Alexander Nemerov is a professor of art history at Stanford. He has written several books on history and images -- notably a book on World War Two (War Time Kiss: Visions of the Moment in 1940's) and works on Edward Hopper, George Ault, Andrew Wyeth, and the photographer Lewis Hines. Nemerov is also the author of a highly regarded book on the wartime films of Val Lewton. Some of his art history lectures, very inspiring and thought-provoking, have been posted on You-Tube. This note concerns mainly Nemerov's lectures on the Hudson River School artists and their affiliates, a series of six hour-long presentations delivered in 2017 under the auspices of the annual A. W. Mellon foundation lectures at the National Gallery of Art. These programs are also available on You-Tube and they are wonderful. Simply put, I'm a fan and urge you to look at these brilliant and profoundly strange presentations. You may not be persuaded by anything that Nemerov says -- many of his assertions are undeniably problematic and speculative, but I warrant that your imagination will be engaged by Nemerov's claims and that you will be moved to draw your own conclusions (and your own connections to other art and ideas with which you may be familiar.) The merit of Nemerov's reflections is that they are liberating; he approaches art history (and history in general) from a very peculiar angle and his profoundly personal, even intimate, lectures will be certain to trigger responses, perhaps, equally idiosyncratic and intimate in those listening. (Nemerov is the son of the great American poet, Howard Nemerov, and the nephew of Diane Arbus, whom he tells us that he can't remember at all.)
Emerson was famous for his lectures, improvised sermons laden with aphorisms and stark declarations of meaning. It is said that you can study all of Emerson's published speeches and never encounter anything that counts as a logical argument. This doesn't mean that Emerson's ideas and lectures aren't compelling. To the contrary, Emerson inevitable puts the auditor into a stance of either alliance and agreement or debate or both -- the effect is that Emerson's blunt proclamations compel thoughtful response (even disputation) from the listener. Emerson was an apostle of the Will to Power (Nietzsche was one of his greatest admirers) and his ecstatic lecture style directly challenges listeners. People who attended these lectures recalled Emerson groping his way forward, making things up as he proceeded, varying his presentations from night to night and city to city. What Emerson offered was direct contact with a powerful intellect ranging widely across many different subjects -- the material wasn't compelling for its content but by virtue of the power of Emerson's personality. Nemerov, in the A. W. Mellon lectures, seems to have revived Emerson's practice. He speaks without notes and, often, revises what he is saying as he says it. Nemerov's modus operandi is familiar -- the standard art history lecture illustrated by slides on which the professor comments. But Nemerov's frames his remarks in terms of his own personal, and, often, extremely surprising opinions and meditations on the art on which he is commenting. And Nemerov's intentions are highly ambitious. In the six Mellon lectures, he aims at summarizing American culture in the 1830's, while, at the same time, explaining how art affects us and makes its claims on our imagination, and, further, considers the manner in which a gifted historian animates the past by demonstrating how it pains and afflicts us today and how it remains also cryptic and inaccessible. Nemerov's lectures (including those in his art history course) insist that the past is a foreign country with enigmatic features that elude our understanding and, yet, must be galvanized into a real encounter with our daily existence in the here and now. The twin poles of Nemerov's embrace of the past, accordingly, are to insist upon its remote strangeness, how the past is "other", while, at the same time, exploring how history remains a presence in our lives, how it inflects our thoughts and emotions. For this latter aspect, Nemerov draws upon his own dreams, visions, and emotional responses to illustrate how aspects of the past still cast an uncanny spell over us today.
The Forest is the title for Nemerov's six lecture series and, I understand, that a book is forthcoming, amplifying on themes developed in the Mellon presentations. In my experience, Nemerov's prophetic presence, his earnest solemnity and improvisational diction (in elaborate grammar and with impressive rhetoric) gives his lectures a power that eludes some of his prose. In a book, the reader has time to dispute with Nemerov the propositions that he urges and the absence of argument (a rhetorical stance that makes Nemerov the heir to Emerson) can seem arrogant, quixotic, and, even, a bit oppressive. Prose requires a tighter structure and greater level of plausibility than Nemerov cares to muster -- his ambitions are those of a poet: to develop penetrating metaphors, foster lyric immediacy of emotion, and fuse things together by associative logic (or, perhaps, illogic). I think his approach is tailored to the lecture hall and, although the books that he has written that I've read, are wonderful, I have some skepticism about many of his assertions. I don't feel this way about the lectures which have an uncanny power based on the speaker's own charisma and gravity.
