Sample Museum Paper 2

John Cage's 433"
Experienced Through Marilyn Minters Strut
by Charles Rech
03/27/06

Part I: The Work

Strut is a photo-realistic painting at a distance, but within 3 one can see the brushstrokes. The piece dissolves into a colorful, but obscure blur up close. It is a huge piece, perhaps 9 high and 5 long, focused on the heel of the wearer of a Dior stiletto pump that has just been splashed through a puddle along a street curb in the early morning. A hint of a wraparound balcony and French colonial architecture fuzzy in the background, taken with the glitzy yet trashy qualities of the shoe and its wearer, suggests the French Quarter in New Orleans, but location is not specified.

The woman wearing the pump appears to be old, hard-lived, and probably a prostitute. The skin of her Achilles tendon and heel is thick, crusty, and pinkish-orange -- more like rind than flesh -- and stained by black streaks of dirt. Her shoe, however, is stunning. It is a pinkish hue like her skin color -- so close, in fact, that it is hard to tell where the shoe ends and the woman begins -- but the stiletto spike itself is what draws in the eye of the viewer. The spike is encrusted with eighteen glittering rhinestones. They look like chunks of diamond ice on fire in the sunrise, but what's really making them so sparkly are the water drops splashed all over the shoe, the foot, and the curb.

It wasn't until somewhere in the middle of my 433" that I realized this painting was all about water. Seen in that light, the rhinestones truly became ice crystals. It was a strange, magical moment when my perception shifted and the trance of my 433" brought out the huge array of color in the painting. I had only seen the pink and orange of the shoe and foot and the blue and white of the rhinestones, but then I became overwhelmingly aware of the background colors. I hadn't seen the deep black hues to the sides. The black turned out to be only to the heels left as I continued to gaze. A rich green arrested my attention to the right; I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it before.

The sun was now clearly rising to the right of the woman -- knowing the directional source of the light resulted in yet another visual revolution. The strong lines of the incoming sunlight strongly delineated the rhinestone spike, shifting it from the photorealistic reality of a hookers heel to a more Impressionistic-seeming painting composed only of a shimmering column of living ice and shining drops of water. I have to admit this rapid series of perceptual shifts socked me in the stomach and brought tears to my eyes -- I had been hit by salvo after salvo of beauty and it was almost too much for me! Many thanks to Marilyn Minter and John Cage for a moving experience.

Part II: The Art of the Everyday versus the Ideal

Strut was a fascinating painting through which to examine the pre- and post-1800 concepts of art and its sources as explored in George Leonard's Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage. Pre-1800 art philosophers were roughly divided into the istoria and Ideal schools of thought. Istoria and the Ideal schools both saw art objects as "superior to mere real things," (ILT, p. 32), but istoria valued art objects as superior only because they can "embody . . . humanistic concept[s]," (ILT, p. 32). It is much like the theatrical separation between high comedy and low farce -- comedy is superior because it concerns social themes and criticism, while farce is purely slapstick-style entertainment with no deeper goal than getting a laugh. Thus, to istoria, art transcends ordinary things when a work isn't created merely for aesthetic enjoyment, but rather provides a commentary on human life.

Strut is a kind of art that can arguably hold istoria's approval. The painting seems ultimately concerned with three things: the striking, bold fashion of a Dior haute couture shoe, juxtaposed by the lowly position of the bedraggled prostitute, tied together by the proud defiance of the word strut itself. Strut shows us extreme, undeniable beauty found between the callused heel of an old whore and the wet, dirty gutter of a Louisiana street. This doesn't sound very promising, thus the painting could be seen as an apology for the prostitute -- some sort of sanctimonious "All of Gods children are beautiful, even when they're sinners" sentiment -- but the rebellious flavor of the word strut defiantly declares its beauty without any need to justify itself. Strutting implies confidence, power, and nerve -- this woman may be a social outcast, but as far as she is concerned, she is a queen. Seen in that light, Strut could be argued as a visual manifesto for the sovereignty of the individual over the social mores of the herd, which is certainly a "humanistic concept" worthy of the label of istoria.

