Five Extraordinarily Creative Communities, But Maybe Six [TALENT SEARCH]

I'm bumping this to the top for Talent Search Week. Here I look at some creative communities, for, often as not (more often?), genius thrives among genius. And genius can only spread among friends and allies. This is about to be added to, The Genius Chronicles: Going Boldly Where None Have Gone Before? to give us Version 7, which you may download here: 

https://www.academia.edu/7974651/The_Genius_Chronicles_Going_Boldly_Where_None_Have_Gone_Before.

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Shakespeare, Ellington, Disney, Apocalypse Now, English at SUNY Buffalo, Mana Contemporary (?)

I was thinking about Apocalypse Now, an extraordinary film, as I often do. But not about the film itself, rather about how it was made, the production spread halfway across the Western Hemisphere (Hollywood to the Philippines), several years, a typhoon, a heart attack, and miles and miles of footage – well, not miles and miles, but you get the idea. Basically, Coppola was riding herd on a small town of talented people devoted to making this one film.

From there my mind drifted to the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo in its glory years, then to Duke Ellington, Shakespeare, and Disney – the glory years of the five early features, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi. Extraordinarily creative communities all, organized at different times and places and to different ends. Now there’s Mana Contemporary, right here in my own backyard, a unique for-profit non-profit art complex on the West Side of Jersey City. In this context it’s a question mark: Will it spawn an extraordinarily creative community??

Let’s start with Ellington and work our way through the list and back to Mana.

Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington was an American composer and bandleader whose career spanned the middle half of the 20th Century. During the latter part of that period he maintained his band at a financial loss. It was his instrument and he needed it as such; by that time his royalty income was sufficient to cover his costs.

First, Ellington did not write music in the abstract. He wrote specifically for the personnel in his band at the time. When the personnel changed, he changed the arrangements if needed. The band’s roster was unusually stable. Harry Carney, his baritone sax player, stayed with him for his entire career. Other key musicians had long tenures – Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart on trumpet; Juan Tizol and Sam Nanton on trombone; Sam Woodyard on drums; Paul Gonsalves, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, and Barney Bigard on woodwinds, and many others. And then there’s his alter ego, Billy Strayhorn, who contributed much of the band’s repertoire – including its theme song, “Take the A Train” – once he joined up in 1939.

Ellington was open to ideas from his men. Many of the lines and riffs, not to mention a tune or three, in his music came from them. So many, in fact, that when Lincoln Collier published his Ellington biography in 1987 he decided to cast doubt on Duke’s genius because of that. He was right to emphasize Ellington’s permeability to ideas from those very talented musicians he gathered specifically for that reason, but as for genius, who knows what THAT is, anyhow? Keeping those folks together and pointed in the same direction was no small task. Surely we must give Ellington credit for having the good taste needed to dream it up, and for having the wile and guile needed to pull it off.

The fact is we have been so besotted with the Romantic idea of the genius as a solitary creative figure pissing in the wind of stale bourgeois conformity that we have no effective way of talking about how people work together in groups. And that’s what Ellington’s band was, a very creative group, with Ellington as cat-herder in chief and front man.

William Shakespeare

And I’ll bet Shakespeare was much the same. Of course we don’t know much about the man, so little in fact that nominating others for the honor of having written those plays has been a minor academic sport for over a century. But, like Ellington, he didn’t write in a vacuum, he didn’t write for some distant audience. He wrote for a specific company, his company. He knew who would speak those lines, what resources of gait, gesture and posture, of facial expression and vocal nuance – a raise of the brow, the twitch of a lip, a stutter coughed up on the fly – they commanded. Did they suggest lines to him? I wouldn’t be surprised. Did he accept their suggestions? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Did they get pissed-off at him for hogging the credit? I suppose, but they’re the ones who took the bows, no?

Just as we know little about the man, we know little about the process by which his plays came to be published in the form we have them – two different sets of texts, most plays in two different versions, some with significant differences between the two versions. Were they based strictly on Shakespeare’s original scripts or did they reflect improvisations and inspirations that happened in performance? We don’t know. But I rather suspect that Shakespeare’s working methods were more like Ellington’s than our prejudices in these matters can accommodate.

So, Ellington and Shakespeare, individual men who surrounded themselves with bands of brothers, channeling and shaping their creativity so they spoke with one voice.

Sexual Shame (aka Araki 2)

This topic, sexual shame, was once again on my mind. So I thought I'd bump this old post to the top of the cue. Why's the topic on my mind now? I've been thinking about Darwinian literary criticism and evolutionary psychology. I'm not aware that either have really addressed this issue, though I assume that the evolutionary psychologists have something to say. I'd think it would be front and center with the critics, but I'm not holding my breath.

