THE CEREMONY (story)..............................by Frank
B. Ford
NOSESPRAY (poem)..................................by Chris Vecchio
IS MADONNA GOOD ART? (essay)......................by Mort Allman
THE HERO WITH FORTY FACES (story).................by Stacy Tartar
TWO TRANSLATIONS FROM CATULLUS (poetry)...........by Jim Esch
Sparks: A Magazine for Creative People Editors: Jim Esch and
Stacy Tartar
Copyright 1993 by Jim Esch and Stacy Tartar All rights for each
work contained herein revert back to the author(s) upon publication.
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considered for publication and returned, provided you have included
a self addressed stamped envelope. Send all correspondence to
the address below. Email submissions are encouraged! Send to
Jim.Esch@launchpad.unc.edu
Print copies are available for $2.50 and a couple of stamps.
Send to
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
THE CEREMONY
by Frank B. Ford
The purple strip low in the sky looks like a crowbar to him.
Sharp crunching...then heel-strikes as she hits the path.
Shortly he sees the vapor preceding her, the gloom behind pierced
by streetlamps. Around them, snow begins revolving.
When he can discover her clothes he comments, "Well you're
certainly equipped for the task at hand!"
"I couldn't get back to the apartment to change."
"Still the party animal, hey?"
"You could say that." Her eyes blank in the dimness.
"Well, at any rate, I'm glad you came," he says,
"this might have to be the last until the Spring thaw."
"Glad? Never heard you use such an odd word. Have you gone crazy?"
A few wet flakes drop into her hair.
"It must have hurt--I mean for you to leave the party
without a stranger."
"Oh? Still the jealous male? My my! But, a discrete hallelujah:
no prying" bitty little questions this time--so very manipulative
with subtle, soft poison. You're at least over that.
"Time," he shrugs in whispering snow, "the cure
and the kill."
"Oh yeah? I'm trying to accept kill, because then hope
is dead. And yet here we" are once more. Stupid.
Absently, he turns a hand up as if to capture the sifting snow.
"You never know. And when you do it's too late."
"Well I hope this is the last," the woman sighs.
He had fetched the tools from a car trunk as frigid as Siberia,
keeps the shovel and gives her the crowbar. They look for the
right place to start, the hard ground beginning to whiten.
Almost as an antidote to their sniping, they dig a half hour
without speaking, gulping in icy needles of air and panting out
dark vapors.
Soon they have dug--she, though unsteady on her heels, thrusting
in with the crowbar, and he scraping away the clods with the shovel--just
enough to reveal the larger outline below them: the hair is frost-whorls
into which individual giant flakes drift.
"A...little more," he encourages--spasmodic puffs
from his mouth darkly surrounding his head.
She demurs, leaning on her crowbar. "C'mon now,don't be
a fuss...budget in this" too! she gasps.
But he wins. "Listen this once! Just not enough...depth
to really operate," really know when you're...s-striking
home!
They again dig in the odors of frozen mud and lye, she sobbing
with each thrust, the snow arriving now in stinging, surging waves.
"I'll change. If you want to change." She blinks
away the tears as he offers the shovel.
They reverse roles, he driving and twisting in with the crowbar,
more deeply than she could, and she, beyond herself, jerkily scooping
up after him.
The depth of the exposed form is right, they silently agree.
Too much more would exhaust the energy needed now, especially
as the wind has begun raging, slamming icy snow into them and
whirling it down into the declivities of the thing below.
The tools are dropped, clattering away along the ground as
the couple falls down on the form, their beating fists producing
a dull, echoing hollowness. On they go far past exhaustion into
a loathsome nightmare of sweat and icy slime and dirt.
As the thumps become less and less audible to them, they are
retching...then the grating draughts after they must, finally,
stop. After some moments they clamber up from out of the grave.
In the fast-ticking hail, she on her knees and he above, hulking,
dark: the whole white scene looking like some Medieval ceremony,
swarthy knight and weeping maiden. Under them with the matted
hair aswirl in flowers of black ice, the horse.
NOSESPRAY
by Chris Vecchio
Pollen rich death rattle-orgasm, Wheeze!
