No Country For New Deals: Letter From Los Angeles By Kevin Cameron

Except perhaps for its ending, it is the tone of No Country For Old Men, the new film from Joel and Ethan Coen, that is most striking. On a shelf by itself, it would have this quality, but alongside the rest of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, it is particularly menacing. Unlike all their previous films to date, which seem to reek (for better or worse) of the brothers’ now trademark self-conscious irony, there is no “get it?” to No Country. In fact, there is no pandering to the audience at all, for there is about as much irony here as one usually finds in the unforgiving west Texas badlands where the story takes place. As is the case with such harsh country, the tone is stark and reflective as it takes us on a trip into the recent American past, summoning up ghosts that have now become institutionalized in the fabric of our equally menacing market-driven utopia—a utopia whose germ, like the germs of most religions, flowers poetically in the desert.

Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy of the same name, No Country tells the story of three men searching for each other. Interestingly, none finds what he is after. The adaptation comes replete with all the violence of the novel, but it smartly disregards much of McCarthy’s sentimentalism. There is Llewllyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder and Vietnam veteran who, while out hunting antelope in the Texas wastelands, chances upon the aftermath of a drug-deal gone wrong. Not one to waste an opportunity, Moss hounds down the two-million in cash that he knows intuitively must have been left behind. Here is where the stalking triangle begins. On his tail is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a depraved yet oddly robot-like, homicidal maniac who is impelled by a tantalizing Kantian sense of responsibility to recover the lost loot now in Moss’ possession. Thrown into this mix a little too late to be of any effectiveness is Sheriff Ed Bell, portrayed in a wonderfully subdued and stoical manner by Tommy Lee Jones. Although not the key figure in the Coen brothers’ meticulously crafted cat-and-mouse game between Moss and Chigurh, Sheriff Bell is the character that most fully realizes the Coens’ not so easy to find social message hidden under this extremely entertaining noir drama.

The acting is as striking as the tone of the story. Josh Brolin’s Moss appears simultaneously confident and bewildered as he hopes to stretch an ill-begotten economic opportunity into early retirement, while all the time being unknowingly in way over his head. Bardem’s Chigurh fills the screen with a chilling other-worldly presence akin to a computer-programmed avenging angel. The understatedness of his character is effective in illustrating a man who lives by a moral code beyond the mundane comprehension of civil society. Tommy Lee Jones plays, well, Tommy Lee Jones, but in the Coen brothers' hands he becomes a sad sage without answers rather than simply the grizzled cynic he has come to caricature.

It is thus the character of Sheriff Bell who provides the viewer with ruminations on the larger moral and social significance of the chase between Moss and Chigurh. From his point of view, the world has moved beyond both his comprehension and his ability to police his small corner of it. Here men kill each other over the fleeting treasure of narcotic profits, without passion and without remorse. The prevalence of drug wealth also has the power to pull seemingly law-abiding, although desperate, men into a world riddled with violence and doom. And that is the point of the film: something has changed in our social fabric. Criminals are different—beyond the reach of legal comprehension. Citizens are different—more opportunistic and more desperate. The old rules, prejudices, and sentiments no longer apply. It has ceased to be a country where an old man has a place. Yet, in an interesting scene between Bell and his crippled brother, we find out that this country has in a fundamental sense always been this harsh. But for some reason, we have forgotten this stinging truth. The Coen brothers have spun this tale in order to remind us of this fact.