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Thinking about the Akaki exhibit set me to thinking about something that’s puzzled me for a long time: sexual shame. Why are humans secretive about our sexual activity? Animals are not. In particular, our primate relatives are not. But we are. Why?

(To be sure, the way sexual privacy is staged depends, in part, on physical living arrangements. But not matter how sparse those arrangements may be, privacy is honored in one way or another.)

I assume that there are non-theological answers to this question here and there, but I’m not aware of any. Nor have I come up with any that I like.

I approached something like this topic in an old post on Sex and Metaphysics, where I said this:

The basic circuits for sexuality, like other biological drives, is located deep in the core of the brain in the limbic system. Except for sexuality, those drives are active from birth. But much of the brain is quite immature at birth, especially the neocortex, which is phylogenetically the newest part of the brain. And it’s where our ‘higher’ capacities are more or less localized. All the other emotional and motivational equipment becomes integrated into the ever more sophisticated patterns of thought, desire, and action that are realized in the maturing cortex.

Along comes adolescence and WHAM! the whole system becomes unglued. All of a sudden distinctly new feelings and motivations have to be integrated into one’s repertoire of thoughts and actions. Even if you grow up in a culture that more or less “makes room” for sexuality, it still comes as a shock. Knowing it's going to happen, play-acting at more adult behavior when you're a child, that doesn't really prepare you for having to deal with a whole new hormonal riot. What’s new and confusing is the riot itself.

This leads me to the notion that there is some subtle instability in the overall dynamics of the human nervous system and that sexual privacy is a way of protecting us against that instability.

I go on in that post to speculate about the developmental timing as between the emergence of sexuality and the emergence of abstract thought (in Piaget’s sense). Perhaps that’s where the instability lies. Or maybe it has to do with specifically human sociality which, as I’ve argued in Beethoven’s Anvil, is a bit different from, in addition to, the sociality we’ve inherited from our primate ancestors.

Araki’s sexual imagery, then, stresses these neurodynamics. The images are on public display. We are with others when we see them. But they call for privacy.

Just where ARE those images in social space? What's the connection between sexuality in our lives and in our notions of art?

Jersey City and Mana Contemporary: A Dynamic Duo, Maybe [2499]

Consider this post an update and amendment to my report, Jersey City: From a Skate Park to the World, and embedded below.

Somewhere behind Mana Museum for Urban Arts on a stanchion supporting the 14th street viaduct, that is,  if it's managed to survive all the construction crews that have been mucking around back there.

With the emergence of Mana Contemporary, Jersey City is set to ride the intersection of two dynamics which could, together, transform Jersey City over the next quarter century. One of these dynamics is about cultural change and growth while the other is about the interaction of culture and urban real estate.

First we talk culture and urban development, and then we discuss Jersey City and Mana Contemporary.

Two Dynamos

One of the best-known dynamics in urban development is the one that begins when artists move in to a dead commercial or industrial neighborhood to get cheap space. The buildings are empty and have large open space well suited for artist’s studios. Services businesses follow the artists – laundries, food stores, restaurants and cafes, and so forth – and then others, with more money to spend on housing, see an upcoming neighborhood and decide to live there. A generation later the artists are priced out of the neighborhood they’d created.

That’s one dynamic. Let’s set that aside for the moment and look at another dynamic, one that’s different and more abstract. This dynamic is about cultural change.

The single best example I can think of is American popular music in the twentieth century, which has been dominated by the interaction between white and black musics. That’s by no means the only dynamic, nor even the only important one, but it’s the one that’s strongest and that’s been doing on the longest, with roots extending back into colonial times.

Thus early in the 20th Century blues and ragtime came bubbling up out of the ground with particular concentrations in New Orleans, Mississippi, Kansas City, and New York City. From this came Swing, the popular music of the 20s, 30s, and into the 40s. Though the most innovative practitioners where black, everyone got in on the act and the audience was mostly white, simply because the white population was and is so much larger than the black. Rock and Roll broke free in the 1950s, first among black musicians and audiences, but then everyone. Hip-hop emerged in the 1980s.

That, of course, is a gross simplification – I run it down in more detail in Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues. The point is simply that we have cultural interaction between two different populations, with different histories and positions in society. A similar dynamic is now operating in the visual arts, and that dynamic is linked to this one in that graffiti is the all-but official visual style of hip-hop.

Graffiti and "Legit" Art

The dynamic relationship between graffiti and the “legit” art world is much like that between black music and white – two-way imitation and borrowing.

Spray-can graffiti arose in New York City and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970s and had spread around the world by the 1990s–in part because hip-hop took it there. It arose outside the legit art world of galleries, museums, and art schools and maintains a significant “outside” presence to this day. Even the graffiti writers who have gallery representation and have canvases and prints in museum collections insist on maintaining their street cred by doing “illegals.”