Olfactory submission.
My nose is down on its knees.
Chemical rich cleansing orgasm in breath.
Olfactory well oiled machine.
A brilliant confusion-death!
travesty [obs. E travesty, disguised, parodied, fr. F travesti,
pp. of travestir to disguise, fr. It travestire, fr. tra-across
(fr. L trans-) + vestire to dress, fr. L, fr. vestis garment ---
more at WEAR] 1: a burlesque translation or literary or artistic
imitation usu. grotesquely incongruous in style, treatment, or
subject matter 2: a debased, distorted, or grossly inferior imitation.
I have sensed in the popular and academic press, and among various
acquaintances, what can only be called the validation of Madonna
as one of the supreme "postmodern" artists of our age.
In this attitude there is an implicit aesthetic nod of approval,
and if I may I would like to first characterize these aesthetic
and cultural assertions of her unique image building power, including
my own appreciation of Madonna's unique abilities, and then lay
out what I see to be a more truthful acknowledgement, namely that
Madonna is merely an icon of certain American tendencies in art
which have been called postmodern and further that to equate her
cultural dominance with artistic excellence actually changes our
notion of what art is and can do. This will not be an essay out
to trash Madonna per se; rather, this is as much an essay about
the threat to artistic sensibility and an inquiry into the ways
we look at artistic practice. Before we rush to validate, we must
look away from the video wall, take off the headphones, and think.
The Phenomenon of Madonna
What is most striking about Madonna, and I think what makes her
most appealing to structuralists and post-structuralists, is her
ability to change images, wear different masks as facets of personality,
to fashion a dynamic artistic self of often ontradictory personnas.
She is, I think, indisputably postmodern in this regard, that
is, she has made a name for herself by appropriating and juxtoposing
cultural and ideological bric-a-brac in new and ironical ways.
Let's take a cursory look at her rise to stardom and the image
changes she has managed in a relatively short time span. She starts
off in the early 1980's as a rather lightweight dance music singer
with such songs as "Borderline" and "Lucky Star."
But what was her image? This was what catapulted her first and
foremost. If you recall she adeptly combined images of her Catholic
upbringing (Rosary beads, the crucifix) with a certain. shall
we say, post-punk fashion sensibility (black bras, thrift store
clothing), then merging this with a dance club goer's attention
to makeup, a cute hair style, leotards, so that she ends up as
a regurgitated cutey-pie punker, or to look at it another way,
a punkisized disco princess. And all the while there is the prominence
of Catholic trinkets, which we may recall struck the nerve of
young urban and suburban Catholic women all across America. In
one sense Madonna appropriated one aspect of the punk movement
(its use of religious iconography) and made it safe for the suburban
babe.
The point here is that right from the start Madonna's music
was less important than her image. I would venture to say that
those early hits if you were to simply listen to them on the radio
or in a dance club were merely bouncy, standard disco fare. MTV's
heightening of the visual element in popular music gave Madonna's
"look" a new importance. And this look was, at the time,
a curious hodgepodge.
The mere presence of eclectic fashion isn't enough to earn
postmodern icon status, however. Let's be clear that fashion has
always been important in 20th century popular music; witness Little
Richard, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, the New York Dolls, punk rock,
disco, and lest we forget the carefully packaged look of the early
Beatles with their cute neat suits and their too long for comfort
mop tops. Madonna can be seen as just another bead on the string
in this regard. She happened to have the luck or the foresight
to have latched onto a style that was to catch on. What was remarkable
about Madonna was that once her image was established in the popular
consciousness, she was willing to tinker with that image, refashion
it. I recall a huge surge in popularity with her hit "Like
a Virgin" which seemed to solidfy what was initially a more
liquid play between her coy catholic accoutourments and choreographed
sex princess dancing style. But it was a change, it was a bold
stroke. You may recall the chorus of that hit:
you make me feel
like a virgin
touched for the very first time
The emphasis falls on the "like a virgin" line. But
of course the personna in the song is anything but a virgin, she's
merely presenting a conceit to her lover, claiming that he can
make her feel like the pure girl for whom sex is all magic, pure
discovery. This provides a clue to what I see as Madonna's strength,
and it is, you might claim an artistic device or trick, namely,
using the pop song as a site for the play of oppositional ideological
concepts. In this instance the following oppositions are at work:
virginity - sexual awareness
purity - impurity
love - sex
clean - dirty
But the oppositions aren't just at work in the song. In fact,
the song isn't so nearly as important as the image and the video
that presents that image. And her image also plays about with
these contradictory concepts. Recall the video and the albumn
cover's use of a busty closeup of Madonna, made up like a sex
kitten of the highest order dressed in pure white lingerie, in
a soft, filtered light with the facial expression of a sexual
dynamo coyly pretending to be a virgin. No one was going to mistake
Madonna for a virgin, what with her history as a go-go dancer,
the Playboy photographs, her suggestive dancing in the early videos.
