People Sunday (1930), directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer. Credits also include Billy Wilder and Curt Siodmak as script writers, and Fred Zinneman behind the camera. These men were all young at the time, and a few years later all would be in Hollywood after departing a Germany that had embraced National Socialism. The film focuses on four young people, two women and two men, on a Sunday outing to the park and countryside and beach. The actors are all non-professionals, and the action mostly improvised. The film is often compared to Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave, but it strikes me as closer to cinéma verité in its almost documentary style and its casual observation of Sunday activities in and near Berlin. It reminds me of the work of D. A. Pennebaker. Certainly, the influence of Dziga Vertov is evident, and so too is the influence of Sergei Eisenstein. Also apparent is the joy, the ebullience almost, of the film makers. The camera is fluid and moves about freely in a manner not often seen in those early days. The lighting is bright accentuating the sunny day of freedom from work. As for the story, such as it is, it simply follows two men and two women. One man is rather lascivious and the other has a girlfriend back at his place, but she has failed to get up on time to make this Sunday escapade. In fact, she sleeps all day. On the surface, this is a sunny, optimistic look at German society in 1929 when the film was shot. Underlying this optimism, however, we have an undeniable sour note. Soldiers marching down a boulevard are, perhaps, a reminder of what is in store for Berliners just a few years away. And then we have the ending in which the two men leave (I want to say ‘dump’) the two women. As they walk away after discussing meeting next Sunday, the men laugh and say they intend to go to a soccer game and not meet the women. The film has a masculine force behind it that disturbs. 

A Girl in Every Port (1928), directed by Howard Hawks. Written and directed by Hawks, A Girl in Every Port is an early example of the Hawksian world, a masculine world sent into a tailspin by a woman. Early scenes show men working aboard a schooner showing us Hawks’s interest in filming men at work, professionals going about their jobs. The plot is slight: two sailors bond in battle as they engage in bar room fights between themselves and with others, they meet a woman circus performer who specializes in high diving and male seduction, they nearly become arch enemies because of the wiles of this woman, and finally they embrace and continue their wandering ways together. The male characters have a homosocial relationship. The ingredients of Hawks’s later and more famous films are here. Check out Only Angels Have Wings, Ball of Fire, Red River, Rio Bravo, Man’s Favorite Sport, or any number of Hawks’s other films. Here the two male leads are played by loveable lug Victor McLaglen and somewhat smaller Robert Armstrong, most famous as the guy who captures King Kong. The Hawksian woman here is the luminous Louise Brooks. Apparently, this is the film that brought Brooks to the attention of G. W. Pabst, and the rest, as they say, is history. So, what to conclude? This film is a must see for any fans of Howard Hawks. 

 

Aelita The Queen of Mars (1924), directed by Yakov Protanazov. This science fiction film by early Soviet film maker Protanazov does not hold up as well as one might wish. The constructivist sets for the scenes on Mars are suitably stark and hard angled, but not as impressive as sets we see in other early silent film. The costumes for the Martians do catch the eye and even portend things to come with Merciless Emperor Ming and his ilk, but they are also, especially the women’s, quite absurd. The story about a Russian scientist who plans to journey to Mars while dealing with a new wife he suspects of infidelity has something of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in it. At times, it is difficult to follow the narrative. Things begin when all over the world radio stations and outposts receive a mysterious message: Anta Odeli Uta. For some reason this device reminded me of Klaatu barada nikto. Anyway, in a very strange twist, this mysterious message turns out to be an advertisement for tires. In a film that emphasises Soviet era proletarian nobility, this twist is strange indeed. And did I mention that the young scientist, named Los, flies to Mars where he leads an insurrection of the workers against the “elders”? He also introduces Aelita to the custom of placing two people's lips together.

 J’Accuse (1919), directed by Abel Gance. Before Citizen Kane (1941), we have Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927). Napoleon is one of my favourite films, and deserves to be on anyone’s top ten list. I recommend it to everyone. But before Napoleon we have J’Accuse. This film is not as flamboyant as Napoleon; however, it is grand and innovative. Its use of animated skeletons, reminiscent of images from Durer, stark black and white drawings of death flying over the dark land, silhouettes, still images of peaceful activity such as ploughing and spreading seed and fishing, and Botticelli’s Primavera illustrate how inventive Gance was. This film is also one of the great anti-war films, containing some brief shots of the actual war. Gance had re-enlisted in the army in 1918 in order to film war as it actually took place; he filmed parts of the battle of Saint-Mihiel in September of 1918. French and American troops fought alongside each other. Another striking feature of the film is the return of the dead soldiers at the end. Gance used some 2,000 soldiers who were on leave from the front lines (Verdun); both he and these soldiers knew that many, perhaps most, of these men would die before the war ended. The film’s title, “j’accuse,” appears throughout the film, hurled at whatever force or forces control this world, hurled at anyone complicit in war, hurled as a cry of pain, and ultimately hurled at God or Gods above. All this condemnation of war is the backdrop for a simple story. This is a melodrama in which three people struggle with love and friendship. Francois is married to Edith who is in love with Jean Diaz, poet and dreamer of sunshine and goodness. Francois is jealous as all-get-out, and when he finds that his superior officer in the army is Jean, he is not amused. War, however, makes for strange bedfellows. While Francois and Jean are away fighting, Edith finds herself captured by German soldiers who act toward her in an ugly fashion. We cannot hope for a happy ending because war has a way of disrupting the order of things. This film goes down with Paths of Glory, La Grande Illusion, Dr. Strangelove as a major anti-war statement on film. Gance remade the film in 1938.

