Originally printed in OC Weekly, 2008.
When you're first confronted by Qin Shi Huang's famed, life-sized, terra-cotta soldiers, your Hollywood-damaged brain is tempted to see them as re-creations, as fiberglass props. They're like something from one of the Indiana Jones movies, sculptures guarding the ancient treasure, seemingly inanimate until our hero steps on the wrong floor panel, and then all of the figures suddenly creak to life, centuries of dust and dead bugs falling away as they reach for their stone swords.
They can't possibly be real, these warriors built to defend the glory of a man who has not breathed since before the time of Christ. And yet they are real, and they are here, next door to the Kidseum. Legendary fighting men who have been locked away for dozens of lifetimes while the world waged endless wars around them, they smell of dust, of history, of grandma's attic.
A whole platoon of these crumbling commandos, 14 men strong, has trooped into the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art for the "Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor" exhibition, bringing with them a full-sized horse and other animals—more than 100 objects, the largest-ever stateside show of artifacts from the First Emperor's tomb. Each figure is unique, constructed from modular elements like some kind of colossal, mix-and-match Lego kit. The figures are ranked, with the generals being the largest. They stand in rows or crouch low, ready for anything you've got to offer.
Once upon a millennium, they were all painted in lifelike colors. Today, those colors are long gone, and all that remains is the fiddly detail of their original sculpting: the rivets of their armor, the little ties in their braided hair (don't call 'em bows), the rusted remnants of chain mail, the individual hairs of their mustaches. And those eerie, serene little smiles. The smiles actually make the warriors far more creepy than they would be if they were snarling or (no pun intended) stone-faced. They relish your intrusion. They lurk in the semi-darkness, lit by spotlights that cast sinister shadows across their faces, making them look like they're quietly calculating your every weakness.
Qin Shi Huang became a king at 13 and declared himself emperor at 38, uniting China and, in the process, systematically killing anybody who got on his nerves. But despite all his power, there was one foe that Qin Shi Huang could never defeat: the Grim Reaper. He decided that dying would serve as the gateway to a new world for him to conquer, and he put thousands of men to work building an entire tomb kingdom with towering palaces, offices for important post-life business and, by some accounts, whole rivers of mercury. He was buried with more than 8,000 stone figures: horses, chariot riders and his terra-cotta terrors—many of them facing east, as though to hold back any invaders from the warring states he had conquered in life. He also had his concubines and some unlucky tomb builders buried alive with him, so he wouldn't have to worry about them giving away the secrets of his treasures. Even in death, Qin Shi Huang remained an ostentatious, world-class jerk.
Qin Shi Huang wished to build an empire that would stand for all eternity. Now his city of the dead has been plundered, his warriors dispersed, his dreams of universal conquest a footnote in the history books. But stand face-to-face with one of his earthenware soldiers, look him right in his tranquil, unblinking eye, and you will feel a little shiver of the fright the First Emperor was so desperate for you to feel.
Showing posts with label Art Criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art Criticism. Show all posts
"Birth of the Cool" at the Orange County Museum of Art
Art review originally published in OC Weekly.
Decades hence, when people try to go for that "early 21st century look," what will they zero in on? What style will make people say, "Oh, my God, that is sooo 2007"? Will they associate this era with the chintzy bling of hip-hop? Will they remember our time as one big Ikea catalog, stretching from sea to shining sea?
Modern America has nothing approaching a sole, unifying aesthetic. You're free to decorate your house or your body in almost any popular style from the past or present, and as long as you do a halfway decent job of it, everything's cool. This is a huge change from the America of, say, 1957, when men wore sharp suits and ladies wore big, fancy dresses, and everybody sat around smoking cigarettes in homes full of pointy furniture. Given the choice, we're all better off with . . . well, having a choice. But there's something to be said for everybody working within narrowly defined parameters. When people are stuck with one look, they focus on perfecting it, and they leave some fascinating artifacts behind.
"Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury," the new exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art, is a sprawling look at those post-World War II years when everybody was giddily looking ahead to what Disney's Tomorrowland promised would be a "great, big, beautiful tomorrow." As soon as you step inside, you're greeted by a black 1960 Porsche convertible that looks like something on loan from James Bond. It's startling to realize that people used to drive around in anything this beautiful. This car deserves to be in a museum - comparing it to a modern Lexus is like comparing the timeless sexiness of a Marilyn Monroe with the pricey blandness of a Gwyneth Paltrow.
The Porsche lets you know right upfront that the show takes a very broad look at the postwar era, from fine art to more everyday design. Frankly, the capital-A "art" has not aged all that well. Looking at a roomful of abstract, geometric paintings by artists such as Frederick Hammersley and Karl Benjamin, you could easily believe it was all the work of the same guy. (You could also believe these were tablecloths from Sinatra's penthouse suite.) Even the titles are functional and joyless: Opposite #15, By the Sea II. This stuff isn't just cool, it's cold.
Fortunately, the same cannot be said of the moody, black-and-white photos of William Claxton. Hot Dog Stand, Los Angeles, 3 AM captures a young couple, presumably on their way home from a nightclub. Dressed in formal clothes (you can even see the woman's hoop through her skirt), they lean together so he can light her cigarette. It's a moment of perfectly random, real-world glamor from a lifetime ago.
The disposable-pop product in this show is the stuff that's really endured: The cover for the Miles Davis album that gives the exhibit its title could've been designed six minutes ago, while the jazzy cartoons of Chuck Jones and the UPA studio (seen here on four flat-screens) will be delighting our grandchildren's grandchildren. We're also treated to a selection of architectural photos and magazines. Some, like Pierre Koenig's cantilevered house, prefigure the design trends of 2007, while others—such as John Lautner's Chemosphere, a spindly, octagonal domicile perched in Hollywood Hills—look like a sci-fi-movie version of 2007.
This show is worth checking out in its own right, but if you have a dad or a grandma around who was alive back then, be sure to take them along for on-the-spot commentary from somebody who actually lived with this stuff. Inspecting the hulking Quadraflex stereo speaker, my dad remembered seeing them in action, noting they were "big enough for a cat to live in." It brings the past alive, but now I can't stop measuring everything in cats. (My car could sleep eight cats.)
The America of today looks as cluttered and chaotic as a MySpace page, and one suspects the citizens of tomorrow won't get terribly nostalgic about us. When they step inside their holo-pods for virtual, retro dance parties with their buddies from Lunar Colony Delta, they'll probably twiddle the chrono-simulator knobs right past our era, taking them to a punk club in 1977, to a 1967 happening, and finally to 1957 . . . to witness the birth of the cool all over again.
Decades hence, when people try to go for that "early 21st century look," what will they zero in on? What style will make people say, "Oh, my God, that is sooo 2007"? Will they associate this era with the chintzy bling of hip-hop? Will they remember our time as one big Ikea catalog, stretching from sea to shining sea?
Modern America has nothing approaching a sole, unifying aesthetic. You're free to decorate your house or your body in almost any popular style from the past or present, and as long as you do a halfway decent job of it, everything's cool. This is a huge change from the America of, say, 1957, when men wore sharp suits and ladies wore big, fancy dresses, and everybody sat around smoking cigarettes in homes full of pointy furniture. Given the choice, we're all better off with . . . well, having a choice. But there's something to be said for everybody working within narrowly defined parameters. When people are stuck with one look, they focus on perfecting it, and they leave some fascinating artifacts behind.
"Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury," the new exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art, is a sprawling look at those post-World War II years when everybody was giddily looking ahead to what Disney's Tomorrowland promised would be a "great, big, beautiful tomorrow." As soon as you step inside, you're greeted by a black 1960 Porsche convertible that looks like something on loan from James Bond. It's startling to realize that people used to drive around in anything this beautiful. This car deserves to be in a museum - comparing it to a modern Lexus is like comparing the timeless sexiness of a Marilyn Monroe with the pricey blandness of a Gwyneth Paltrow.