Interestingly, No Country takes place in the recent past of 1980, in West Texas. The change in the universe of cops and robbers is then situated historically amidst a similar change in the American landscape itself. 1980 was, of course, the year in which the Reagan revolution commenced, complete with all the free-market euphoria that inaugurated the dismantling of the New Deal Welfare state. Allegorically, then, Chigurh can be seen as the very embodiment of Capital shorn of its ethical and social responsibilities that “crippled” its free movement prior to Reagan. It is not merely that he is a socio-path that calmly kills only for the money; what is crucial is that his mechanical actions are performed in strict accordance with his own inscrutable moral code. Thus, he embodies most fully the underside of the Neo-conservative ideological fantasy of the moral quality of capital—a quality that must be unleashed if we are to enjoy its ultimate fruits. At one point, Sheriff Bell refers to Chigurh as a “ghost”, as something that is beyond our detection, something that forces the world to move in a manner that we can no longer master socially. And his injured escape at the end establishes the guarantee of his continual return, forever intent on wreaking more havoc on the social fabric no matter how often we seek to rein him in with our abysmal political restraints.

If we follow this line, Moss appears as an emblem of the white working-class, the Reagan Democrat if you will, who shifted electoral allegiances in the lottery-induced hope that tax cuts would lead to a financial windfall. Moss is the hunter when we first meet him, but he becomes the desperately hunted once he envisions the possibility of a get-rich-quick scheme. In the end, his cynical go-it-alone mentality secures not only his demise, but that of his family as well. (This must be the pathetic creature qua listener that pundits for the wealthy such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly cynically have on the brain when they preach out in mock anger at such seemingly demonic forces as “socialized” medicine).

It is interesting that we follow Moss on his journey into Reagan country, but never actually witness his murder. We have seen America’s industrial workforce in steady decline, but we too have failed to witness its death. And as the direction of the film invites viewers to become absorbed in Sheriff Bell as he looks for the old, now obsolete, rules of the game to fix things, the murder occurrs without his—and our—detection (It might be too much to say that the Mexican gang that kills him is some kind of embodiment of the cruel irony of NAFTA). The point is that Moss dies attempting to obtain something that rightfully belongs to capital and to those who truly benefit from tax cuts, and not to someone from his social class.

As noted above, Sheriff Bell represents someone who lives by the old, pre-neocon rules, the embodiment of the social balance underlying the New Deal. He possesses all the intent and effectiveness in resolving the situation as the contemporary Democratic Party has in resolving ours. In fact, in a mysterious scene, when he comes close to confronting the social and moral problem embodied in Chigurh, he fails to see him at all. His senses are not what they used to be. One waits for the sheriff to save the day, but he never even comes close. Herein lies both the meaning of the Coen brothers’ vision and the significance of the ending of the story they tell.

The “old man” here is the New Deal and the majoritarian consensus that held it together. Represented by an impotent and ageing lawman, the consensus is now divided, turned in on itself, and lacking any ethical compass. This is no longer a country for it. The cruelty represented by Chigurh that is unleashed into our world with the loss of this old man’s skills is merely a return to a form of life that preceded the consensus. However, under the fantasies we have wrought concerning the reemergence of the free market and all its rugged individualist baggage, we have forgotten how harsh the past had been and, thus, do not realize it was something we used to control. Now we find ourselves in a new gilded age. This is where the confusion of Sheriff Bell comes in. He can no longer track a killer because he is living in his own fantasy that explains the past as a place that possessed some kind of moral order where, presumably, law men did not need to carry firearms. He can only dream of some vague reconciliation with a dead paternal figure. The brilliance of the end of No Country rests in its refusal to resolve the story. It is an abrupt end designed to be disappointing because it seeks to reveal that we have unleashed Chigurh, and only we, and not some dead father-figure (FDR?) or overly romanticized fantasy of the individual, can tame it. If only we could stop thinking of that satchel of money that awaits us under a tree just over the next hill.

Only In America: Viewing "The Nutcracker" with Eyes Wide Shut

“Every Christmas we are all one more Nutcracker closer to death.” – Richard Buckle


It is not likely that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut will be included among the slew of family holiday specials that will soon arrive in movie houses and theaters throughout the United States. For those of you who have seen this or any other film by Kubrick, its absence from the holiday entertainment repertoire probably comes as no surprise.

