I was at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam yesterday. In a letter (274) to his brother Theo on Oct 22, 1882, Vincent Van Gogh wrote:
What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? -- since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.The Van Gogh Museum does an excellent job placing his work in the context of his family, friends, and culture. One can see the development of his skills over ten years. I understood that too much emphasis has been placed on his mental illness and the self injury and not enough on his enormous productivity. Besides all the paintings, the museum numbers his drawings to be around 1100 (they have archived about half).
This same question can be posed about writing, which is perhaps a way of drawing. The selection of words, images, and arrangement of those sentences and paragraphs and pages create the whole. How can one get through the wall between what one feels and what one can do? Forcing it does not work, it's true. One must go deeper. I like his choice of the word grind. It speaks to the slow process of vision, revision, and vision.
The Eye
The Eye Museum traces the history of film in an exhibit of stereoscopes, zoetropes, and the Magic Lantern and other things in between. The stereoscope added a greater sense of depth. The Magic Lantern allowed the operator to project an image, and then add a hand-operated moving image within. The zoetrope was a cylinder with vertical cuts, allowing the viewing to see the images inside that were arranged like a cartoon or a book. To see movement, one must spin the cylinder. It's quite pleasing. Also shown were machines with something like a rollodex inside (and every other card was blank). To turn the crank was to create a movement of the set of photographs, a rudimentary film. In another exhibit, the inner workings of a film projector were explained.
There is an important piece of a projector, a maltese cross, that helps to make the motion of the motion picture. In the 15th century, according to Wikipedia, the Maltese cross was worn by knights who upheld eight obligations or aspirations:
to live in truth
to have faith
to repent one's sins
to give proof of humility
to love justice
to be merciful
to be sincere and wholehearted
to endure persecution
Later, it came to represent the beatitudes:
Observant (“that he may note the causes and signs of injury”)
Tactful (“that he may without thoughtless questions learn the symptoms and history of the case, and secure the confidence of the patients and bystanders”)
Resourceful (“That he may use to the best advantage whatever is at hand to prevent further damage, and to assist Nature’s efforts to repair the mischief already done”)
Dextrous (“that he may handle a patient without causing unnecessary pain, and use appliances efficiently and neatly”)
Explicit (“that he may give clear instructions to the patient or the bystanders how best to assist him”)
Discriminating (“that he may decide which of several injuries presses most for treatment by himself, what can best be left for the patient or bystanders to do, and what should be left for the medical men”)
Persevering (“that he may continue his efforts, though not at first successful.”)
Sympathetic (“that he may give real comfort and encouragement to the suffering”)
Another gallery in the museum was dedicated to the first films, the ground-breaking and iconic. We watched excerpts of silent movies with Charlie Chaplin, and clips of Shirley Temple movies, war & westerns starring John Wayne, Popeye cartoons, gorilla movies, The Rebel Without a Cause (starring James Dean).
The Stedelijk Museum
This museum of modern art had a special exhibit, Zero. This explored the work of avant garde artists in the 1950s: Yves Klein and many others. The question they seemed to be asking is "what should art be?" They rejected the old traditions in favor of the new. White paintings, paintings done with smoke and shadows, paintings that tricked the eye. Nails. Silver and mirrors. Things looked modern and sleek.
Upstairs in the top gallery, I considered the photographs made by Andy Warhol. Four were stitched together on a sewing machine. This sewn technique is so moving to me, so domestic. It's women's work, traditionally.
What makes art or writing good?
I began asking myself the question: what should writing be? what do I think makes writing good? The use of image is very powerful, and it is certainly important to me. And quickly, I thought good writing should project into the viewer's imagination an expanded emotion, a larger expanse, to make the reader feel more full or more hollow. Good writing is an internal experience. It needs to be active and sensual. It needs to be capable of impact. Writing can imprint, or image (as a verb), or study an object, and it can employ fictional or dream or fantastical elements in the way of telling the truth. It can be rhythmic. Writing is a thread that connects disparate elements.
Writing should erode the patriarchal structures and gender roles and open possibilities, not in an angry or destructive way, but with tender determination. It represents more than reality: dream, form emerging from chaos, quantum mechanics. Strange symmetries and effects like the 100th monkey.
Writing should have clarity and remove obstacles, the right words. Repetitions are a way of playing with history.
The Stendhal Box
Stendhal felt that good art caused a physical reaction that made one "fall apart." In order to remedy this, an artist created a tall and narrow cabinet/chair for people who are suffering art's effects. One can enter the cabinet, sit down, close the door, and gather one's emotions and wits in an area that reduces external stimulation.
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