James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Literary Blog: Verses on the Early Beats

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Created on Sunday, 11 December 2011 04:13

Written by James Cahill

Literary Blog: Verses on the Early Beats

I seem to be going back and forth, in these blogs, between presenting myself as a litterateur and presenting myself as a scholar. Early in my life I decided to study English through graduate school and become a professional writer. That never happened, but the ambition never went away--some of it lingers, and inspires the hope that I will be remembered as someone with some of both. So I present now another of my early writings.

In an earlier blog (10/25/11), titled “Berkeley as America’s Cultural Capital,” I recounted how a man named George Leite, a close associate and follower of Henry Miller who was then living down in Big Sur, used to come to Berkeley and hang out in Creed’s Bookstore, my own favorite haunt in those days when I was going to Berkeley High, and later was an undergraduate at U.C. The movement centered on Leite, which one magazine article (Atlantic Monthly?) called “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy,” was, I pointed out, an important forerunner of the later Beat Generation, and is thus more deserving of attention from literary historians than it has received. (I see now on the internet that Leite and his movement are discussed in a book unknown to me, Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century,  Cambridge University Press, 1991. Already I feel a slight negative reaction: San Francisco instead of Berkeley? Wrong place. And mid-century? A bit earlier, please.) Leite started in 1946 a literary magazine called The Circle--I wrote a verse making fun of it and parodying it, which I mentioned in my blog without quoting.

Now I have copied it out from my old handwritten manuscript, and will print it below, as a young litterateur’s response to an important literary phenomenon, the Birth of the Beats.

(The pun in Part VI is lifted, as I remember, from some humorist of the time, S. J. Perelman or Ogden Nash. I was much given to a verse form that changed line lengths and rhyme patterns from one stanza to the next; English teachers criticized me for this, but I persisted.)

Doggerel Verse, especially composed to honor and describe the cultural atmosphere of Creed’s Book Store, and to increase the roster of its habitués:

I. If you’ve pretensions

To Culture and Learning,

Scorn all conventions

And think yourself burning

With hot Inspiration, and passions that never stop boiling and churning;

If some shocking impropriety

Bans you from polite society,

Don’t despair!

If others will have nothing of you,

However false you be, we’ll love you!

We don’t care!

Especially those

Who produce the new verse,

Which is something like prose

But decidedly worse,

For most of it says nothing, means nothing, ‘tis modern poetry’s curse.

II. Poeme a la Circle

I have rolled in garbage

Till the sun rose,

Raising it with both hands,

Pressing it into the blackness of my nostrils,

And two garbage rats

Came and encouraged me

I have felt my being permeated

With garbage.

Oh, young men,

You with strong souls,

You with wild eyes,

Roll in garbage!

There is no other joy in this world.

III. To the Customer

What? You want the Faerie Queene?

That’s old stuff, and not for you!

Buy the Circle Magazine!

Though it doesn’t really mean

Much of anything, it’s new,

And has pictures in it, too!

IV. Often, in the afternoons,

Here at Creed’s we congregate,

All pretending to enjoy

One another’s company,

Hiding all our deep dislikes.

But, to tell the truth, we come

To enjoy an audience.

What a joyful time we have,

Matching disillusionment!

Desperate, laborious,

And amateurish cynicism!

What a joyful time we have,

Sneering all in unison!

V. Paranoics, Misanthropics,

Who discourse on sundry topics--

On Philosophy, Religion,

And the Love-life of the Pigeon;

On their passions, and on Fate,

And on How to Choose a Mate;

Penning poems, three a day,

In an offhand, casual way,

Making maxims, never heeding them--

Buying large books, never reading them--

Ah, ‘tis rapture, ah, ‘tis bliss!

Come to Creed’s and be like this!

VI. Further welcome

To such-like our door never closes;

Our store is a bed of neuroses.

VII. Final Denunciation

Oh, ye dabblers, oh, ye dribblers,

Oh, ye modern Grub-street scribblers,

One guffaw from Rabelais--

This would blow you all away.

(Let it be understood that none of the above applies to Mr. Schilling [the manager of Creed’s], whose only fault is Tolerance.)

