the ultimate

“in” joke, that Marcel Duchamp co-opted and enveloped all of post-modernity beforeit even began. The “in” joke for humanists (like the Philly Free School) is thatDuchamp started off as yet another frustrated Picasso wannabe, who rebelledagainst Picasso because he couldn’t equal him. And since Duchamp’s totalizedrebellion constituted a totalized rejection of the aesthetic from the inside out, lookingat Warhol tweaking Duchamp and then Koons tweaking Warhol can’t be thatinteresting over a long period of time because what’s being tweaked is a void and adenial. But, post-modern critics will say, this is what the twentieth century was, avoid- true enough, especially with America’s material and cultural supremacy overEurope after WWII. Rejections of the aesthetic and a transaesthetic mentality(“transaesthetic” being Baudrillard’s term for “anything can be art”) were a startingpoint for Duchamp onwards; investigations of a posited “nothing,” and for no reason.

One good reason that humanism is a decent bet to trounce this approach in 2012 isthat, during economic crises, art audiences (like everyone else) are more needy. Ifan impoverished audience wants to find anything in the arts, it’s richness. No onewants to look at or read a void who’s already enveloped into one. If you seesomething timeless, which represents some human essence in an innovative way,your mind (and, dare I say it, heart) are enriched. This is heightened if the work of artis rich enough to force you to engage it several times- works of higher art aresupposed to have that duration. That’s what separates them from kitsch and popularculture. If everything is conflated (and America in particular is wont to conflate thesethings), culture becomes a junk-heap. American culture is a junk-heap, and largelyalways has been. Furthermore, “the funny stuff” was created as a foil orcounterbalance to serious aestheticism- it was never meant to dominate, and couldonly do so in a time of cultural degeneracy.

Crises have a level of humanism built into them- if trapped in a burning building,even post-modernists will scream (thus proving they finally feel something). Americais now in a place and set in position to sweat, scream, and bleed- the funny stuff

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can’t quite requite us for what’s been lost. For those of us who never found the funnystuff that funny, the stage being set for a new (and innovative) humanism can onlybe a good thing. The post-modern disease- a complex which stipulates that onlypushing forward into deeper levels of corrosive banality constitutes progress in thearts- has its antithesis in essential themes being refreshed inventively, andspecifically for this crisis period. Only a fool would say that sex, God, death, passion,politics, gender, language, and the human imagination could ever be exhausted.That’s what post-modernity was- the triumph of the foolish over the wise, over anextended period of time and with disastrous consequences for the arts. Now thatcrisis has forced an array of new hands to be played, the pearls will emerge from theirritations of a society shaken to its core.

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On a Movie Still 

Images of sex in American cinema are a dime a dozen. American cinematic

portrayals of sex are usually air-brushed and sanitized for mass consumption. Actorsand actresses unconvincingly mime sexual intercourse as rapturous, passionate,harmonious, and not awkward, tentative or anti-climactic. What distinguishes NataliePortman’s portrayal of the character Alice Ayers in the movie “Closer” (also starringClive Owen, Jude Law, and Julia Roberts) is that her sense of sexuality is shotthrough not only with duplicitous edges and manipulative overtones but with dreadand foreboding. Alice uses sex to magnetize men who will protect her; but she has acompulsion to seduce which endangers this protection. This still, from a famousscene in “Closer,” which has become one of the most famous seduction scenes of alltime, shows us the dangerous, dark side of sexuality that Portman, as Alice,represents. But that the shot is quirky, and works on other levels- the stripper’s garbthat Portman is wearing (including pink wig), the fact that she is contorted into “split”position, and the plush blue “funhouse” room in which she and Clive Owen areensconced, all give the still a lurid, unique magnetism of its own. That Portman’scontorted position expresses an interior reality gives the still some emotional heft-she is “split” between a world of comfort and one of danger, what her needs are andher own unbalanced appetites. Since the room is a kind of funhouse, what is inferredis that layers of artifice animate and distend the situation. She is being watched; butsince you can only see the back of Clive Owen’s head, we don’t get a clue as towhat his expression is or whether he is “buying” the performance. The dynamictension is between artifice and reality- how many of Alice’s postures are “true” andhow many feigned. And that adds a second tension- is Alice more attractive whenshe’s real or when she’s faking? That sex and sexualized relationships can integrate

not only crass physicality but also imagination is the hinge on which these tensionsrest- and because the still shows us sex rendered not only intensely butimaginatively, it has its own charisma not completely dependent on “Closer” but notcompletely independent from it either.

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The Philly Rock Shots

The Philly rock shots are interesting to me because they prove a number of keypoints at once. Rock music, as an art-form and a cultural force, has flourished for atleast half a century on a number of different levels together. Nationally and

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internationally successful acts can go so far as to sell out stadiums; local acts canhave trouble even filling up local venues. But that rock music, no matter howcommercially successful, is an empowering agent in society, giving participants asubstantial voice and an ability to make political and personal statements(expressive of whatever ethos happens to be relevant and espoused), would bedifficult to dispute. One thing I’ve discovered, while putting together “Rock Shots,” isthat Philadelphia rock musicians seem to have a surer aesthetic sense than do rockmusicians in other cities and scenes; and that this has resulted in more memorableimages than in NYC, L.A., D.C., Chicago, San Fran, and the rest.