No, what we had in this package was a sex vixen crossed with a
high-school style virgin. And the package was popularly fertile.
We can begin to see why the structurally minded find a home in
Madonna's performance art. And yet there is a weakness to this
play of opposites, namely that the opposites operate not as two
sides of the same coin, but more as a costume, an ornament, a
makeup on the true face. Because we "know" Madonna is
no virgin, her conceit is merely pretense. This is not a comment
on the ability of one to feel like a virgin; it is a comment on
Madonna's ability to represent virginity only as an ornament.
One might assert that more potent artistic works synthesisize
their elements as parts to the whole, as two sides of the same
coin, whereas Madonna's postmodern posturing is a part putting
on another part. There is no whole.
I do not mean to chart out every twist on the road of Madonna's
image enhancement abilities. But I do wish to mention some of
the highlights. And now I'd like to turn to her video of the megahit
"Like a Prayer," which interestingly is also based on
a simile, as if to say I can only compare my experience with purity
and religiosity. I can not be these things directly.
In this video we have a hot bed of cultural imagery clashing and contrasting with a now brunette-haired Madonna in her underwear still at the center holding it together as her ever present bust bobs up and down. Here we witness the statue of a black saint come to life, who makes it with Madonna in a church sanctuary, while at the same time in a different narrative we see the secular version of the black man blamed for a murder committed by a gang of white thugs while Madonna glares on guiltily. We have the juxtoposition of a black gospel choir with milky white Madonna, and the contrast of Madonna bumping and grinding it in the foreground while crosses burn in the background.
There are obviously many levels at work here, and one could
make a case that most great art does exactly the same thing. Beyond
the immediate textual meaning, a work of art elaborates various
symbolic meanings beyond it's immediate context. Yet this video
seems almost to be drowning in its symbolism. Despite the attempts
to affix it to the story line of Madonna witnessing a murder and
the trial that ensues, any sense of narrative dissolves into a
series of striking images revolving around ideological taboos:
Black Man/saint/accused fucking Madonna/slut/victim in a church.
Dancing in front of burning crosses, making love to the strains
of gospel music, statues of saints turn to life, sow some wild
oats, then resolidify. Madonna here has radicalized her artistic
device or trick even further. Cultural signifiers play about merely
for the sake of breaking taboos, for the sake of playing with
contradictions outside of any attempted resolution or definition.
Hers is the art of making your eyes widen and not much more.
Of course other videos bear out different incarnations of the
Madonna trick. In "Material Girl" we see Madonna approriating
the personna of Marilyn Monroe while suitors offer their material
wealth in a stage-show movie set atmosphere only to be rejected
by Madonna as Marilyn who goes after the guy behind the scenes
in the baseball cap. We see the play of material wealth, fabricated
beauty, honest affection, etc. Or in another video we see Madonna
bumping and grinding as a stark go-go dancer but she's also just
another buddy of the kid down the block. The viewer gets to be
titillated by a little soft porn made safe for MTV, by the slut
who befriends the little boy. We have innocent young boys contrasted
with dirty old men, and Madonna mediating between the two. She
can trot her stuff for pay, or tap it out with the kid.
