john the baptist

The Chicago Art Institute is a wonderful museum, but it lacks one thing - or if it has it, I didn't find the room or place on the wall where it was. It doesn't have any Brueghel paintings [or Bosch ones for that matter - its late medieval and renaissance holdings are slim, now that I think of it]. But it does have some things: among them this wonderful beheading of John the Baptist. John's leaned out the window and become decapitated - which was very agreeable of him. Note Salome standing off to the side, like she's picking up some groceries. She's a long way here from Strauss's naked temptress doing a tango with the Baptist's head in fin de siecle Vienna. That's what you get in medieval painting: not much sex but lots of violence.
I wanted to find a Breughel or a Bosch because I knew that with them I'd find examples of the carnivalesque and the grotesque. I invite you to do google image searches for them. Here are two the most fervid and frenetic (as well as caustic and laughing) minds that have ever painted a painting. Between 1480 and 1569 the time was ripe for the carnivalesque, and these two exemplified it in paint.
Painting like this is what needs to be taught on PBS painting shows (as well as painting like Jasper Johns or William De Kooning). People should demand their culture give them rich complex food that demands being ripped off the haunch and dipped into vinegary sauces of mystery. Instead cold, prefabricated slices of the most undistingushed and questionable food are placed before them for consumption and the only mystery is how people can consume so much of it and not keel over from boredom. We are a country on the verge of inventing prosthetic brains because the necessity of nature is imposed upon us.

Levitational madonna

Still writing a day behind. This image, a woman floating above the waves [which are cropped out of my poor photo], comes to me again and again. What could it mean? I drew it and drew it exactly because it expresses an unknown idea. That is: when I drew it it seemed appropriate that the woman be hovering above the waves. People ask me what symbols mean and for as long as I've been alive, they can mean anything. In art history we learn about a fixed iconography: Jerome has a lion; Paul has a sword; Catherine has a wheel and Barbara has a tower; St. Lawrence, gruesomely has the griddle he was cooked on in his martyrdom. These are mnemonic devices- and not symbols per se - although they could be used symbolically. Quite possibly Bosch, when he painted his strangely surreal paintings was unaware of what symbolism he was joining together. The hollow man in hell just is - and what he is symbolic of is unknown. So today when we look at his paintings the wonder is our not knowing - that interpretation is elusive. Jung says that a symbol is a tendency in pursuit of an unknown goal. And so it is when images lose their charge, their energy, their symbolism is spent. To know is to be not useful - for what vexes us is the unknown. If we sat in a room full of knowns all day we would become agitated. It is the symbol that is the vessel for the unknown - like an algebraic variable - that pushes us forward. This is why we study scripture. When we think we know its symbols we turn from it, uninterested. But when we look closely, when we accept the text as provisional and connect ourselves into its world, we discover that we don't know. And the unknown pushes us from the inside to the symbol, to fill the symbol with thought, to as Ricoeur says, to say more to understand better. The symbol is the penultimate.