Phil Leider wasn’t the best teacher I ever had. He wasn’t the most intelligent, nor the most articulate, nor the most insightful, nor the most attentive. However, he was one of the most consequential to me. He was the first in my life to point out one of the trails I ended up following, and to show me it was well worth walking.

The search engine at my fingertips tells me that Christopher Buckley studied under Phil and found him similarly influential. He writes

I took many classes from Phil Leider, who is probably the best teacher of any subject I ever had. Classes I had from Leider were not focused on contemporary work, but he taught us how to look at painting. Neither Art Historian nor Art Critic, (he had been editor of ArtForum for a number of years in New York and in San Francisco), Leider gave us both lines of thinking on a particular painting or artist and then supplied a view that often discarded both theories and considered, in a very immediate, specific, and practical fashion, the artist and the aspects of the work itself. He taught us to always “trust the artist first.” The main thing was that after studying with him, consciously or unconsciously, I had some idea about how to look at painting.

On a whim, to fill out my academic schedule for the first quarter of freshman year, I took a course selected nearly at random: Phil’s survey of Spanish painting (from Velázquez to Picasso, more or less). At the time, I was unaware of art history as an academic discipline. I had visited only a couple of museums prior to college (most memorably the Telfair Academy in Savannah). I had no expectations and no goals beyond discovery.

Leider, in contrast to nearly every other teacher I had ever had, was utterly informal. He would begin each lecture by scribbling a list of names or key terms on a chalkboard, but working from the board was not his forte and he seldom made reference to those notes. Rather, he would riff with seeming improvisation on one image after another in order to flesh out the conceptual and psychological space of each artist, patron, or subject. In doing so, as Chris Buckley points out, Phil would massage into high relief the conflicts and tensions that defined not only the art in its context but also the art historical discussions unfolding in the metacontext. We were learning not only to read the artifacts, and to identify the cues and clues that facilitate such reading, but also to see the subsequent criticism as similar in kind and as susceptible to the same analytic curiosity.

That’s all good, but what was special about Phil was his style. He was a blue collar art historian, an ordinary Joe of an art critic, with a blue jean vocabulary and a take-no-crap style. He was utterly unpretentious, and deeply concerned to step aside, out of the spotlight, and to draw the students closer to the artworks and to the words of their creators. I found him completely engaging.

A couple of years later, a friend well versed in Renaissance art history was visiting from Germany. I took her to hear one of Phil’s lectures. While I found his insights into competition and identity in Florence captivating, she found his persistent mispronunciation of ‘Ghiberti’ grating. (He’d say “juh-BERT-ee”, by no means his only verbal anomaly). What did I value in Phil that was either invisible to, or unwanted by, my dear Westphalian friend? Maybe it was the fact that Phil seemed emphatically American. He was informed but unpolished. He came across like some guy on a street corner, respectable but common, who was just bristling with that Unitedstatesian mix of pragmatism and idealism, and who wasn’t going to quit until he had gotten to the bottom of the vexing cultural conundrum that was making his brain itch. He was Brooklyn and California, intense and feisty but laid back and expansive.

Years later, working with Vincent Scully made me recall another key facet of Phil: he could be intensely dramatic, playing the timing of a pedagogic moment like the string of a plaintive viola. He was sometimes cocky, sometimes chatty, sometimes astonished. He worked the audience. In short, he was entertaining. The house was always packed, and we came in numbers because everyone knew, or had heard tell, that at the end of too quick an hour, we’d walk away having learned something worth knowing or having practiced a skill worth honing.

I ended up taking enough art history courses for a minor, and later turned to that discipline for graduate study. It seems to me that this probably wouldn’t have happened if Leider hadn’t hooked me from the outset and given me a reason to keep coming back for more. Others taught me about rigor, precision, methodological awareness, and balanced weighting of evidence. In course after course, Phil taught me about soul, passion, and humanity in the explained and the explaining. The more I teach, the more I come to see how much wisdom there was in his distinctive way of taking it to the streets.

Thanks, Phil.

Art is human action (often, but not always, entailing the production of an artifact or the definition of a space) exercised (individually or collectively) within particular material, conceptual, and social contexts (not always harmonious) for the particular purposes (sometimes explicit and sometimes tacit) of interested parties and institutions.

Here’s something you don’t see everyday, though it would be fun if you did: Frozen Grand Central:

What can we make of Yoko Ono’s Apple?

Given the work’s deceptive simplicity and literal labeling, one might reasonably think first either of the Magritte pipe piece at LACMA or of Apple Records. However, Ono’s Apple antedates by at least two years the formation of Apple Records in 1968, and Ono shares with Magritte little more than a sense of playfulness. Where, then, do we go?

