Letter

On Friday the 13th I rented a Zipcar and drove to Oak Lawn to see Califone play in someone’s living room. Getting there entailed going through Beverly, where I lived for three years. Thinking about that time as I drove lent a sadness to the trip, but it probably wasn’t the worst state of mind in which to hear Tim Rutili’s wistful, shambling songs.

It’s often odd to be in a roomful of strangers who are each having a personal experience listening to music. It’s even more awkward when that room is a suburban living room in some stranger’s house. I overheard a lot of people complimenting the blinds and the lighting fixtures. The couple on the couch next to me introduced themselves and then we didn’t utter more than two words to each other the rest of the evening. That’s normal in a bar or nightclub but strange in a private home. There’s an expectation of familiarity or intimacy there but the fact that the thirty or so people crowding the space had paid to see musicians who could pack a venue holding hundreds lent an unreality to the whole experience. 

It is a testament to the songs played that night that I was able to get past the social anxiety that the setting presented. Afterwards, a couple people who had seen me drawing asked to see the sketches and said nice things about them. The hostess’s cousin even took cellphone pictures.

I bought a record at the merch table—which was set up to strategically block access to the second floor of the bungalow—and ran out into the rain. The guys had played a half hour longer than advertised and I had to get the Zipcar back to Pilsen quickly in order not to incur a late charge. When I pulled into the parking spot off Halsted, it was pouring. I used the shrink-wrapped record as an umbrella as I ran to the bar for a nightcap.

But wait: I wrote short reviews of an above average Hong Kong actioner and an interminable Bulgarian epic about a girl with no belly button.

Why bother going to a museum for an exhibit of 17th century portrait prints? The very idea and purpose of portraiture in the age of social media selfies seems to be incompatible with work so ancient in conception and technique. But if you put down the smartphone a minute and linger in the rooms filled with faces which comprise the Art Institute’s “Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and the Portrait Print”, you might see a few familiar looks and attitudes staring back at you.

Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) was already one of the preeminent portrait painters of his age when he embarked on an ambitious series of etched portraits he called Iconography. Unlike much of the portraiture before, which focused on nobility and other eminences, this series featured artists of the past and present. Putting mere painters on par with aristocrats was unheard of but the prints proved immediately popular. Some of the early examples (etched by Van Dyck himself unlike later ones done from his drawings by master printers) are the heart of this show. They include a self-portrait, as well as renderings of well-known artists like Pieter Bruegel and Frans Snyders, and are distinguished from much of the supplementary images in the show by Van Dyck’s decisive mark-making, as well as their fragmented, unfinished quality.

It is this last aspect which makes these portraits appear especially contemporary. By leaving large parts of the paper blank or barely sketched in Van Dyck allows us to enter his subjects’ space and fill it in ourselves. There are also many examples of stylistic echoes of this strategy in the ensuing centuries. While his work is not included in the show, the work of the great New York Review of Books illustrator David Levine came immediately to mind. By focusing on some details of physiognomy, while leaving others absent, both artists allow airiness as well as immediacy into their compositions which is often extinguished in more formal and finished work.

Rembrandt, who was Van Dyck’s contemporary and an even better portraitist, is also well represented. An early self-portrait from 1618 contrasts a serious gaze with his quick signature flapping in the breeze on a curtain in the window to his right. Though etching is of course a much more time consuming process than pushing a button on an iPhone, the impulse to include dashed off or humorous moments like that signature have some of the same feeling we find in our own better snapshots.

Doubts about the purpose of portraiture were voiced at the same time that portraiture began. One of the earliest examples in the show, Albrecht Durer’s “Portrait of Philip Melanchthon”(1526) includes the following text on a plinth below its subject’s imposing profile, “Durer was able to depict the features of the living Philip, but the skilled hand could not portray his mind.”

Portrait prints were the Instagram of their day and then as now there were people questioning the narcissism and vanity of their production. And yet, the impulse to render the likeness of yourself and your friends seems irresistible, whether you’re holding an etching needle or an iPhone. Over 400 years have passed since Anthony Van Dyck set out to immortalize his friends and heroes and that love of staring at faces has hardly waned.

p.s. I wrote short reviews of an animated film about a Steam Age which never went away and a documentary about an ex-yakuza member who becomes a bible-thumper...

A photobooth is an anachronism. In a time when every digital device we carry in our pockets is capable of shooting a feature-length movie, a box with a seat inside and a privacy curtain, which produces four black-and-white shots of unpredictable quality and takes five minutes to do it, would seem obsolete. And yet, both the Rainbo Club and the Skylark both have them, and in both bars they are used multiple times nightly.

A few weeks ago I was a guest critic at a final thesis show at a local college. One of the kids displayed a wall of Fuji Instax snapshots with his messy scrawl underneath to indicate the date and subject. Some of the pictures were blurry, others looked barely composed, but all together they presented some sort of visual diary. In his talk before his classmates and teachers, the kid talked about how permanent and unalterable these pictures were. In a time when every image can be ceaselessly altered and manipulated, these crappy little photos felt more real to him.

I think it’s a similar thing that keeps drinkers coming back to the photobooth. They feel as if the wet, curling, chemical-smelling strips of photo paper capture an actual moment of their lives. Then they lay out all the finished pictures on the table next to their drinks, take out their iPhones, and take pictures of their pictures so they can share those frozen moments with all their friends who are probably at other bars, where there may not be a photobooth.

The fact that people still feel the need to have tangible souvenirs in this way may be a fetish or relic or affectation, but just the fact that there’s any interest at all in images which aren’t just flitting past our eyes, barely differentiated, one after another, gives me some small bit of comfort.

p.s. I went to the M.F.A. show at my alma mater and lived to tell about it.