In the first lecture, Nemerov talks generally about the forest and shows some pictures by Thomas Cole. There are illuminating ruminations on the distinct kinds of woods in the American forest and a marvelous section in which Nemerov shows us the floor of a Shaker Meeting House that is still oozing sap two-hundred years after it was built. (Throughout the lectures, Nemerov focuses on tangible objects: hatchets and wood-working equipment, items of apparel -- Thomas Cole's gentleman's hat is a touchstone -- and odd little artifacts; these things have a talismanic force; they carry energy with them that Nemerov seems capable of feeling and channeling). The second lecture involves the works of strange semi-primitive painter John Quidor. Quidor was a sign-painter and an odd fellow -- Nemerov drily remarks that he wasn't much of teacher: although he had apprentices, he would abandon the workshop for days and be impossible to find; sometimes, in the gallery, he would rest motionlessly on a dusty plank, a bit like "Dracula" Nemerov remarks, undead and motionless until inspired to act. Nemerov's weird associative approach to this material leads him to connect Qui-dor with Don Qui-xote (it's all smoke and mirrors -- there's no real connection) leading to some remarkable and poetic assertions about the artist's approach to his craft. (Most people who comment on Don Quixote have never read the thing -- it's too long, too foreign to our modern sensibilities, and too strange. But this criticism doesn't apply to Nemerov who seems to know the book, in all of its shaggy abundance, very well.) Nemerov ends the second lecture with an astonishing peroration: he says that a certain painting by Quidor is like one of the artist's signs made for a tavern or an inn -- the picture shows Ichabod Crane, riding hell-bent, through a dark and eerily anthropomorphic woods; the rider's horse is streamlined like a bullet or a cannon shot and the white stallion has all feet off the ground as it charges away from the headless horseman who is in pursuit. The horse is strangely schematic, a diagram of a galloping horse, and Nemerov says that it looks like a figure in the sign (or one of a Muybridge's zoopraxigraphs -- I'm surprised that Nemerov doesn't digress on this topic; after all, the running thoroughbred was owned by Leland Stanford, the founder of the University where he teaches); a sign, that is, something painted to be seen in the weather and all kinds of light, including moonlight. He, then, says that we tend to regard history as "epic" but that this is an error in our perspective -- history, in Nemerov's view, is always "episodic"; although, he doesn't clarify this point, I think he means that history is comprised of anecdotes that are situated in relationships with us that have certain emotional valences. He, then, makes an assertion that is one of the most peculiar, yet thought-provoking things I've ever heard. History, Nemerov, proclaims is like a sign hanging over the front of a 19th century inn in the deep wilderness -- we glimpse the sign and its pictorial freight illumined fitfully by moonlight and we feel mingled "relief and trepidation" at coming across the place of refuge in the vast of night and heart of the desert. Nemerov goes on to say that this formulation doesn't just apply to history and to the philosophy of history and to art, but to life in general. (In making this proclamation, Nemerov says Ovid, for instance, presents an "epic" view of life -- I contest this idea: in fact, Ovid is episodic and his anecdotes are fitfully illumined, as it were, just as Nemerov claims for the public house signs that Quidor painted.) A metaphysical subtext is the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, an idea that Nemerov equates with swampiness, murky water, bodily fluids, juice -- he shows the image painted in Jesus' sweat, the Vera Icon or Veronica on the handkerchief; this discourse links to the Shaker meeting hall still animate and expressing sap from its floor boards and the watery landscapes described by Francis Parkman in his last book about Wolfe and Montcalm.
The Third Lecture is, if anything, even more peculiar and ecstatic. Nemerov begins with a rather crude lithograph of a man murdering a prostitute with a hatchet. He, then, shows us the infamous picture of the death of Jane McCrae at the hands of Indians allied with the British during the Revolutionary War. (This part of the lecture reminds us that Nemerov is speaking pre-George Floyd and, therefore, pre-racial reckoning -- I doubt that anyone could get away with displaying, without overt "virtue-signaling", the horrifying image of Jane McCrae beset by demonic savages who are about to scalp her.) From this point, Nemerov ranges freely over a variety of topics only very loosely connected -- and there's no real thread to his speech; it's just one remarkable provocation after another. (He ends up talking about Pontormo's grisaille of Apollo and Daphne and citing John Berger on the Fayum portraits from ancient Egypt.) Again, Nemerov ends with a formulation about history. To encounter history is to encounter pain -- here, Nemerov discusses Francis Parkman's neuralgia and migraines; history is like a child bit by a rattlesnake with poison coursing through his veins that slowly seems to be changing the location of his wound into something like the mottled scales of the serpent. Like art, history has to intercept life and impose itself upon the living; it has to pain us. (This is pertinent to today's disputes about teaching aspects of American history that embarrass and shame us in the present.) As a counter-example to the living experience of history and art, Nemerov posits the marmoreal evasions of Hiram Bingham's "The Greek Slave", an artwork that he argues is designed to substitute silence and a pale nothingness for the clamor of history. Nemerov shows us a little souvenir showing a fragment of the forest, a leaf and a tiny inscription penned by a woman who was born without arms -- in this figure, Nemerov finds an antidote to the official version of the past, a version that is intended to console and reassure and not be disturbing to us, but that is fundamentally false like the perfect polished marble of Bingham's sculpture. He ends the lecture by reverting to the terrible picture of Jane McCrae's death, an engraving that was, for some reason, displayed in the brothel's sitting room on the night that the whore was killed. In the background of the image, there's another weirdly anthropomorphic tree -- Nemerov notes that when the tree, an actual thing, was cut down, after finally withered and died around 1851, the wood was carved into various souvenir boxes and canes. "I would like to hold in my own hands one of those caskets or walking sticks. I yearn to touch such a thing. But no examples of the commemorative wood objects have been found." Nemerov tells us.
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