It’s the illegal nature of street graffiti that anchors outside the legit art world. And, while some graffiti writers now have art school educations (and may even work as designers with sporting goods, apparel, media and other companies) many writers remain indifferent if not actively hostile to that world. Graffiti has not been assimilated to and absorbed into museum, gallery, and art school culture – though some schools now have studio courses in aerosol art.l

What makes the graffiti/legit dynamic such a powerful one, then, is: 1) graffiti originated outside the legit world and has maintained that status, and 2) graffiti is international, and so has interacted with legit art traditions on every continent. It’s everywhere and remains strong after more than four decades. It’s the most important art form to have emerged in the last half century.

Once graffiti had claimed the streets for (illegal) art, other artists, with different sensibilities and techniques took to the streets. The so-called street artists began gaining prominence in the 1990s. Many of these artists used stencils – Banksy is perhaps the best-known of these – and prints, often quite large, that they pasted on walls. As swing gave birth to bebop, so graffiti gave birth to street art.

Jersey City Future: the Twilight Zone

I’ve been feeling that there’s something afoot in Jersey City, but I don’t know quite what. For example, here’s an empty block in Lafayette as it was two years ago (August 10, 2011):

Here’s the same block earlier this year (September 14, 2013):

Quite a difference.

Two years ago the block was deserted and derelict. This year it’s blooming with plants, art, and people.

What’s Going On?

In the small, that’s easy. Liz Perry and UMMI (Unified Mothers & Men Initiative) got the lot into Jersey City’s Adopt A Lot program in 2012. That summer a few people put plots into the lot and grew some stuff. The lot looked a bit better, but still rather thin.

This summer, UMMI’s Living Village Community Garden really took off. The City fenced it off, more people took plots, and the artists, poets, musicians, and other creatives moved in, the children, too. The garden won a prize for Seed Sowing, and the seeds are just plant seeds. We’re talking about life and friendship and getting along and getting up in the neighborhood.

That’s one neighborhood, and I could name a lot more people here.

But I’ve got the impression that this sort of thing is jumping off all over the city. The most obvious indicator is all the street art. Some of that is City funded, but most is not. There seem to be a lot of Liz Perrys in Jersey City, a lot of UMMIs, and they’re building neighborhoods.

What’s driving that?

Does Jersey City have more Creative Potential than NYC?

Can Mana Contemporary make the transition from NYCArt in Jersey City to scene weaver?

It’s time to revisit a question I posed a couple of months ago in the wake of Steven Fulop’s ground-breaking election as Mayor of Jersey City: is Jersey City a 21st Century Florence?

A Time for New Institutions

First let’s once again review a crude little story I’ve been telling for years. It goes like this:

In the Medieval West the Catholic Church was the institutional center of intellectual life. Then the West underwent a massive cultural change, the Renaissance, and new life ways and new institutions emerged. A new system of colleges and universities supplanted the church as the central institution of intellectual life. That system served us well up through the end of the 19th Century and into the early 20th Century.

But the world is once again changing. And this time it’s not the West alone that’s undergoing a metamorphosis. It’s the whole world, kicking and screaming.

So, just what are the possibilities for new institutions? Are any emerging?

On the latter question, sure, I guess. But the basic institutions of life in the West, if not the rest, have been inherited from the 19Century and before. This is overlaid by large international corporations and various international treaties, pacts, and NGOs. And the web has emerged in the last 20 years as a vehicle of communication and dissemination, and it’s certainly changing the institutions of higher education.

But the deepest kind cultural work needs to be done face-to-face. What are the prospects there?

Well, of course, I don’t know. But let’s think about the three institutions I’ve been examining recently: Mana Contemporary, the MacArthur Fellows Program, and the SUNY Buffalo Department of English for roughly a decade or so in the 1970s. Can we make something new out of that? What? How?

Mana Contemporary: Is All the World Its Stage?

Greg and I took another trip out to Mana Contemporary yesterday. There it is, this multi-building complex on the west side of Jersey City, next to the PATH line to Newark, within sight of the Hackensack River and the Pulaski Skyway, and the Meadowlands to the north. Once it was a can factory and tobacco warehouses, now it’s an art complex. One man we talked to, a project manager named Yoav, says there’s nothing else like it in the world.

In the world!

Is that so?

That’s what the man said.

But what does that mean, in the world?

Well certainly means that it’s a unique combination of facilities and institutions.

How so?

Well, it has fine-arts storage for major collectors and institutions. You know, Mr. Big Bucks Billionaire has 3482 pieces of art in his collection, but can display on 637 of them in three houses and two condos spread over four continents. What does he do with the other 2845 pieces? Puts them in storage with Mana.

And Mana moves pieces around from storage to house, from condo to storage, and so on, right?

I assume so, yes. But Mana also has viewing galleries where a collector can take some stuff out and look at it.