The Porsche lets you know right upfront that the show takes a very broad look at the postwar era, from fine art to more everyday design. Frankly, the capital-A "art" has not aged all that well. Looking at a roomful of abstract, geometric paintings by artists such as Frederick Hammersley and Karl Benjamin, you could easily believe it was all the work of the same guy. (You could also believe these were tablecloths from Sinatra's penthouse suite.) Even the titles are functional and joyless: Opposite #15, By the Sea II. This stuff isn't just cool, it's cold.
Fortunately, the same cannot be said of the moody, black-and-white photos of William Claxton. Hot Dog Stand, Los Angeles, 3 AM captures a young couple, presumably on their way home from a nightclub. Dressed in formal clothes (you can even see the woman's hoop through her skirt), they lean together so he can light her cigarette. It's a moment of perfectly random, real-world glamor from a lifetime ago.
The disposable-pop product in this show is the stuff that's really endured: The cover for the Miles Davis album that gives the exhibit its title could've been designed six minutes ago, while the jazzy cartoons of Chuck Jones and the UPA studio (seen here on four flat-screens) will be delighting our grandchildren's grandchildren. We're also treated to a selection of architectural photos and magazines. Some, like Pierre Koenig's cantilevered house, prefigure the design trends of 2007, while others—such as John Lautner's Chemosphere, a spindly, octagonal domicile perched in Hollywood Hills—look like a sci-fi-movie version of 2007.
This show is worth checking out in its own right, but if you have a dad or a grandma around who was alive back then, be sure to take them along for on-the-spot commentary from somebody who actually lived with this stuff. Inspecting the hulking Quadraflex stereo speaker, my dad remembered seeing them in action, noting they were "big enough for a cat to live in." It brings the past alive, but now I can't stop measuring everything in cats. (My car could sleep eight cats.)
The America of today looks as cluttered and chaotic as a MySpace page, and one suspects the citizens of tomorrow won't get terribly nostalgic about us. When they step inside their holo-pods for virtual, retro dance parties with their buddies from Lunar Colony Delta, they'll probably twiddle the chrono-simulator knobs right past our era, taking them to a punk club in 1977, to a 1967 happening, and finally to 1957 . . . to witness the birth of the cool all over again.
Discovering the Jolly Nightmare: The Lost World of Charles Altamont Doyle
Originally printed in LA Weekly.
When I was a kid in the late ’70s, Linnea, a dear friend of the family, loaned me a peculiar book entitled The Doyle Diary. It reprinted the 1889 sketchbook-journal that Charles Altamont Doyle (father of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes) kept during his lengthy stay in a Scottish lunatic asylum. If Linnea ever hopes to get the book back, she’ll have to kill me first.
Individual pages of The Doyle Diary can be dazzling, but you have to spend some time with the book to realize what a masterpiece it truly is. The Doyle Diary grants you free access inside Charles Doyle’s busy brain. There are cheeky fairy women and giant polecats, humorously unflattering self-portraits, meticulous studies of the local flora and fauna, political rants and melancholy familial reminiscences, affectionate doodles of the asylum’s cleaning staff and lots of agonizing puns. Overall, one gets the impression of a gentle, highly imaginative Victorian gentleman who somehow ended up in a madhouse but was too polite to inconvenience anybody by making a big fuss about it.
While Doyle’s flights of fancy are entrancing in their own right, one of my favorite drawings in the book features a seemingly unremarkable scene the artist witnessed between two crows. One crow stands with a worm in its mouth, offering it to the other. The caption: “I have just seen this out of the window. Could unselfishness go further?”