Having discussed istoria's view, let us inspect the Ideal school. Ideals view is the classical idea of art all Western schoolchildren are taught. As Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote in his Discourses, art is seen as "an ideal beauty, superior to what is to be found in individual natures." (fn.1) We are taught in the West that art addresses the Platonic true ideals that stand behind nature's cloddish forms. (fn.2) One may look at a real apple, but one is only seeing nature's attempt to make a form, a mold for the Ideal Apple to exist in the physical world. Art, on the other hand, comes from the artist's imagination and creativity, from thoughts, from the mind -- all of which are connected to the non-physical world of true ideals. Art provides the only window that can possibly allow us to see the world of true ideals, rather than the shadows of mere forms.

A strict Idealist probably would not approve of Strut as an example of their kind of art. Artists were supposed to work from only the most "excellent" objects -- excellence in this sense refers to the intertwined classical concepts of virtue, truth, and beauty -- so a whore's dirty stiletto probably would not make the cut! However, a more lenient Idealist may have approved of Minters intent, if not her subject matter, because she sought the ideal beauty behind the crude forms. Barring that, an Idealist may have at least approved of my described experience with beauty as I interacted with Strut. By gazing at what was after all just a prostitute's dirty foot and shoe, I nevertheless could argue that I saw through Arts window to the world of ideals. The shoe was transformed in my perceptions to a vision of color, water, and light -- formless, pure ideals, not mere objects.

The Idealists, Leonard writes, also sometimes worked with the parables of Zeuxis and Phidias to decide whether "mere real things" could lead to the creation of the superior art object or if they should be avoided entirely. (fn.3) Leon Battista Alberti, a Renaissance-era Idealist, wrote of Zeuxis in his work Della Pittura. Zeuxis was an ancient Greek painter who instructed "always take from nature that which you wish to paint, and always choose the most beautiful." (fn.4)

The story goes that Zeuxis painted the ideal beautiful woman by looking at a number of local virgins, taking and molding their best features into one whole, and then improving upon these "mere things" still further by looking past the common traits of their formed beauty to discover the ideal beauty. The Zeuxis parable still elevates the ideal over the real, but allows that the real provides a window to the ideal. Phidias parable, on the other hand, was said to "[disdain] completely to look at everyday objects . . . even to select beauties from them," (ITL, p. 40). A Phidian Idealist was against any art based from real life. All art was to come directly from the mind.

Arguably, Strut parallels the Zeuxis parable, but has nothing to do with Phidias story. Minters work puts her own twist on the former Idealist branch of thought. Minters end goal was the same as Zeuxis -- she used everyday objects (fn.5) to find beauty -- but the means were opposite. Instead of using the most beautiful natural things, Minter looked for the ideal when beauty and ugliness are wedded. Minter finds her art "in the moment when everything goes wrong . . . It's when the model sweats. There's lipstick on teeth and the makeup's running." (fn.6) Her particular viewpoint could be a hybrid branch of Idealist and Everyday art, located somewhere between the Zeuxis camp and a hardcore champion of the commonplace like Carlyle.

Speaking of Carlyle, and having already explored the pre-1800 philosophy of art, let us move to the post-1800 era. Carlyle and Emerson were two important voices of the slowly rising movement toward art as existing only in the natural world -- a complete, radical 180 from the classical Idealist views. Carlyle believed that artistic inspiration -- or poetic to use his term -- existed in everyone, but only "a man that has so much more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become noticeable" (fn.7) will actually become a poet. To Carlyle, poets didn't even necessarily write poetry -- the only thing one needed truly to be a poet was the ability to find "God or the godlike in the simple produce of the common day," (ITL, p. 86). (fn.8)

Carlyle, at this point in his artistic criticism, may have partially approved of Strut. Minter did not only use the everyday object of a shoe -- albeit a very fancy one -- she also used the everyday person of a prostitute and the everyday situation of stepping in a puddle. Imagine if Strut were nothing more than a wide photograph of Bourbon Street on Ash Wednesday morning and the prostitute was just one smallish figure, accidentally getting her feet wet in a puddle, dwarfed by all the buildings, trees, and trash around her. The prostitute would seem pitiful and sad. However, by zooming in and enlarging her everyday subject, Minter changes the pictures focus to a defiantly shod heel and revels in the beauty of every shimmering drop of water from what is nothing more than a dirty puddle. Minter not only could see Carlyle's "godlike" in a prostitute's foot, she made it possible for us -- presumably the non-"poetic", or at least less poetic -- to see "a God made visible . . .." (fn.9)

