No Endings for Long Movies
Essay Posted February 12, 2008 by James E. Nelson
Art is notoriously difficult to define. The standard definitions generally consider that art operates at the emotional level, and that it somehow connects the creator and observer. It is therefore a community endeavor in some sense. I would add that art also describes and sometimes critiques the world as it is and points a way toward how the world ought to be. Some might say art is “subversive,” but that’s not quite accurate (unless you’re a deconstructionist). Art is rather constructive. If it reveals flaws in the world as it is currently perceived, it doesn’t merely try to tear down this current perception, but rather offers an alternative, or a new way of seeing things. When culture comes to an impasse, it is generally the artist who reframes the matter and shows the way forward.
I’ve been thinking about art because Brenda and I recently spent a day at the Dallas Museum of Art. The DMA has some of my favorite paintings and there are few things better than spending a day in the presence of great art.
I also gained a brand new appreciation for unbelievably expensive nicknacks and doodads. (Actually, the museum calls them pottery and sculpture, but . . . po-tah-to, pot-ā-to . . . what’s a bit of differing terminology among friends?) But that’s a bit of a story in and of itself.
Emery Reves, Hungarian by birth, was a publisher who lived in France with his wife Wendy, a Texan. They lived in a French villa built by Coco Chanel. They were also rich. Over the years they filled the villa with over 1,400 pieces of fine art. After Emery died, Wendy donated the contents of the house to the DMA. The rooms of the Reves’ villa are essentially recreated within the museum and their collected art is displayed pretty much as it was in their home.
The salon (which is pictured at the top of the linked web page) is a sitting room with some of the world’s great paintings hanging from the walls, ming vases artfully transformed into lamps, and various sculptures (the good stuff, like Rodin) and pottery sitting on end tables and desks. Unfortunately all of this is roped off from the public and can only be viewed from a distance. It would have been wonderful to rest my weary feet in the salon and sit amidst all that great art.
But they also had some exhibits that were at the opposite end of the spectrum. The Rubble Room was the most glaring example. (Actually that’s not its real name. It was “Gabriel Orozco: Inner Circles of the Wall.” [Note: This exibition will not be showing much longer, so the link probably isn’t permenant.] But I didn’t find that out until I got home and started writing this essay.) The room was completely white and on the far wall was a pile of whitewashed rubble, probably meant to suggest a wall that had fallen, although it was far too orderly for that.
It was certainly suggestive in several different directions: The hope of the Berlin wall whitewashed over by politics as usual. The destruction of Palestinian lives caused by manic Jewish governmental policies. I live in a vibrant Mexican community, and so I also recognized that it might be pointing toward current American border policy. But it was white, suddenly suggesting snow cover, and I thought that maybe the artist was confused and thought the government wanted to build a fence across our northern border to keep out those rabid Canadians who will cross check you with their hockey sticks without warning, and drop their gloves and punch you in the nose with the slightest provocation. (Okay, I admit it, now I’m just making fun of the guy.)
In my parochial view, the problem with Orozco’s work was that it had little to do with the medium and everything to do with the message. He had transgressed the line between art and preaching (or education). But most of all, it sought to tear down (in this case, quite literally) rather than critique and point a way to the future. In short, it fell short of art and only managed to achieve the level of whining.
It reminded me of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, another world class museum that our family visited. On that trip we were enthralled with the Minneapolis Institute of Art but were completely put off by the very contemporary Walker. Exhibits included junk piled in the corner, junk pieced together in a manner that made us think the artist forgot all about the exhibition until the night before and quickly glued stuff from under his bed together.
But the show stopper was the horse.
It was a life-sized, stuffed thing. It had “hair” on it, but it was put on very sloppily. I suppose the artist had fooled himself into thinking that the commonness of it all made it better art, but it was quite clear that the artist was simply too lazy to do a decent job of foliating to poor creature. The hair-like substance was glued badly and unevenly to the outside of the horse, and it wasn’t even a good horse. There was no muscle structure. There was no detail whatsoever to the face. It was the sort of thing you’d find in a Five and Dime store, or a Pinãta factory. And it was hanging upside down by its hoofs from the ceiling.
While in Dallas we also went to “Louis Tussaud's Palace of Wax and Ripley’s Believe It or Not”—one of the strangest places I’ve ever been in. Wax figures are very weird, but the one thing that was obvious is that the artists spent hours upon hours inserting all those hairs into the wax heads so that they looked realistic. Even if the overall effect was goofy, the skill in creating a life-like head of hair on a wax bust is pretty amazing.
The “artist” who slapped together the horse at the Walker obviously didn’t respect his audience enough to actually put any serious work into the thing. I forget what the exhibit was supposed to say, but what it actually said was, “I’m a lazy SOB, but smart enough to hoodwink this museum into exhibiting my junk.
The overall experience at the Walker was quite discombobulating. (I wrote about it in this poem.) And I suspect that discombobulation was precisely the intent of both the curators and the artists. That sort of experience may be art from a deconstructionist perspective, but I would argue that art, if it’s going to aspire to be art, is far more than that. First, art should, at the very minimum, be quality craftsmanship. Second, it needs to offer an alternative vision and not just try to cynical. It’s easy to just be cynical; anyone can do that. (I offer Michael Moore and me as proof.) To be both critical and offer an alternative vision of what might be . . . well, that requires an artist.
And this brings me (finally!) to the title of this essay. Back in early January I went to see No Country for Old Men. It is a Cohen brothers movie and I love their quirky characters. Fargo was their most famous movie, but my favorite was The Big Lebowski, which is in my opinion the greatest bowling movie ever made. In one narrow sense, No County did not disappoint. After seeing it I told my son that if it weren’t for the gratuitous violence and pointlessness of the movie, which will put most movie goers off, No Country for Old Men could do for west Texas culture what Fargo did for Minnesota and that funny north woods accent.
After that, No Country settled into some back alley of my brain, not to be thought of again until the Oscar nominations came out. Brenda and I were on the road when the nominations were announced. When I’m on the road, there are several public radio talk shows that I’m fairly devoted to (Bob Edwards, Here and Now with Robin Young, Soundcheck with John Schaefer, Leonard Lopate) and they were all talking about the Oscars. I found it striking that none of the experts dwelled on the fact that No Country had no ending. It seemed to be significant to no one that it didn’t conclude, but only faded away with an old man babbling about his dreams, which were only tangentially associated with the movie. It was as if there was a conspiracy of silence to make this sort of movie making behavior out to be normal.
But after seeing the Rubble Room in the DMA, which jogged my memory of the Walker in Minneapolis, I realized all three are of the same stripe. All three snipe about the failure of our culture without offering any alternative vision of what might be.
And I suspect this is precisely why No Country never ends, but only trails off in an old man’s babblings about his pointless dreams. An ending would require a vision, a sense of what could be. I can’t help but think that Joel Cohen was thinking of his namesake, the prophet, when he wrote the last scene of this movie. Joel (the prophet, not the movie producer), in the process of describing how the world would change for the better because of God’s activity, said, “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28).
In Joel Cohen’s world (as in the world of the Walker) God is not active, and everything is falling apart. As a result, these people have no alternative vision for the future, and the old man’s dreams are pointless things that he can only babble about. He’s cashed in his artist chips and is now satisfied with merely kvetching. Sadly, our culture is as blind as these princes formerly known as artists. We confuse the kvetch with artistic endeavor and give them a gallery, and maybe even an Oscar.
No endings? I suppose these people will be shocked when it finally comes.
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