And where it can be displayed to the public?

Yes. They do that too. That’s another aspect of the place.

OK, so we’ve got art storage and display. Big deal. There must be over a dozen museums within 10 miles of Mana each of which has more art on display than Mana, even if they do keep some of their overage there. Anything else?

Why yes. But Mana's got studios for artists, photographers, sculptors and others. And they've got a cafe where they can gather over a meal or a snack and chat.

OK. Now we’re getting somewhere.

And so it goes. We have art storage, exhibition space, and artists themselves. According to this New York Times article:

Araki and His Models

Almost two months ago I saw the Nobuyoshi Araki exhibit at Mana Contemporary, in the post-industrial hinterlands of Jersey City (and subsequently blogged about it). I walked into the gallery and found myself surrounded by large photos of Japanese women, some in traditional dress, some naked, some in schoolgirl sailor suits. Most of the poses were erotic, some with legs splayed wide open. Many of the models were elaborately and precisely bound. Some were suspended from the ceiling.

I was...well “shocked” isn’t quite the word, certainly not “horrified”, nor does “surprise” quite fit, though I wasn’t expecting what I saw, heck, I had no particular expectation at all beyond checking out Mana Contemporary. Whatever mental state I was in, once I was able to set it aside, one question emerged: How did Araki work with his models?

Does Araki objectify women? Sure. Are the photos sexist? Why not? Is he playing to male fantasies of domination? Undoubtedly.

But, in order to get those photos, Araki the photographer cannot dominate his models. I suppose he could try, but it wouldn’t work. Why not? Because the models cannot dominate themselves, not in a way that yields those poses. The mind and body don’t work that way.

For example, the mind can order the face to smile. And the face will obey, after a fashion. But such a deliberate forced smile is different from a spontaneous smile. Anyone can see it. The camera would pick up on it.

Not that smiling is particularly germane here; most of the the women weren’t smiling. But the principle applies. Araki may or may not have a specific expression and attitude in mind for a particular shot, but he cannot order the model to assume some specific expression, even if he had the words. Nor could she order herself to assume it. 

 

Somehow Araki has to evoke the attitude in the model (and then snap the shutter when the evocation works). That’s what I was wondering: How does he do it?

Arakimentari (see it on YouTube), a documentary by Travis Klose, has many clues scattered about in scenes from various photo shoots. Some involve models Araki’s worked with over some period of time, some are housewives he’s shooting for a magazine series. He works with two or three assistants, one handling cameras, another lighting, perhaps someone on make-up. He’s quick, matter-of-fact, playful, humorous, as the occasion requires. You see him moving pubic hair to get it just so, or moving the labia this way or that. Deftly, quickly.

It’s not the sort of thing that can be readily described. You have to see it.

The point is, first, he has to do it. Without it, no picture. Second, the women are comfortable with his doing these things. They say so, on camera. He makes them feel secure, safe, they can relax. Yet they’re naked, bound, genitals exposed. Secure, safe.

How’s Araki do it?

And what does this imply about the whole history of portraiture, both photographic and in older media (drawing, paint, sculpture)? It’s unnatural, this business of posing. How can you reveal a person’s essence when they’re not doing anything BUT posing?

What did Rembrandt see when he looked at himself in the mirror those many times for those many self-portraits.

What of the Mona Lisa smile? Where’s in coming from? Where’s it directed?

 

Check out this more recent post, Women posing for a photographer and having (delicious) fun [#naked]. 

Nobuyoshi Araki at Mana Contemporary

The other day Greg and I decided to check out Mana Contemporary. We had nothing particular in mind, but we’d read about the place in The New York Times and decided to see for ourselves. One of “the art world’s best-kept secrets” in the industrial wilds of Jersey City? Sounds interesting. After all Greg had spent five years curating a somewhat different seKret Art zOne in a different region of Jersey City’s industrial hinterlands.

So we hopped into his white SUV, headed South on Kennedy, turned West on Newark, and drove right past it–all those old industrials look alike, dontchaknow?–but not by much. We found our way to the magic button, got buzzed in, signed-in on an iPad–the place, after all, IS contemporary–and were delivered to a tour guide, Amanda.

And she took us to the Araki exhibit, which occupies two galleries (three if you count the small galley where the documentary played) on the first floor. She took us other places too, including several galleries showing stately videos of Palestinian women; but let’s stick with Araki-san. He’s more than enough for one blog post.

Araki is a photographer, one of Japan’s best-known and most prolific. Never heard of him. Which is neither here nor there.

The flower close-ups, yes. Lush. Even when partnered with a desiccated salamander. Cloudscapes. Yes. Cityscapes. Yes.

But Araki is about the women. Some entirely naked, some only partially so. There’s the school-girl sailor suits. But also traditional kimonos.

Some black and white. Some in color.