But the approach of Christmas is emphasized throughout Kubrick’s last film, starting with the first scene. The pre-teen daughter of a wealthy couple asks her mother if she can stay up to watch “The Nutcracker” on television while they go out to a Christmas party. The mother (Nicole Kidman) of course readily agrees, apparently pleased her daughter voluntarily wants to see the ballet that has been introducing American children (and adults) to this form of art since CBS first presented a New York City Ballet performance on Christmas night in 1957. It in fact seems as though the CBS production team made every effort to present the 1957 television premiere of “The Nutcracker” as the birth of a family-oriented cultural tradition. For instance, the broadcast opened, closed and was occasionally interrupted by none other than June Lockhart (a.k.a., the mother in the Lassie series that began that year), who appeared next to a young girl on a living room sofa with a storybook in her hands.

What may not be commonly known today about the most widely performed of ballets in the U.S., however, is that its origins couldn’t be further removed from the iconic, Norman Rockwell-like status it now commands. The ballet is based upon E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, “The Nutcracker and The Mouse King,” a darkly comic, at times graphically violent, ghost story that, like Eyes Wide Shut, has the power to disarm both the reader and the central character of their ability to clearly distinguish fantasy from “reality.” And so we might wonder how and why it happened that a grisly, at times ironic, and in any case highly ambiguous Hoffmann tale evolved (or devolved) into the “Great Russian Nutcracker” that the Moscow Ballet will be performing at the Tennessee Theatre on November 25 as part of its 93-city tour of North America and Canada (significantly, the company will only perform “The Nutcracker in the U.S. In Canada, it will stage Tchaikovsky’s more critically acclaimed “Swann Lake”). This was in fact the question dance critic Jennifer Fisher posed in her recent book, “Nutcracker Nation.”

How is it, she wonders, that the ballet which opened to highly unfavorable reviews at the Mariinsky Theatre of St. Petersburg in 1892 (and continues to have comparatively limited success with Russian audiences) has become an unrivalled cultural sensation in the United States? Why did the ballet here “latch on to the Christmas season so securely?” Why, in the words of Mary Talmi, the artistic advisor to the Moscow Ballet in the U.S., is it widely regarded in the U.S. as “the one experience that brings the family together, where [each member] walks out of the theater with a really warm feeling?”

One partial, but by no means complete answer, may lie in the fact that many American companies have added innumerable innovations to their respective productions of the ballet, many of which attempt to tailor the performance to a particular region’s historical- cultural traditions. To cite but one example: Donald Byrd produced a “Harlem Nutcracker” which portrayed Clara as a grandmother who has flashbacks to childhood episodes that take place during the Harlem Renaissance (the flashbacks culminate with dances held at the “Club Sweets” in the ballet’s second act, accompanied by a Duke Ellington arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s score). What all these variations have in common is the extent to which they carefully exclude any direct references to the darker aspects of the Hoffmann short story.

For their 15th annual tour of the U.S., the Moscow Ballet likewise stages a performance punctuated by several unique alterations that keep references to Hoffmann at bay. Perhaps owning to the fact that the company was formed in 1986 by members of the award-winning “Glasnost Festival Tour” (which signaled the beginning of the end of the Cold War), the setting of the second act, for instance, takes place not in the Land of the Sweets but rather in the “Land of Peace and Harmony”, where the Nutcracker Prince and the renamed Masha are escorted by a dove to a utopian world the program notes describe as devoid of “war and suffering.”

The appearance of the dove may perhaps be overshadowed by Valentin Fedorov’s spectacular scenic design, which depicts a backdrop of painted unicorns, elephants, lions and firebirds. While Fedorov cites the late 19th century French “primitive” painter Henri Rousseau as an inspiration for these backdrops, there is no intimation here of the sort of hidden terror and disquieting “artificiality” that distinguishes the latter’s famous jungle paintings.