On it goes. Madonna moves from video to video, from concert
tour to concert tour, from movie to movie, with only one constant
purpose that I can detect. And that is to change her image, refashion
it so that it contains cultural contradictions, but only to use
those contradictions or taboos to the extent that they become
exposed, bridged, and then it's on to the next costume change.
Her transformations are not always consistently popular, some
are more popular than others, but sure enough she seems to have
the uncanny ability to tap into what America, even the world wants
to see exposed.
It is in this sense that Madonna is essentially postmodern
(which glorifies the death of the whole, no matter how fragmented
modernism had left it), and a particularly expert postmodern technician.
And for this I guess she is to be admired. Whatever you might
think about her singing, dancing, or acting, she is indisputably
talented at one thing, remaining popular. And here is where I
must part company with apoligists for such artists. For we must
acknowledge that this is Madonna's main artistic purpose, to ride
the top of the charts like a cowboy rides a bronco. There is no
higher purpose. Commercial success is the artistic goal of Madonna
and nothing more, and she does it without shame. But should we
even pose this goal as an artistic one?
The Feminist Salvo
At this juncture I need to address what might be termed a feminist
argument in favor of Madonna's artistic practice, because it is
a neat way of valorizing her image transformations into something
more than repackaging a product. Despite the obvious evidence
that Madonna has primarily made her millions as a sex object and
displays a unique ability to continue to titillate the general
public, the argument goes like this: Because Madonna the person
is able to change her image so often and in so many ways, she
is in control of her sexuality, she stands in an ironical stance
to her sexual personna, and in so doing empowers herself. Her
ability to ride the popular wave is a victory for the resourcefulness
of an empowered woman. She is no prisoner of sex. She is no dumb
blonde. She is street smart. She uses her sexuality rather than
being a victim of it. In a postmodern sense she takes the trappings
of traditional female roles and by shuffling and juggling them,
gains control over them. Such an argument I think has some credence.
Madonna has become a powerful cultural force in a very short period
of time. And her particular brand of popular resiliency does appropriate
traditional female roles to her own ends. But here is where the
argument loses steam. Madonna's artistic function ultimately has
only a tangential relationship to feminist concerns. Primarily
Madonna's skill as an artist doesn't empower women as such, only
herself. I say this because I do not see her videos and music
as really "saying" anything of substance but as more
of a display or exposing of cultural taboos and contradictions.
We never get beyond the initial exposure; there is no development.
It is merely one change after another, one no-no to the next,
the trying-on of cultural masks with the same sincerity that a
mall-shopper devotes to trying-on blouses, one regurgitation followed
by another recycling job. And yet always at the heart is the central
role without which Madonna would be little if not nothing, and
that is Madonna as object of sexual desire. I think it dangerous
for feminists to inflate the import of an artist who really is
just a creative burlesque player, who will do almost anything
to be popular, and who does little with her popularity and power.
Madonna, it has been claimed, has mastered the postmodern art
of the image, i.e. the image being the fundamental artistic text
beyond the music, beyond the song, beyond the dance. If images
are supposed to be so much more powerful than words and song lyrics
and speeches, then what else are we to see in Madonna when she
grabs her crotch in concert and every other sexual gratuity she
offers for the public awareness? When she grabs her crotch is
she primarily breaking down a cultural barrier? Is she exposing
cultural contradictions? Or is she basically clutching her crotch
because it hasn't been done on T.V. before? Because at heart the
huckster knows that when others zig, it's time to zag? What else
is truly being sold besides a sex object? A woman trades sex for
power. How far does that advance the cause? Is there anything
really daring about that? It's time to name things for what they
are and stop looking for substance in places where surface is
queen.
Art as Commodity
I have asserted that Madonna's prime function as an artist is
to be popular, and that as such, is a notably succesful artist.
What we need to consider now is how a phenomenon such as Madonna
helps ratify the status of artistic production as commodity. We
needn't dwell on the fact that Madonna is a commercial artist.
Her activity is part of a vast cultural capitalism where music
and videos are mass produced and televised worldwide. I do not
think any of us would be talking about Madonna at all if it weren't
for the fact that she has made millions for herself and her coporate
culture merchants. We must recognize this fact and not dismiss
it, because more often than not in this age. most of us spend
our time trying to rationalize the products of artists only because
those artists are popular.