In Doyle’s eyes, a simple transaction between two cawing, homely scavengers has been transformed into a touchingly noble act. How could anyone not love this man?
Charles Doyle was born into a family of successful artists. His father, John Doyle, was an acclaimed caricaturist of the Regency period, while his brothers all went on to fame, and his older brother, Richard “Dickie” Doyle, was one of the better-known illustrators of the Victorian age. But while Charles Altamont Doyle showed early promise as an artist, at 17 he was sent off to Edinburgh for a job as a surveyor in the Scottish Office of Works. It was mostly a routine clerk’s position, although he did some impressive architectural design, including a mighty fountain in the courtyard of Holyrood Palace, the queen’s Scottish residence.
At 22, he wed his landlady’s daughter; they had 10 kids, seven of whom lived. For years Doyle struggled to make it as an artist (he illustrated 17 published books we know of) while continuing at his day job, but the pressures of supporting a large family gradually wore him down, and he took to the bottle. Another man might have been proud to have designed Scottish monuments while illustrating books in his spare time, but Doyle knew that by the lofty standards set by his brothers, he was just an anonymous civil servant and Sunday painter with a house full of kids he could scarcely afford to feed.
In 1876, after decades of toiling without promotion for the Office of Works, Doyle was dismissed and put on a pension. Later that year he was sent to Fordoun House, a nursing home for alcoholics. His stay at Fordoun lasted years, and it was apparently during this time that he developed epilepsy, a condition poorly understood then. Perhaps addled by his illness or perhaps desperate after years of confinement, Doyle made a violent attempt to escape Fordoun in 1885. He failed, and was sent to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum, where he spent the next seven years and illustrated The Doyle Diary. Following a final relocation, Doyle died a lonesome death at the Crighton Royal Institution in 1893. He had spent 17 years in confinement. By any measure, Doyle lived a tragic life, but nobody who has experienced the wonders of The Doyle Diary would say it was a wasted one.
Unfortunately, Doyle’s rotten luck hasn’t improved much in the decades since his death. While his work inspired a passionate cult following and he’s been cited as a kindred spirit by such modern cartooning geniuses as Dame Darcy (Fantagraphics Books’ Meat Cake) and LA Weekly’s own Tony Millionaire, Doyle’s not nearly as well-known as he deserves to be. The Doyle Diary is long out of print (private dealers often sell used copies on Amazon for under 10 bucks) and his surviving art is scattered in collections around the world and rarely seen by the public.
Although I’ve probably read The Doyle Diary a hundred times, it wasn’t until a few months ago that I discovered a note at the book’s end stating that one of the largest American collections of Doyle’s work was at the Huntington Library in San Marino. I called the Huntington and was told that while they did indeed possess a collection of Doyle’s work, it was in fragile condition and only scholars were permitted to view it. They bent the rules and agreed to let me into their archives so I could write this article, although frankly they didn’t sound too thrilled about it. Had they denied me access, I think I would have executed a daring midnight raid, breaking into the Huntington under cover of darkness to explore the archives with a flashlight. Fellow Doyle fans would understand.
My excitement was tinged with melancholy as I sat in the Huntington’s Scott Curatorial Office’s Art Division Print and Drawing Study Room and perused a crumbling album of Charles Doyle’s drawings — an album that once belonged to Doyle’s son, Sir Arthur himself. There was easily enough material here for a whole new book, but this was literally a once-in-a-lifetime thrill; I had exactly three hours to take it all in, and then I’d probably never see this work again.
While his usual playfulness was on ample display, overall the Huntington collection showed a darker side of Doyle than I was used to. There was a sometimes unsettling battle-of-the-sexes theme on display, although you couldn’t always tell which side Doyle was on. One drawing depicting a woman riding sidesaddle on a man’s back was captioned, “To be useful as well as ornamental”; in another, the smartly dressed “Mister Present Times” offered a girl for sale: “Who wants a Bride — now is your chance — going — cheap — but nice!” Elsewhere, Cupid held a hoop through which a man and woman jumped onto the backs of running horses in the eternal circus of love. There were many hapless males trying to catch the attention of unimpressed dames, a dynamic that repeated across the human, animal and fairy kingdoms. Given how so much of Doyle’s life played out in confinement, I suppose a little sexual frustration is understandable.