Still More on Art and Artists

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Created on Friday, 02 December 2011 02:29

Written by James Cahill

Blog: Still More On Art and Artists

This is the third blog on Art and Artists, and I now contemplate even writing a fourth. Why doesn’t he just write a long publishable article, you may be wondering, or even a book? Answer: because my thoughts and reminiscences and opinions aren’t organized or authoritative enough to merit that--they are more blog-like, that is. (How strange that I’ve lived long enough to be able to write that without cringing!) As before, I’ll warn that I may well be repeating a few incidents or observations from the earlier two. But mostly it will be new, and will touch on matters that have been important in my life, and that I hope will strike responsive chords in others.

This one will be mostly about artists, and kinds of artists, whom I’ve admired, and whose works I’ve deliberately spent serious time with, during my long career. I don’t mean to include the many Chinese painters I’ve known and for whom I’ve written catalog essays etc.--I’ll devote a few video-lectures to them. I mean only Western, and mostly American, artists, most of them painters, whose works I’ve liked--and a few I’ve disliked-- with attempts to formulate the reasons why or why not.

I’ll start out, as before, with an excerpt from an email communication, this one to David Carrier. He’s an art critic and theorist living in Cleveland--I’ve never met him in person, only communicated with him, but lots of that. He spent a year in China and was introduced to me by Freda Murck. Recently he wrote me while traveling in China again, and our communications livened up. I wrote this in one of mine (I’ve expanded it slightly):

Dear David,

On one point I should correct you: you write that you can see why I don’t like contemporary art. But I’m not down on contemporary art as a whole, even to the degree that Gombrich was. I was deeply engaged with Abstract Expressionism while it was happening, moved by Franz Kline, spent lots of time in a Rothko exhibition at the Phillips
Gallery, etc. I read Harold Rosenberg a lot, disliked Clement Greenberg with his advocacy of the flat. I was also a fan of the Bay Area artists, especially Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown. If I had access to a Brice Marden retrospective I would go, and not leave quickly. And so forth--I spent a lot of time in a MOMA show of Picasso-Braque Cubism, quickly developing the eye for telling which was whose without reading labels, recognizing why P could do the push-pull thing with space in ways that B couldn’t touch. I even knew Ad Reinhardt (he used to spend time at Asia House Gallery, helped curate an exhibition!) although I looked on--and looked at--his solid-black painitings as more anomalous than absorbing.

What I can’t get seriously engaged with, and think of as a large part of “where it all went wrong,” is the “he-thought-of-it-first” kind of art that doesn’t produce art objects you can sensorily engage with. A recent article I read was about how artists of that kind hire others to make the tank and put the shark in it in formaldehyde, or fabricate the oversize plastic tiger, or whatever--their own job is only to have the clever idea, and for that, dumb rich people pay them millions. For them I have no respect--nor do I have any, with very few exceptions, for conceptual/environmental/installation/happenings art generally. When I became acting director of the University Art Museum in 1973, after watching the beginnings of that kind of stuff under Peter Selz’s directorship, I announced to the staff that we were going to hang a big sign from the highest balcony saying DOING DUMB THINGS AND CALLING IT ART IS OVER! They (led by Brenda Richardson, the vice-director, who had helped to get Peter retired and out--and who now is my good & respected friend) they talked me out of that; but the belief/attitude persists. I used to say in faculty meetings and elsewhere: if only someone had said, at the right moment, “Good joke, M.  Duchamps, a urinal exhibited as a sculpture, ha ha. Now let’s go back to making art,” instead of that grand collective “Oh wow!”, art of the twentieth century and beyond would be much different and (for me) a lot better.

So, there you have it. Just to set things right on that matter.

Best, Jim

The Princeton musicologist Edward Cone, whom I got to know well when he spent a year in Berkeley, published an article proposing that “art” of that kind might be disposed of if we could only take away from it the designation “art” and make the object/event make it on its own, without enjoying in its observors/participants that sense of awe that works of art command. Do we really want to sit still in the audience watching the pianist also sitting still for four minutes and 33 seconds, just because it’s billed as a musical composition (by John Cage)? No, of course we don’t. So: end of that. And so forth. But that would pull the rug out from under so many artists and their admirers that it won’t happen.