It’s never a bad idea, as a starting point in interpretation, to steer away from high-falutin’ art jargon and simply to ask about the material things that present themselves to the senses.

Apple consists of a plexiglass stand bearing a brass plate that says “Apple” and, atop the whole, an apple. Brass is an alloy of naturally occurring metals, here wrought into an engraved placard. Plexiglass is a synthetic, transparent polymer. An apple is a naturally occurring fruit. It would be fair to suppose that bringing these elements together suggests a thematic contrast among natural, man-manipulated, and man-made.

Brass is quite durable. Plexi is fairly resilient but susceptible to scratching and fragmentation. Apples decay rapidly, having only their skin and sometimes a layer of wax to defer the inevitable. It would also be fair to suppose that temporality and entropy are themes raised by this set of juxtapositions.

A plexiglass presentation stand is a conventional means of elevating an artifact to facilitate viewing. A brass nameplate is a conventional, if somewhat special, means of raising semantic awareness to facilitate understanding. Both typically serve to frame and deliver a man-made or man-manipulated artifact, but Ono has placed on this contrived pedestal an apple, something that nature delivers unassisted. This breach of protocol calls attention to the formal characteristics of the apple even while denying creative or constructive intervention.

Viewing the fruit as if it were designed and crafted, one might become aware of the way it appeals to the senses: vivid, varying color and a complex texture and shape appeal to sight and touch. A whisper of scent and awareness of taste appeal to gustatory and olfactory capabilities, if only by way of memory and association. The fruit raised on a pedestal is silent; the connotations of sound abide only in a conceivable, contingent future in which the apple might fall with a thud or yield a crunch when bitten. Sound for the apple is a matter of potential that depends on human interaction– an interaction that consumes and destroys the apple.

There is irony in the way time inflects this multi-sensory presentation. Left alone, the apple decays, withers, dries, or otherwise succumbs to oxygen, moisture, bacteria, and other environmental factors. Sight, smell, taste, and touch thus remain fully in play during these gradual changes, but sound’s potential changes radically as the apple quickly becomes less crunchy and resonant.

Over time, the prized fruit changes from an instance of natural beauty to something repellent, leaving the stand and plate as they are. This is not how things go with conventional art, which is placed in a museum precisely to conserve its state. As the artwork-apple changes, though, human responses to it also change– something that also occurs relative to conventional art, but less quickly and according to less predictable patterns.

Setting the stage as she does by foregrounding an apple, Ono engages the viewer’s subjectivity as a vital part of the artwork itself. The pedestal no longer serves to hold up the apple for the viewer to regard with disinterest and detachment; the pedestal becomes a site where the dynamic and changing perceptions and tastes of the viewer engage the dynamic and changing state of the apple, and where the two dance in a complex dialectic of stimulus/response and nature/cultivation.

It’s never a good idea to force metaphors, but always a good idea to consider the ones that jump out at the eyes. Apple is decaying nature resting on man-manipulated and manmade presentational devices. Which is the human viewer more like, the pedestal or the apple? Like the apple, the human is organic, natural, and dying. Intelligence, distinguishing the fruit from the manimal, remains the driving force behind the more enduring monuments in brass and plastic. Ozymandias commemorates himself by impressing mind into stone and metal because they’re supposed to endure. Is it any wonder that he must finally seek to ambiguate the border between natural and manmade in a desperate effort to conserve not just his memory but himself? If you can’t beat nature, join nature and then declare victory.

The apple is relentlessly natural. The human who would objectify, emphasize, and even glamorize the apple demonstrates by those contrivances that she is relentingly natural, susceptible to the transhuman interpretive impulse that finally turns artist into art. Within a postmodern frame of reference, the artifact has much less relevance than the generation of artifactuality. In this respect, it turns out that Apple is a self-portrait.

Just before Thanksgiving, The Washington Post reported on an amusing bit of politically tinged art wranglin’:

Censorship! That’s what some art lovers whispered during the Hillary Clinton fundraiser Nov. 5 at the Woodley Park home of Tony and Heather Podesta. The huge photograph of the nude man was missing from its usual spot on the living room wall …an eight-foot-tall color photo of a nude man lying on his back…

“It’s an iconic photograph in political fundraising circles,” Tony Podesta told us yesterday. The $250,000 picture made quite a backdrop at a fundraiser for Clinton’s Senate campaign, where the official photographer spent the night with his back to the art to prevent her from appearing in a shot with the naked guy.

The work in question is Sam Taylor-Wood’s Soliloquy VII (shown here with an added caption). Podesta explains that the work was taken out of rotation as a matter of best practices in conservation. That seems plausible, especially in view of the work’s medium and price tag. More interesting to me than the question of why the work was taken down is the question of why it was made to look that way in the first place.