One simple drawing in the Huntington archives stopped me cold: Beneath a full moon, a fat, leering drunk tipped his glass to the viewer as he tottered atop a horse with a frenzied, mirthless grin. The caption was, “Hurrah! For the jolly night mare!” It was a phrase that aptly described Doyle’s work, perhaps his entire life: the jolly nightmare.
While the public isn’t permitted to see Doyle’s work at the Huntington, representatives from both the library and Doyle’s family have told me that they’d be amenable if a publisher approached them about printing Doyle’s work, although so far there haven’t been any offers. Until that blessed day comes, I plead with you to do whatever you must to experience Doyle’s jolly nightmare for yourself, whether that means scouring Amazon for a used copy of The Doyle Diary or just stealing one from a dear friend of the family. Doyle’s work can be achingly lovely, achingly funny or achingly sad, and sometimes it is all of these things at once.
The art of Charles Altamont Doyle hurts, but it’s a hurt you’ll never get enough of.
When I was a kid in the late ’70s, Linnea, a dear friend of the family, loaned me a peculiar book entitled The Doyle Diary. It reprinted the 1889 sketchbook-journal that Charles Altamont Doyle (father of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes) kept during his lengthy stay in a Scottish lunatic asylum. If Linnea ever hopes to get the book back, she’ll have to kill me first.
Individual pages of The Doyle Diary can be dazzling, but you have to spend some time with the book to realize what a masterpiece it truly is. The Doyle Diary grants you free access inside Charles Doyle’s busy brain. There are cheeky fairy women and giant polecats, humorously unflattering self-portraits, meticulous studies of the local flora and fauna, political rants and melancholy familial reminiscences, affectionate doodles of the asylum’s cleaning staff and lots of agonizing puns. Overall, one gets the impression of a gentle, highly imaginative Victorian gentleman who somehow ended up in a madhouse but was too polite to inconvenience anybody by making a big fuss about it.
While Doyle’s flights of fancy are entrancing in their own right, one of my favorite drawings in the book features a seemingly unremarkable scene the artist witnessed between two crows. One crow stands with a worm in its mouth, offering it to the other. The caption: “I have just seen this out of the window. Could unselfishness go further?”
In Doyle’s eyes, a simple transaction between two cawing, homely scavengers has been transformed into a touchingly noble act. How could anyone not love this man?
Charles Doyle was born into a family of successful artists. His father, John Doyle, was an acclaimed caricaturist of the Regency period, while his brothers all went on to fame, and his older brother, Richard “Dickie” Doyle, was one of the better-known illustrators of the Victorian age. But while Charles Altamont Doyle showed early promise as an artist, at 17 he was sent off to Edinburgh for a job as a surveyor in the Scottish Office of Works. It was mostly a routine clerk’s position, although he did some impressive architectural design, including a mighty fountain in the courtyard of Holyrood Palace, the queen’s Scottish residence.
At 22, he wed his landlady’s daughter; they had 10 kids, seven of whom lived. For years Doyle struggled to make it as an artist (he illustrated 17 published books we know of) while continuing at his day job, but the pressures of supporting a large family gradually wore him down, and he took to the bottle. Another man might have been proud to have designed Scottish monuments while illustrating books in his spare time, but Doyle knew that by the lofty standards set by his brothers, he was just an anonymous civil servant and Sunday painter with a house full of kids he could scarcely afford to feed.