Carlyle would already have been difficult to please artistically, but Emerson was even harder. Emerson wrote in Art (1841), "Away with your nonsense of oil and easels . . . except to open your eyes to the masteries of eternal art, they are hypocritical rubbish." Emerson was insistent that the only art humanity needed was in the world all around us, that we were in fact "immersed in beauty" (fn.10) but that "sheer familiarity has closed [our] eyes to the worlds perfection," (ITL, p. 14). Emerson was calling for a literal stop-and-smell-the-roses moment. In our rush-about lives perceived by brains wrapped in the protective fog of sensory adaptation, humans simply do not see the beauty of what we encounter everyday. We were trained by the Idealists to see beauty in the common only if it was in the form of art. Thus, we could examine a typical Impressionist painting of a Parisian café crowd and marvel at the two-dimensional translation of three-dimensional life, but Emerson demanded to know why we couldn't see that an actual, real café crowd was far more dynamic and beautiful in person, in living color. With this philosophy in mind, Emerson, like Carlyle, may have at least appreciated Strut for concerning itself with everyday objects. He might have lauded Minter for showing how beautiful the prostitute's filthy, cracked, old heel -- a completely natural, God-made thing -- was, despite being a far cry from some delicate, supple, pink foot supposedly belonging to Aphrodite.

Part III: Life After 433"

I have consciously seen art in everyday life twice since my experiences at the SFMOMA. The first happened right as I walked out of the museum. I passed through the revolving doors on a whim -- admittedly a little tired and cranky after running up and down the stairs searching for artwork that moved me enough to inspire a 5-page paper. As the door spun me towards the street I would normally have just looked straight ahead and obliviously pushed my way through, but instead I heard for the first time the whooshing -- and, yes, musical -- sound of the doors sweepers on the polished tile. I also found myself looking at the glass rather than through it. I became aware of the beautiful, elegant symmetry of the evenly spaced glass panels inside the door swooping away from, or perhaps chasing, each other. I noticed the way the reflections glinted and leapt from glass to glass as the panels moved through the light bouncing off the sidewalk. This revolving door was about its own movement and beauty, not my momentary passage through its world. I stepped out of the door with regrets as it swept me heartlessly to the street. The whole experience was maybe five seconds in real time, but the subjective time felt much longer. I had to laugh at how quickly I'd had a Cage experience.

The next occurred just a few minutes later as I was walking down the platform at the Powell Street MUNI station. A train was arriving ahead of me and was rapidly approaching the far end of the platform to pick up its passengers. I heard someone thumping down the steps behind me, who inevitably knocked into me as he attempted a futile 100-meter dash to catch the train. There was no way he could catch the train, so I'd been knocked into for no good reason. This was the kind of thing that would normally piss me off and set off some major kvetching in my head. I started to do just that, but as I looked at the rapidly shrinking man running down the platform I had another Cage experience. Both the train and the man were moving away from me, but at different speeds, resulting in an interesting Doppler effect. I noticed too that the man was running perfectly down the center of the yellow safety strip that ran along the platform edge. The entire picture was made up of a marriage of moving and static lines, color and speed. My annoyance evaporated and I saw only beauty.

  1. Reynolds, Discourses 3, p. 41
  2. See Plato's concept of the "Divided Line" from The Republic.
  3. ITL, p. 38.
  4. Alberti, Della Pittura, p. 93
  5. Relatively speaking, that is! Dior stilettos aren't quite as everyday as virgins.
  6. Paper Magazine, March 2006, Vol. 22, No. 8
  7. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, II:8
  8. Perhaps this remarkable paradigm shift towards honoring the incredible complexity and beauty of the natural world was the result of the post-Enlightenment ongoing scientific triumphs. By the mid-1800s, humanity had a couple of centuries of Newtonian physics under its belt, Darwin would soon shock the world with the theory of evolution, and internal combustion engines powered people over rails and across the seas. We were beginning to understand just how incredible the universe was, how perfectly connected, and infinitely complex. The old ways of denigrating the physical world just couldn't survive the Enlightenments exploration of the nature of reality -- nothing a human could ever create could ever rival Creation.
  9. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, II:10
  10. Emerson, Nature, p. 5