In the 1950s, when I was writing my dissertation and my Skira Chinese Painting book, I was caught up in the widespread

enthusiasm for Abstract Expressionism in American painting. I put together an elaborate argument, and delivered it in lectures here and there, about how Chinese painters had anticipated it by developing a theory of artistic expression, and a kind of painting based on it, in which the expressive content of the work became pretty much independent of what it pictured, deriving instead from the artist’s brushstrokes, from “gesture.”

I was especially fond of Franz Kline, was moved by Robert Motherwell’s “Elegies for the Spanish Republic,” and so forth. Later, I used to give two lectures every year in a World History series within the History Dept., one about what Chinese artists took from European pictorial art in the 16^th-17^th centuries, and in the other, pointing out “influence” in the opposite direction, for instance the importance of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy to the origins of Abstract Expressionism--how much Mark Tobey’s development of his early abstract “field” paintings depended on his learning about this in Japan, I think it was.

I can also write--but will do it only briefly--about artists whose works I disliked or even hated. We had a big Dan Flavin exhibition in our art museum, installations of new lighting installed all over; and one of his “works” was purchased for the Museum. It consisted of a strong light installed on the stairway leading to the basement; and it has, ever since, hurt my eyes when I walk downstairs. I remember complaining to David Ross, when he was Chief Curator: Does making it unpleasant for me to walk downstairs constitute a valid work of art? And he, of course, fell back on that all-purpose response to such criticism: Provoking that reaction in you is exactly his purpose, and makes this a successful work of art. An argument I still believe to be phony, a catch-all for “justifying” anything at all. (I got the same response to a criticism of Christo’s “Running Fence” at an Arts Club meeting.) I was also critical of most of the “works” in an exhibition of Jonathan Borovsky--I won’t take the time to describe what they were, but really dumb things--we still have his “Hammering Man,” which is just a boring thing (after the first few minutes), in our lower gallery.

I was certainly not critical or disapproving of all the shows of new art that Peter Selz organized during his tenure--some were exciting and absorbing. He had an early exhibition of kinetic sculpture--it was Peter who had installed the Jean Tinguely sculpture in the MOMA court that was supposed to destroy itself and didn’t. (See the funny parody of that in Arthur Penn’s early experimental film Mickey One.) Peter brought to the U.C. campus a wonderful show of the sculptures of Arnoldo Pomodoro, some of which were set around the green spaces on campus and attracted large numbers of fascinated viewers with their look of being remnants from a long-ago high-tech civilization. One of my favorite stories was of two little boys standing by one of them, in Faculty Glade, looking at it for a long time, and one of them asks the other: “Is it real?” What, I used to ask rhetorically, is the right answer to that? And Peter organized an exhibition of some sculptor, I forget his name, who made very realistic (3-D Chuck Close) figures of gallery-goers or pairs of them, dressed in real clothes, and set them around the galleries. This was so popular that people came in on weekends and planted themselves motionlessly against walls, challenging others to tell them from the sculptures.

I remember once sitting next to Wayne Thibaud, much of whose work I like, and talking with him about how non-art can turn easily into art--he painted pie slices for commercial signs before he did them as paintings. My example was how some Japanese tea-master, was it Sen no Rikyu, raised a poor rooftile-maker he observed working on the palace grounds and turned him into the first master of Raku teabowls.

Enough--or more than enough--for now. But, as I say, I may still have a fourth, about artists’ late periods and their tendency to go flat in their late works--to fail to achieve, that is, the effects of space to be seen in their earlier paintings.

Blog: Two Deceased Colleagues

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Created on Wednesday, 30 November 2011 15:47

Written by James Cahill

Blog: Two Deceased Colleagues

I interrupt my series of blogs on art and artists to do one inspired by two writings that came to my attention yesterday. One is the New York Times obituary for Michael Heyman, who died of emphysema in his Berkeley house on November 19^th at the age of 81. The other is an offprint, which I happened upon in a disorderly pile of old offprints and other documents, of a talk called “Voyages” given in 1992 as a presidential address at the American Historical Association by Frederick Wakeman Jr. when he was president of that organization. Both were Berkeley colleagues and good friends, and memories of them brought back by reading these documents arouse feelings in me that are appropriate for this Thanksgiving season. I have a lot to be thankful for, but at the top my list is my mere survival, in pretty good health, at an advanced age. Both Mike and Fred were younger than I, and both were full of vital energy; both should have outlived me, but didn’t.