With Billy Dufala of Man Man, we have a portrait which reveals character-expressions, attitudes, and a certain sense of artistic lunacy. The portrait of singer-songwriter Natalie Mering does much the same thing, this time with a hinge to astatement about transience, permanence, fertility, futility, and the ability of works ofart to stop time. Marriage Records founder Curtis Knapp (based in Portland, Oregon,but originally from Philly) shows us how a strain of restlessness, recklessness, androotlessness animates Indie America; and the striking image of Philly stalwartsStinking Lizaveta seems like a harbinger of apocalypse, the fall of America, and thedecimation of civilization altogether. The Philly Rock Shots all have an edge in themaway from comfort, complacence, and the juvenile, sexualized posturing whichpervades much rock photography- each one is a serious statement meant to dosomething other than sell. Philly in the Aughts was not that different than Memphis inthe 1970s, where rock music was concerned- a zone where musicians played andrecorded rock music because they wanted to, not to impress anyone, and not to getfamous. They had something to express.

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Picasso and Romanticism

Though the conjunction of English Romanticism as a gestalt with the privilegednotion of an “I,” an atomized male ego set against society towards nature and thetimeless, is something of a cultural cliche, it’s nonetheless a cliche buttressed bymany levels of truth. If not too many critics and scholars have proposed some kind ofconjunction between English Romanticism and Picasso, it’s somewhat owing to an“apples and oranges” effect (representational versus literary art), and it’s also ashame. The space Picasso works from has many harmonies with a Byronic,

Keatsian, or Wordsworthian space- he certainly seems to embody an atomized maleego set against society towards the timeless. What’s missing is “nature”: Picasso’sforms are products of intense imaginative power interacting with the harsh andsynthetic material realities of century XX.

The reason I bring this up around Picasso’s 1906 self-portrait is that it presents himbounded within a grey space; it looks more like clay, something synthetic, than agrey sky. The grey is emblematic of an artist forced to work against nature torepresent new human realities in a new century. The grey of synthetic forms alsoimposes a psychological encumbrance on the artist- rather than nature sparking akind of Romantic ecstasy (whether ecstasy as joy, as we mean it today, or as a formof madness, as the Romantics knew it), the murk and muck of technologicaladvancement (especially as applied to militaries) creates a sense of futility and nullityaround the higher arts, so that the mind’s chiasmus with nature would seem to beboth impractical and unimaginable. Wordsworth had his own murk and muck; theindustrial revolution was well under way during almost his entire adult life. ButWordsworth went out of his way to create self-portraits in fertile greens. By 1906,Picasso dimmed the effort into greyness, and that is where much of his best workdwells (along with blue and rose). That he sought the timeless in theme and formnonetheless is both remarkable and classically Romantic.

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More on Bonnard

Feminists in the late twentieth century loved to deconstruct the objectifying malegaze. Picasso was always one of their favorite targets; pushing up to mid centuryXX, de Kooning was also singled out, for obvious reasons. There is no inherentproblem with deconstructive analyses of the male gaze; unless the inference is builtinto these deconstructions that the realm of the arts would be a more sanguine placewithout it. The objectifying male gaze is a fact of life and both a law and a force ofnature- a psycho-affective and psycho-sexual brick wall and a permanent level of

human richness. What’s richly durable about it is that male creators can reveal theirentire selves, including their vulnerabilities, when they perform the ocular trick ofimperial conquest.

What Bonnard reveals, in “Woman Pulling on her Stockings,” is that he is enmeshedin the green haze of jealousy, fertility, comfort, and squeamishness that revealedsexuality engenders. He catches his subject here in medias res (one stocking off, abare leg and a “darkened” one), and the paint handling has a sexualized fluidity to isso that the male gaze is “swimming” in the feminine. This fluidity amounts to anadmission that, on some levels, the artist cannot see his subject clearly- all thetensions and ambiguities involved in partial nudity have rendered the portrait asmuch a study of male bewilderment and confusion (when confronted with rawfemininity) as anything else. Yet the tenderness with which the forms are renderedmake them pleasing- and the subtext of jealousy which layers of green suggest areoffset by the intense sense of harmonic and textural balance between these layers.The basic point I am trying to make is that the objectifying male gaze cannot bemanifested outwardly without reflecting an inward reality- every decimated woman isa kind of self-portrait (of decimation or not) as well. If feminists sense danger from it,it has more to do with self-conscious fear of their own sexual power than of any harmPicasso, Bonnard, de Kooning or others may do.

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Bonnard and “Indolence”

For Bonnard to paint a painting like “Indolence” (1898/99), and, even moreimportantly, to call it “Indolence” and thus turn it into an allegory, Bonnard had to digpast the mannerisms and concerns of the Impressionists and post-Impressionistsback to Manet, who assayed the transgressive in a novel way in mid-nineteenthcentury France. What makes Bonnard and “Indolence” interesting, on the edge ofcentury XX (and as a tangent to Manet’s “Olympia”) is the sense that Bonnard’semployment of language drastically alters the thematic import of the painting; i.e., isthe nude nymphet indolent for reclining on the half-lit bed, or is the artist indolent(and, perhaps, impotent) for only painting her? Thus, the genuine allegory here isthat knife-edges of double meanings are hidden everywhere, even in conventional (if

transgressive) representational art. Double meanings are built into the formalstructure of the painting too- to the right of the nymphet is a large, dark area ofshadow; and to her left (gauche), a large space of pure bright light. Sex is full ofdichotomies- male/female, moral/immoral, attraction/repulsion; and this paintingrepresents them, both thematically and formally. The big century XX art dichotomy(art/non-art or trash) is hiding in the background too. To transpose something fromRomanticist Geoffrey Hartman, the nymphet and the painter himself are both“boundary figures,” embodied linkages from surface realities to deeper ones(surfaces to depths)- and for depths to disappear in dichotomies is a distinctlycentury XX predicament in visual art.

ADAM FIELED, 2012

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