I don’t have a definitive answer to that question. What does jump at the eyes, whether by coincidence or intention, is the similarity of this photo to one of the best known works of the Italian Renaissance, Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, made sometime between 1480 and 1500. Perhaps Taylor-Wood meant to allude to this work. Soliloquy VII does include a predella, an element typical of altarpieces from the Renaissance. Perhaps the influence, if any, is only indirect. Either way, the question reverts to that precedent: why was Mantegna’s work made to look the way it does. Why the foreshortening?

According to the standards of Mantegna’s culture, the human form was the most worthwhile and challenging pictorial topic. To represent the human body from an unconventional angle in an optically convincing way was thus to demonstrate uncommon skill in doing the artistic thing deemed most valuable. This conspicuous display of skill tells us that the artist is capable of calculations and selective distortions that require not only representational skill but learning. Mantegna stakes a claim here in the Renaissance discussion of whether an artist should be understood not merely as a craftsman, but as a humanist and scholar whose mind was more important than his well-tutored hands and eyes.

Of course, the fact that Mantegna presents this particular foreshortened body as that of Christ adds a further layer of dignity and significance to an already lofty subject. But the choice does raise the question of decorum. This particular angle on the dead Christ places emphasis not only on his pierced hands and feet but also on his scantily covered reproductive parts and his vulnerability to a voyeuristic gaze. Would this awkwardness have posed a problem for the painting’s initial audience?

In The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, the art historian Leo Steinberg rallies impressive evidence in support of the claim that paintings emphasizing the genitals of Jesus, especially as a child, were surprisingly common in late medieval and early modern art. Behind this iconography, according to Steinberg, lies a particular theological intent: to assert the humanity of Christ in a cultural context where the doctrine of Christ’s divinity had come to the forefront of pictorial imagery. Against the distant echoes of Docetism and Monophysitism in late medieval art’s insistence on the divinity and transcendence of Jesus, we have here something like a pictorial equivalent of Hebrews 4 or Cur Deus Homo, an insistence on the Chalcedonian Christology that defines the Messiah as fully God and fully Man, two natures in one person.

It’s probably safe to say that Taylor-Wood’s photograph does not broach this issue. At most, the composition of Soliloquy VII is a formal echo that declines to carry forward the likely connotations of its compositional archetype, the Mantegna. But even this simplification from layered Christological references to a more literal and immanent reading of the foreshortened human form has its precedents. Rembrandt, for example, uses a similar vantage in his Anatomy Lesson of Professor Deyman of 1656. Noteworthy here is the fact that the difficult representational task, a demonstration of the artist’s skill and understanding, no longer takes up the subject of the human body as noble, and no longer reveres the body of Christ as especially so. Rather, the body here is that of a criminal, and its state of death and dissection excludes anything like Mantegna’s evocation of physical and spiritual integrity.

Let’s generalize: if the artists of the Italian Renaissance revered the human form as the nearly-highest run on the Ladder of Being, the artists of the Dutch Baroque had a more empirical and and pessimistic outlook. Admiring human beauty went hand in hand with acknowledging human frailty. Both of these do duty in Rembrandt’s reworking of Mantegna, as the folds of sectioned scalp dangle symmetrically to suggest the flowing hair of the conventional figure type used to represent Christ. Here, though, there is no suggestion of hypostatic union or incarnation. This fellow, even in his best days, was merely a man; as we watch, he’s only partly a man, and dead at that, and will, over the course of the anatomy lesson, be reduced to something far less than the sum of his parts.

Whether or not she intended her Soliloquy VII to be read in relation to Mantegna, Rembrandt, and incarnational metaphysics, Taylor-Wood’s work serves concretely as a prompt to consider the issues that this iconographical and compositional tradition seems to raise especially in relation to our own cultural circumstances.

Sleep and the literal topology of the body are the overt themes of her photograph. “Soliloquy” is a matter of talking to oneself in the private context of a virtual, fictional world that happens to be wrapped within the public context of an actual, theatrical world. At once, the speaker does not wish to be overheard and the actor does indeed wish to be overheard. The paradoxical status of the stage-whisper as private noise and public signal is the irreducible, distinguishing trait of a soliloquy.

How then does the title illuminate this postmodern, secular analog to those old-masterful antecedents? Just as the union of God and humankind in Christ was the theological challenge underlying representations of Jesus in the Renaissance, so the union of public and private, staged and spontaneous, virtual and actual in the experience of any given human is the anthropological challenge in figural art today. Just as the character wants privacy even while the actor wants publicity, so the photographed body in this photo is both a fictional subject and an actual model, the former seemingly in stasis but the latter seemingly in the studio.

What more fitting set of issues to raise as the backdrop for a political fundraiser?