We have to look at the real definition of what it means to
be popular. We're not talking about the sort of popular that made
certain cliques in high school the envy of the rest of us geeks.
We don't mean popular in the sense of being liked, or of being
conducive to the general will. Well maybe in a stretched sense
of the word we mean these things. Rather the definition of popular
that operates most strongly is simply that being popular means
selling a lot of product. And when you have the monstrous hype-engine
that is corporate advertising and marketing on your side, creating
a market demand for your product, the import of one's popularity
as a result of free choice becomes suspect. Of course, people
like an artist such as Madonna; they would not purchase her music
or attend her concerts otherwise. So the original meaning of popularity
still applies; however, the moment of popularity in our culture
only begins when the artist realizes his/her likeability into
real dollars. My point here is that we can like somone's art without
having to buy it (e.g. going to a museum and admiring impressionistic
painters, or listening to musicians on the radio), but we only
create popularity by buying it. So when you convert that likeability
into the purchase of a print at the museum gift shop, or when
you go to the store and buy the CD of the artist you heard on
the radio, only then do you contribute to making that artist popular.
Our present American popular culture is a mixture of hype-factory and the ratifying choice of the buyer's preference. So when we read the popular press, watch Entertainment Tonight or a talk show or MTV, we find a combination of competitors: various want-to-be's being marketed through videos, profiles, interviews, etc., and the already-made-it-ites whose presence on a show or in a magazine, while inevitably tied to a new cultural product being sold, also provides shine for the outlet itself, which is, afterall, in business as well.
It is up to the consumer to sift among these various choices
and lay money out for the established winner and the wanna-be.
Reckoning-time comes at the end of the day when the company counts
the change. To be likeable no longer means to be popular; rather,
to be popular is to be profitable.
So what's all the fuss about? Certain people express their
like for something through purchasing it, which makes it popular.
Correct. But those of us who like to think about these things
are in danger of making a serious mistake. If we could leave it
at that we'd be fine. Madonna has about the same worth as Levi
jeans. This would be a truism worth mulling over. But we make
this mistake: we say 'Madonna, because she sings and dances, is
an artist, and art is more than blue jeans or perfume. ' We might
suppose a syllogism here.
Madonna is an artist.
Artistic production has more use value than other productions.
Therefore, Madonna's art has value.
I am not a logician, so forgive the leaky syllogism. Let me
try to illuminate the problem further. I do not dispute that Madonna
is an artist, if we are to mean by artist, someone who produces
imagined, fictive artefacts in a sensory medium (visual, aural,
spatial, written, etc.). Of course she is an artist in the general
sense. But why are we singling her out among the multitude of
others like her? Because she is popular, or to more truly put
it, because she is commericially viable, the fittest to have survived.
And she has been able to maintain her popularity through various
stylistic convolutions. This presents her to us as a phenomenon,
the same way we would remark about an extended heat wave, or a
severe storm.
Basically the market offers us Madonna for consideration and
says 'She's so popular, and she's an artist, you must acknowledge
that her art is important.' Many respond like trained seals 'Yes...you're
right. We can't ignore the cultural import. There must be something
behind all this. Something artistic at work.' Bullshit. Yes, there's
something at work, but it may have nothing to do with art.
The incidence of popularity, especially commercial popularity,
should have no bearing on a work of art's merit. There are simply
too many factors to ignore. Are we willing to say that works with
little financial muscle behind them resulting in poor distribution
resulting in a lowered awareness among the mass consumers, and
which subsequently fall through the market's net of value into
the pit of obscurity...are we to blindly say that because these
works never 'made it,' that they were probably of low artistic
value? Of course not. So why then should we note that the very
popular, of which Madonna is only one example, deserve the slightest
consideration regarding artistic merit? You can't deny the one
side and accept the opposite. No. We must resist the urge to ratify
art based on its market status. We have to recognize that there
are too many non-artistic reasons for a work's popularity.