It may be then, that “The Nutcracker’s” success in America directly stems from the very factors that provoked scorn when it first opened in St. Petersburg. That is, the ballet’s amorphous plot, its decorative figures and props that seem to appeal primarily to children, the way it unequivocally abandons any element of psychological or historical realism, and its joyful granting of an untainted childhood wish all seem to immunize the work from the historical instances of “war and suffering” which never fail to haunt the inimitably American celebration of Christmas.

The Moscow Ballet does depart in one significant respect from most productions, however. At the end of the ballet, Masha awakes from a dream in an epilogue that adds a small dose of realism to the performance. But this too stops short of the sort of effect Hoffmann produces. While his short story also ends with the child protagonist awakening from a dream, neither she nor the reader are sure which parts of the preceding story were part of that dream. In fact, Hoffmann’s narrator invites us to question how certain we can be that dream and reality can, at the end (or at the beginning) of the day, be clearly separated from one another: “The most wonderful things can be seen if you have the right sort of eyes for it.” Such things are particularly hard to see with “eyes wide shut.”

“Reconfigured”: The state of contemporary art on view at the Basement Gallery’s national exhibition

Basement Gallery curator Michael Martin thought the odds were high that something good would happen if he organized a national, juried exhibition whose title and theme exploits both the historical importance and the expressive richness of the term “Reconfigured.” And leaving it up to “each artist to interpret what they think or feel the exhibition title means to them specifically” has enabled Martin to present a cohesive yet highly diverse exhibition that provides a revealing snapshot of contemporary art which is greatly enhanced by the oil paintings by Mandy Rogers Horton and the installation/sculpture by Tina Stevens.

Horton’s two paintings have the power to create a newly fashioned historical tradition that seems to turn certain works from the past into her own precursors. That is, movements, media, styles and eras not normally associated with one another like the Medieval Fresco, Pointillism, Surrealism and the late works of Francis Bacon converge as if in response to a summons issued by Horton’s “The Soft Animal of Your Body” and “In Search of.”

In both of these works, which seem to demand that they be viewed together, merging, bleached color patterns tainted by a single hue appear to outline the haunting remains of a sacred fresco. The unaccountable white background against which figures neither wholly abstract nor wholly representational appear in a state of suspension heightens our sense of having discovered a precious fragment that belongs to a vanished world. Along with this feeling of loss and unfamiliarity, however, the works seem to generate a quiet, dynamic energy that is derived from multiple sources. In fact, the longer we look at the paintings, the more we may start to detect signs of a violent and painful metamorphosis that appears to have been frozen at a decisive, and yet still indeterminate, moment. But it would perhaps be more in the spirit of Horton’s work to say that what we see depicted is the actual freezing of a crucial point in a struggle which somehow appears to be taking place simultaneously between two clashing life-forms and within a single “organism.”

This sense of bearing witness to an act of “reconfiguration” may give viewers the feeling that they are also engaged in a type of struggle, as their perceptions of the paintings’ figurative qualities repeatedly come up against the limits imposed by the abstract forms which continually threaten to engulf the painting. This shift from the figurative to the abstract is then reinforced and deepened when, as though in response to the pull of two opposing magnetic forces, we alternatively step away from, and toward, the works.

What may initially strike us most about Tina Stevens’ untitled installation on view is how “easy” it is to identify the form and content of the sculpture—especially since they seem to be one and the same: an arrangement of about 2 dozen screwdrivers with red handles on a white pedestal that is raised a couple of feet off the ground. But this feeling of recognition proves to be short-lived as we perceive how all the tools seem to be inexplicably interwoven with one another. And upon closer examination we also see that the shaft of each screwdriver has been bent in a manner that transforms the tool into a “new”, hook-like instrument. As a result, the misshapen, “melted” screwdrivers that nevertheless also appear unused, undamaged and oddly “functional” (even if no exact function for them comes readily to mind) seem to have magically shed their functional properties and taken on strikingly “aesthetic” features.