Michael Heyman was Chancellor of U.C. Berkeley for ten years, from 1980 to 1990; these were active years for me as a professor there, and I saw quite a lot of him. It was he, along with Provost Rod Park, who called me in just before my 1973 trip to China to inform me that they were retiring Peter Selz from the directorship of our University Art Museum, and that I was being appointed Acting Director for a year. It was a long talk, filled with information about the financing of the Museum (that Peter had consistently gone way over budget was part of the reason he was being retired), and their hopes that more of properly academic funding could be directed into it; and for that, they said, we had to demonstrate more clearly the value of the Museum and its exhibitions to campus programs. It was my trying to carry out that quite reasonable (I still believe) directive that got me branded as a stodgy academic who was trying to reduce the Museum’s commitment to contemporary art. I was not a success in this year-long position; I have avoided high administrative jobs throughout my career exactly because I am no good as an administrator.

I have, however, been a good writer, and at U.C. Berkeley I wrote materials for a number of the Faculty Club Christmas party performances. In 1983, when I set out to do a show that followed on our highly successful 1967 “Dan Destry’s Dilemma, or Publish or Perish, or Both,” this time using the music and song-patterns from the John Gay-Frederick Pepusch Beggar’s Opera instead of the Gilbert-and-Sullivan songs used for DDD, we invited Mike Heyman to play a part in it. It was entitled Dan Destry’s Return, or the Academic Beggar’s Opera (A Wry Entertainment for Academic Beggars. We were in the midst of our great budget crisis, and our theme for that year’s entertainment seemed appropriate: ways in which U.C. Berkeley might draw on the expertise of its faculty to earn outside income, if it were not so honest. Faculty members made up a band of outlaws; Mike Heyman agreed to appear briefly near the beginning as their leader and to sing one song, as Chancellor Mike Highwayman (“the name was later corrupted by shortening.”) Writing this was a great pleasure for me, because I love The Beggar’s Opera and its songs; it was not, however, such a success with the audience as DDD had been, perhaps because the music was less familiar, but also because it was too long. You can read most of it, the whole plot and most of the songs, in the CYCTIE on this website under Writings of JC, pages 32 ff. This is how it began:

Chancellor Mike Highwayman, outwardly an advocate of law and order but

secretly supportive of MacDestry and his robber band, is awaiting their

first annual report on the forceful fundraising activities in which they have

engaged during the past academic year. Musing on his secret role, he asks

rhetorically why he does it, and answers: “Because for the present my real

concern is—and must be—money!” (Mike sang well, but I recall telling him:

“You’re a great chancellor, but you need to learn how to come in on the

upbeat.”)

Solo, Mike H. (Tune: “Through All the Employments of Life”)

For all academia’s woes

‘Tis money supplies the solution

And, as every good chancellor knows

Brings health to a sick institution.

For the faculty comes and it goes,

The buildings can stand or can fall,

As for students, who cares about those?

It’s money that’s key to it all.

Yes, the faculty comes and it goes (etc., repeat)

Dan enters with his band, and explains that they have organized into

platoons, according to academic specialties, of which the first is the

Foundation Grant Proposal Writers. They sing their marching song:

Song, MacDestry and Chorus (Tune: “Let Us Take the Road”)

Let us seize the chance!

Hark, I hear the approach of deadlines

We’ll join the academic breadlines

And pursue foundation grants

See the pen I hold--

So prettily we write the jargon

Our project sounds like a bargain

And they send us pots of gold!

Mike Heyman, as noted above, enjoyed singing his song but had trouble coming in on the upbeat, i.e. on the fourth beat of a 4/4 measure. After Christmas he called us all to a dinner at his Chancellor’s Residence where we sang some of the songs again for other guests, including, if I remember right, Gordon Getty, who had written a kind of opera himself and was interested in the form.

Mike went on, as the obituary relates, to head the Smithsonian Institution. The Times calls his tenure there “largely successful” but also relates how he was booby-trapped by a controversy over the labeling of an exhibit; he accepted some of the blame for this, although it was not his doing. As Chancellor of the Berkeley campus, he had fought hard for affirmative action and other causes he believed in. He was a man of firm principle, but, perhaps even more importantly, he had the ability as a leader to pursue his ends effectively. He was one of the friends I have most admired.