In 1876, after decades of toiling without promotion for the Office of Works, Doyle was dismissed and put on a pension. Later that year he was sent to Fordoun House, a nursing home for alcoholics. His stay at Fordoun lasted years, and it was apparently during this time that he developed epilepsy, a condition poorly understood then. Perhaps addled by his illness or perhaps desperate after years of confinement, Doyle made a violent attempt to escape Fordoun in 1885. He failed, and was sent to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum, where he spent the next seven years and illustrated The Doyle Diary. Following a final relocation, Doyle died a lonesome death at the Crighton Royal Institution in 1893. He had spent 17 years in confinement. By any measure, Doyle lived a tragic life, but nobody who has experienced the wonders of The Doyle Diary would say it was a wasted one.
Unfortunately, Doyle’s rotten luck hasn’t improved much in the decades since his death. While his work inspired a passionate cult following and he’s been cited as a kindred spirit by such modern cartooning geniuses as Dame Darcy (Fantagraphics Books’ Meat Cake) and LA Weekly’s own Tony Millionaire, Doyle’s not nearly as well-known as he deserves to be. The Doyle Diary is long out of print (private dealers often sell used copies on Amazon for under 10 bucks) and his surviving art is scattered in collections around the world and rarely seen by the public.
Although I’ve probably read The Doyle Diary a hundred times, it wasn’t until a few months ago that I discovered a note at the book’s end stating that one of the largest American collections of Doyle’s work was at the Huntington Library in San Marino. I called the Huntington and was told that while they did indeed possess a collection of Doyle’s work, it was in fragile condition and only scholars were permitted to view it. They bent the rules and agreed to let me into their archives so I could write this article, although frankly they didn’t sound too thrilled about it. Had they denied me access, I think I would have executed a daring midnight raid, breaking into the Huntington under cover of darkness to explore the archives with a flashlight. Fellow Doyle fans would understand.
My excitement was tinged with melancholy as I sat in the Huntington’s Scott Curatorial Office’s Art Division Print and Drawing Study Room and perused a crumbling album of Charles Doyle’s drawings — an album that once belonged to Doyle’s son, Sir Arthur himself. There was easily enough material here for a whole new book, but this was literally a once-in-a-lifetime thrill; I had exactly three hours to take it all in, and then I’d probably never see this work again.
While his usual playfulness was on ample display, overall the Huntington collection showed a darker side of Doyle than I was used to. There was a sometimes unsettling battle-of-the-sexes theme on display, although you couldn’t always tell which side Doyle was on. One drawing depicting a woman riding sidesaddle on a man’s back was captioned, “To be useful as well as ornamental”; in another, the smartly dressed “Mister Present Times” offered a girl for sale: “Who wants a Bride — now is your chance — going — cheap — but nice!” Elsewhere, Cupid held a hoop through which a man and woman jumped onto the backs of running horses in the eternal circus of love. There were many hapless males trying to catch the attention of unimpressed dames, a dynamic that repeated across the human, animal and fairy kingdoms. Given how so much of Doyle’s life played out in confinement, I suppose a little sexual frustration is understandable.
One simple drawing in the Huntington archives stopped me cold: Beneath a full moon, a fat, leering drunk tipped his glass to the viewer as he tottered atop a horse with a frenzied, mirthless grin. The caption was, “Hurrah! For the jolly night mare!” It was a phrase that aptly described Doyle’s work, perhaps his entire life: the jolly nightmare.
While the public isn’t permitted to see Doyle’s work at the Huntington, representatives from both the library and Doyle’s family have told me that they’d be amenable if a publisher approached them about printing Doyle’s work, although so far there haven’t been any offers. Until that blessed day comes, I plead with you to do whatever you must to experience Doyle’s jolly nightmare for yourself, whether that means scouring Amazon for a used copy of The Doyle Diary or just stealing one from a dear friend of the family. Doyle’s work can be achingly lovely, achingly funny or achingly sad, and sometimes it is all of these things at once.
The art of Charles Altamont Doyle hurts, but it’s a hurt you’ll never get enough of.