Stevens’ arrangement thus creates an effect similar to the one produced by Horton’s paintings in that she allows us to envision a process of visual alteration that normally occurs only on a computer screen. And so before long the scrap heap may begin to resemble by turns a Frank Gehry-like architectural model, a newly invented technological device, and the exposed, internal wiring of some mechanized apparatus.

But the works by Stevens and Horton do more than “stage” a moment of reconfiguration that points toward, and further develops, the history of modern art. For apart from invoking the process by which something from the visible world is transformed into the subject of a painting or sculpture, or reassessing the ways in which the dominant styles used to represent those subjects have evolved (or devolved) from “realism” to varying forms of abstraction, or exposing how the materials considered to be suitable for making an artwork have alternatively expanded and contracted, they also suggest that a revitalized way of seeing should not restrict its field of vision to the realm of art.

David Allee at the KMA’s “New Photography” Exhibit

The relationship between photography and painting has always been treated as a complicated one, and perhaps never more so than today. In fact, with the advent of Photorealism and digital imaging programs like “Paint Shop Pro”, we have long since passed the point where we can clearly tell who (The painter? The photographer?) is imitating whom. But what is perhaps more troubling is that it has become increasingly difficult to figure out why an artist working in one medium is imitating or borrowing a certain style from another.

In an apparent attempt to show viewers that it is nevertheless possible (and even enjoyable) to establish a sense of order in the midst of such confusion, the KMA offers visitors to its new photography exhibit a special guide that attempts to map out for them how the works on display have “transformed photography into a vital contemporary art medium marked by innovation and experimentation.”

Under the heading, “Gallery Challenge: Can You Identify?”, the interactive guide asks visitors a series of questions that reveal much about the world of photography today: “can you identify photographs that have been altered using digital software or darkroom techniques? Can you identify photographs that represent straightforward views of the subjects [of the photographs] as they appeared [before being photographed]? Can you identify photographs that depict places or settings that were invented or staged by the artist?”

Before you get too far along in this game, you may begin to sense that something fundamental is missing, that some question or set of questions hasn’t been asked but perhaps should have been. And why might this be so? It appears that the featured photographers were so preoccupied with, say, merely tweaking a famous painting (“distorting” a Caravaggio by taking a picture of it that uses only the existing light of the museum where it is displayed), or pulling a sleight of hand (photographing a chair set against shelves of wine corks that only become identifiable as you move closer to the image), or imitating a still from a film ( an overly studied image of a woman who sits “lost in thought” in a corner of a lighted foreground that is set against the receding hallway of a mansion), or recreating a 19th century landscape watercolor painting, that they devoted too little attention to the subject, mood and composition of the image itself.

The end result of these formal experimentations is that, with one very notable exception, the works on display lack the sense of detail, arrested motion, and imminent disclosure which give a photographic image the power to invoke the invisible by means of the visible. But all these shortcomings become fully apparent in the exhibit precisely because there is one photograph which shares none of them: David Allee’s stunning “Stadium Light.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, his method is a simple one: using a large-format Linhof Technikardan camera to take pictures at night with long exposures (for up to 20 minutes), Allee produces images that combine the artificiality of an Ed Ruscha pop art painting with the documentary realism of an eerie urban setting illumined solely by its own artificial lighting.

In the work on display at the KMA, “Stadium Light”, a partial rear view of Yankee stadium taken from an anonymous, off-centered, and seemingly “midair” vantage point that no person could actually occupy turns a readily identifiable architectural monument into a snapshot “stolen” from a distant and alien world; for the side of the stadium assumes the form of a ship’s bow, and the apparently empty seats have the appearance of an amorphous, miniaturized hologram. More striking still is how the absence of any material texture, conventional perspective, or natural color gives the cropped image of the stadium, subway tracks, bridge and street a flat, uniform quality that seems to place it in a dimension where the realms of photography and painting become distinct and yet inseparable.