Fred Wakeman was a brilliant historian of China, working on China’s middle period and intellectual history. He started teaching at UCB in 1965, the same year I did; and since he considered himself (and was) a disciple of Joseph Levenson, we had a lot in common. I and my students drew on his expertise frequently and heavily in our research--if we had been working primarily on early art we would have drawn more on David Keightley (who did, of course, help us also on occasion) or, if doing Confucianism, on Weiming Tu. In my first exhibition seminar, the one on late Ming painting that led to The Restless Landscape exhibition and publication, Fred was a principal advisor, and came sometimes to seminar sessions. Advice from him and his advanced students allowed us, in the seminar that produced the Shadows of Mount Huang exhibition of Anhui-school painting, to make the arguments we did about the implications of these artists’ patronage being heavily among the Anhui merchants. And so forth--Fred was writing his huge and important work. The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in the 17th Century, published in 1985, just as I and my students were most engaged with late Ming and early Qing painting (my Compelling Image book, for instance, published in 1982, was about painting of just that period.)

Recently I found and watched a video made at my own 70^th birthday celebration in the University Art Museum, and there is Fred giving a spirited talk, looking so full of life and energy that he should, as I say, have outlived me. But awful things were ahead for him. A lower-back operation was unsuccessful, and left him unable to walk; at the end he had to be pushed around in a wheelchair. And other afflictions hit him, ending with liver cancer, which brought about his death in 2006 at the age of only 68.

The offprint from him that I rediscovered is of his Presidential Address to the American Historical Association in 1992. (It was printed in The American Historical Review 98/2 for February 1993.) . He had also been president, for four years, of the Social Science Research Council. Since 1492 was the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, he needed to choose a theme that engaged with that event; and, as a Berkeley historian, he needed also to demonstrate his mastery of the New Historicism originated mainly by Stephen Greenblatt of our English Department, which laid out a pattern of concurrent events that seemed unrelated but then moved smoothly between them (a Shakespeare play being performed at the Globe Theater, a bear fight going on outside, both playing to enthusiastic audiences with a love of violence.) Fred came to me to ask what I could think of that had happened in Chinese art in 1492 that he might use in his talk. I thought immediately of Shen Zhou’s Night Vigil painting (see my Parting At the Shore figs. 37-38 and accompanying text) in which the artist sits up through the night and meditates; I had translated the long account of this experience in his inscription on the painting (pp. 90-91 of Parting.) It was just the kind of thing Fred needed, and he worked it into his talk, which began with reminiscences about his childhood. He was the son of the Frederick Wakeman who wrote The Hucksters and other popular novels. (I once, lecturing at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, stayed for a weekend with Fred’s sister and brother-in-law there, and discovered on their bookshelf a paperback novel by Evans Wakeman, Fred at an early age writing about college life. Back in Berkeley I confronted him as ‘Evans Wakeman” and he smiled and admitted his guilt.) His presidential address begins with an account of how his father, after making him read and report on a booklength account of Columbus’s second voyage in 1494, set off with the family to retrace that voyage in their ketch. From their running aground on the coast of Cuba Fred turns to the awful plight of Chinese laborers in Cuba, and so forth, coming at last to Zheng He’s voyages, their termination, and the decline of the Ming dynasty. Shen Zhou’s Night Vigil, of course, fits nicely into this.

His talk ends with these sentences: “I am now, by choice and inadvertent shaping, a Californian. And although it may sound strange to you after the Los Angeles riots of last April, my pride in that Californian complexion is in its capacity to encompass the resistance of all our individual cultures to the melting pot and for its commitment to the regeneration of a civil society that will allow each of us to share the journey ahead.” He was too polite to say that Los Angeles and Southern California really belong, for us, in a different state, or that by California he really meant Berkeley and its Bay Area extensions. For my own expression of a similar sentiment, see my earlier blog titled “Berkeley As the Cultural Capital of America.” Fred Wakeman and Mike Heyman both shared that belief, even if they didn’t express it so openly as I have, and they spent their happiest and most productive years at U.C. Berkeley, as I did. When I can no longer continue producing my video-lectures here in Vancouver, for reasons of health or whatever, I mean to return to Berkeley to spend the remainder of my days there, as comfortable as one can be in today’s world, surrounded by my family and friends in the city I have called “that bastion of ineffectual right-mindedness.”