The Adventures
of Constantine Cavafy, by Duane Michals (Twin Palms Publishers), is
only the most recent of Michals's explorations of photographic storytelling,
including in this instance some ten little dramas loosely based on Cavafy's
love poems, with Joel Grey playing the poet who contemplates the charms of a
gallery of handsome men. Michals's work is a fascination. His photographic
cycles, like short films distilled into half-a-dozen or so scenes, have
elements of slapstick comedy, surrealist fantasy, naturalistic observation, all
suffused with a heartfelt sentiment that Michals sometimes enjoys pushing
almost to the brink of sugary sentimentality. The anecdotal informality of
these images of Cavafy mooning over a young man in a café or receiving a
surprise kiss on the street is complicated by the gentle precision with which
Michals lights each momentary, momentous event. Michals gives plain old-fashioned
lust a chiaroscuro richness. And in the epilogue, where "the poet
decorates his muse with verse," the images of the bare-chested young man
sitting in bed, festooned with sheets of paper, each a poem torn from Cavafy's
notebook, are hard to forget. These closing pictures have a haunted sweetness.
Second Diasporist
Manifesto: A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses, by R. B. Kitaj
(Yale University Press), is a wonderfully idiosyncratic book. Kitaj, who died
around the time this volume was published, was a painter every bit as much at
ease with words as he was with images, and not surprisingly, he wanted to
create a contemporary equivalent to the blazing manifestoes that painters and
sculptors had produced in the early twentieth century. But in place of the wild
optimism of those modern artists, who aimed to build a world of feeling and
experience from scratch, Kitaj argued for the painter as a fiercely solitary
individualist, a Jewish prophet in exile in some Athens
or Rome of the
imagination, who had to reconstruct tradition for himself, on his own private
terms. The Second Diasporist Manifesto
recalls the glorious crankiness of earlier generations of American bohemians,
of Edward Dahlberg or Charles Olson or Robert Duncan (who was a friend of
Kitaj's). The book is niftily laid out, with Kitaj's drawings and paintings
reproduced in a black-and-white that suggests the brevity of tabloid imagery, and
shots of red ink added to underscore the vehemence of Kitaj's drumroll
pronouncements. He ranges from the grandiose to the near-absurd. Kitaj is the
Diasporist who "prowl[s] big sensual cities, haunting their books, art,
heresies, sirens, and hosts." He is also the comedian who, with a nod to
Duchamp's famous urinal, announces that "this Manifesto is one of my works
of art, like a Urinal-in-Constant-Use."
Calder Jewelry,
edited by Alexander S. C. Rower and Holton Rower (Yale University Press), adds
yet another level of delightful complication to our understanding of an
American artist whom too many people still take for granted. This opulent
volume puts us on intimate terms with the necklaces and bracelets and pins and
rings that Alexander Calder produced through much of his life. As he hammered
and twisted pieces of brass, silver, and gold, Calder created shapes that
ranged from the bold to the whimsical, the barbaric to the rococo. There are
mobiles reimagined as earrings, pins that recapitulate a friend's or a loved one's
initials or entire name, bits of broken china mounted as if they were precious
gems, and ornaments resembling insects, animals, and faces of all kinds. I
don't think that anybody has ever invented as many variations on the curve and
the curl: casually looping lines, elaborate corkscrew lines, lines as tightly
wound as the springs inside a clock. Maria Robledo's photographs, reproduced in
deep color on thick, coated stock, bring us very close to the jewelry, until we
feel as if we are actually touching these miniaturized fantasies, taking them
in our hands, trying them on. Calder's jewelry suggests a bohemian Van Cleef
and Arpels, an imagination running rampant, an ecstatic fecundity.
By Jed Perl