Many probably object to this discussion as reactionary. I might
characterize it as rejectionary. I reject the notion that profitability
(popularity) should be a gauge by which we judge artistic merit.
I reject this because to accept it as an assumption is to give
in to the demands of capitalist mythology, that the market can
supply all your needs, that the present system of mass production
and mass consumption is a worthy base for ethical and aesthetic
values. That the good is that which sells. That the bad is that
which doesn't turn a profit. That the weak man is he who can't
run a business correctly. That the strong man is he who can squeeze
the most from the least. That the beautiful is that which sells.
That the ugly is that which doesn't pay for itself. That the primary
role of the artist is to move the merchandise. That the prime
goal of life is to accumulate capital. That art is subservient
to capital.
That art is subservient to capital is a sad fact, perhaps the
most definitive fact of postmodern art, the art that regurgitates
past art in kaleidoscopic transformations of the old. In fact,
our present age of postmodernism has essentially destroyed artistic
production and enslaved it completly to mass production and the
dynamics of the mass market. The fact that a Madonna exists, is
so popular, and is taken seriously is merely one example of the
cultural travesty we call art today. I don't mean to trash all
that goes under the name of art today...I do mean to say the kind
of art Madonna perpetuates and the kind of criticism that ratifies
such artistic production both combine to destroy the concept of
art as anything other than cultural competition for the senses.
I can't change the facts. We live in such an age. In the midst
of this cultural junkyard we find ourselves in, amid the sad dance
of phony oppositions like talk show- commerical, video-advertisment,
all subservient to the almighty profit motive...amid this muck,
I'd like to not return to the old way of thinking, but rather
to try to build something real and true. I'd like to build a way
of looking at artistic production that acknowledges the realities
of today, but doesn't apologize for it.
THE HERO WITH FORTY FACES
by Stacy Tartar
He was a slack man, a fastitidious organizer and a lazy worker.
He liked carrots, or anything else, from a can. He was easily
shocked, always frightened, frequently huddled in a corner or
a doorway, and terribly, terribly hungry. At sundown he would
walk around and howl at empty trashcans. He lived (where else?)
in the city, on a street beloved by others, not him. How could
he love it? It was full of soggy newspapers when he was a man
who liked and believed in blankets. He fled from rain, though
sometimes, feeling religious, he would sit and sway in it. He
was a blasphemer the rest of the time.
Once upon a time the man had a different face, a lovely, cherubic face that knew nothing. Knowledge had changed the man's face dramatically, had pinched and pulled and pummeled it. Fault lines widened on his brow. His cheeks and chin caved in and stuck out like disaster areas.
His eyes seemed permanently flooded. He looked at others as
if he were looking up from a firey pit. He was a worried man.
Most of the time he felt pain.
The man's imagination would just as soon soar with eagles as swim with sharks.
It could invent companionship and even food. It enabled him to wear a ripped pair of underwear wrapped loosely around his genitals and pieces of other people's clothes and shoes. To the man's imagination, sounds and smells were potent messengers from beyond the street, carrying truth and beauty and horror.
Pigeons and rats were prominent creatures in his private mythology, which he kept absolutely secret, as it was his last source of power in a world otherwise consumed by cement walls, gaseous fumes, and roaches.
The man's imagination could do all but what we might consider
most essential.
Once in a while the man would meet other slack men and women
or other slack families with whom he would exchange sickness before
moving on. The man's face when ill turned a hideous yellow-gray.
It was during an explosion, one late afternoon before sundown,
while stores and houses and businesses burned furiously around
him, that the man fell down and died. All of his faces melted
into the street, and the rest of him followed.
5
We should live and love
and forget what old men say
the sun rises and sets
but our sun once set
is a never ending sleep.
Just kiss me, once,
again, a thousand
then a hundred, then
another thousand and
a second hundred yet
another thousand then
after making many thousands
we'll scatter the number
so no one can know
or grow jealous at
the sum of our kisses.
85
I hate and I love.
You ask how I do this.
I do not know
but I know it
I do it
I feel it
happening
and I am ripped apart.
END OF FILE
.