Allee’s photograph thus achieves what the KMA too generously credits to all the works on display: it explores the “expressive possibilities” of both painting and photography in a way that revitalizes both mediums. Moreover, he does so in a manner that is animated by a critical spirit which is conspicuously absent from the other works. That is, the depiction of the “artificial”, lifeless, and empty if not uninhabitable stadium seems to expose us to a type of collective experience that individuals may at times get an intimation of, but then quickly dismiss. But it is because this sense of unease isn’t normally “seen” or acknowledged that it is capable of haunting our experience of modern life.

A Kid Did Paint That: The Presence of the Past in Jean Hess’ Mixed Media Paintings

“My kid could paint that”: The winner of the best documentary award at Sundance this year takes its title from a much maligned statement that succinctly conveys a sense of derision, impatience and defensiveness. But over the last two decades, it seems like it has been voiced less often at modern art exhibitions.

While it might be nice to think this means there has been a growing appreciation for avant-garde art, the more likely explanation is that traditional (or “realistic”) forms of art have lost many of their ardent defenders.Those defenders of tradition did not hesitate to declare “my kid could paint that” because they assumed the authoritative standards of taste which tell us what is considered art and what is not were still very much in force.

Today those standards are for the most part treated as objects of historical study, a turn of events evoked by the quotation from the Jungian Robert Johnson that serves as the opening epigram to the “artist’s statement” which accompanies the current exhbition of Jean Hess’s most recent works at the Downtown Gallery: “many people use the energy of their nostalgia…trying to get back to a previous state of grace, back to childhood. This is not possible…”

While the ellipses found at the end of that quotation are perhaps meant to suggest Hess’ work will find a more fruitful way to put nostalgic energies to use, they seem also to announce she has come up with a singular way to actually document, or to reveal, why it is impossible to “get back to” such an imaginary condition.

Hess’ works are particularly well-suited to do so because the form (or material) and content of her “mixed media” paintings mutually reinforce one another in a manner that exposes the passage of time on three different levels: the compositional history of the work itself; the relation between the work and the tradition of Western art; the historical distance that separates the current exhibition from the time and place where the “readymade” materials used in the paintings originated.

These relationships become clearer if we see how in a work like “Tangent”, traces of the succeeding layers of clear resin and thin washes of acrylic that were used in the various stages of the composition can be found in the painting’s “final” form (Hess regards that final form as “a document of sorts that includes documentary information collected as part of the creative process.”) What gives the “history” of this painting its distinctive character is the faded handwriting that appears to be embedded in its deepest layer. The “dated” character of what are in fact the original pages of children’s school notebooks glued onto a treated wood surface is heightened by the fact that they appear to lie beneath several planes of pale colors; while these merging color patterns are marred by clusters of dark turquoise “erosions” (splotches created by using small amounts of dry metallic pigment), the most jarring aspect of the work is created by the addition of hand-painted flowers that are cut from paper and then pasted onto the surface.

The end result is that the work shows not only its actual “age” but also its inventive indebtedness to a modern art tradition which includes the “soak staining” method Helen Frankenthaler mastered in her abstract expressionist paintings, the Dadaist use of “ready-made” or found materials, and the Surrealist juxtaposition of incongruous images.

And what might juxtaposing the faded writing of a hundred-year old school notebook with a cut-out drawing of a flower tell us about our relation to the past? Here’s one possibility: it suggests the revolutionary ideas brandished by the leaders of several major modern art movements (Abstract Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism) have long since lost their ability to help bring about the type of spiritual renewal and material prosperity that had been promised to those school children at the beginning of the 20th century.

Hess describes the flowers that make up the “last additions” to her recent paintings as, among other things, “gifts to the children—or a sort of commemoration.”

It seems like a strange gift to give to the children who “really did” provide the foundation for the painting. For that matter it may seem strange to think of giving them a gift at all. But this could be precisely what Hess wants to convey: the glaring inadequacy of a present day gift that can no longer be accepted or rejected. For what does such a gift amount to? It looks a lot like an image of the past we give to ourselves in our failed attempts to either make amends for, or replace, what has been irretrievably lost.