 

The Bride’s Play (1922), directed by George Terwillier. January brings us silent film Fridays, and the first of our silent is The Bride’s Play. Marion Davies stars in this romance. I have never read a book by Barbara Cartland, but I suspect the plot here resembles the plots in Cartland’s books. A young woman loses her father, is admired by an older member of the landed gentry in Ireland, and falls for the young poet, Bulmer Meade. Bulmer sees the young woman as just another in his gallery (literally) of female conquests. The narrative turns on the ancient tradition of the Bride’s Game. After she marries, the bride goes about the place of the wedding celebration asking men if they are the one she truly loves. Anyway, this fluffy plot is not the reason to see this film. What sparkles is the cinematography and the set designs, and in the flashback to ancient times, the costumes. These scenes late in the film are lavish and impressive. I also like the film’s various tints, especially the blue of the seascapes and the somewhat subdued yellow elsewhere. What weakens the film for me is its dependence on intertitles. Especially in the film’s first half, we have many – and I mean many – intertitles, some of them quite lengthy. Still, this is a fine example of Hollywood’s ability to create a sense of place, in this case Ireland both ancient and contemporary, without leaving the vicinity of backlots.

 A couple of John Ford films:

Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), directed by John Ford. Ford made three films in 1939, a banner year all-round for Hollywood. Two of those films have become film-study favourites: Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln.  The third is Drums Along the Mohawk, Ford’s first colour film. And the colour, courtesy of cinematographers Bert Glennon and Ray Rennahan, is stunning. This Ford picture is lovely to look at. The plot involves settlers in upstate New York in the years 1776 to 1778 who find themselves harassed by Iroquois and their Tory inciter, played by John Carradine. The principal characters are Gil Martin (Henry Fonda) and his young bride (Claudette Colbert). The action scenes are impressive, perhaps none more than the chase scene in which Fonda runs from the besieged fort to find help and he is pursued across fields, through streams and forests by three Native men intent on stopping him. Also impressive is the soldiers' return from battle near the end of the film, ragged, wounded, exhausted, and the Fonda character traumatized so badly that he does not recognize his wife. Although Ford lauds the bravery and patriotism of these people, he also presents war as ugly, brutal, and wasteful. Of course, the film has familiar Ford touches such as his attraction to ritual: weddings, funerals, dancing, for example. His presentation of Native people is not easy to accept. He tries to give us a likeable Native person in the character of Blue Back, played by Chief John Big Tree, and certainly Blue Buck is likeable. He is also stolidly stereotypical. The other Native people are faceless enemies haunting the woods and burning settlers’ houses. A feature of this film that does resonate positively is its cast of strong women, especially the Widow McKlennar, played with robust energy by Edna May Oliver. It is worth seeing the film for her performance.

 

Donovan's Reef (1963), directed by John Ford. This is the final film Ford made with John Wayne. He made only two (or 3 if you count Young Cassidy for which he is not credited) more films. In other words, this is something of a closing out for Ford and he includes most of the things we expect from Ford films, ritual, boisterous male action, some sexism, sentimentality, and race relations. The story takes place on a fictional South Sea Island, Haleakaloha, where people from all over the place meet. We have the original people of the island , along with Irish, American, Australian, European, Chinese, and Japanese people. The island is a small world. Ford once again approaches the issue of miscegenation, but he does so in lightsome mood. This is a comedy and a broad one at that. The relationship between Wayne's ''Guns" Donovan and Lee Marvin's "Boats" Gilhooley serves to set the tone. They engage in an annual brawl on the day they celebrate both their birthdays. Oh, and I ought to say that this is a seasonal film; the action takes place over Christmas. Christmas, time for festivities, family, forgiveness, and the simple virtues, provides the background for the story. Life on this tropical island eschews the corporate world that Amelia Dedham (Elizabeth Allen) has left behind in snowy Boston. In short, Ford creates a paradisal world devoutly to be wished for. He even has his personal boat, the Araner, in the script. A few of the Ford regulars turn up: Dick Foran, Mike Mazurki, John Qualen, Chuck Roberson, Aissa Wayne, Patrick Wayne, and of course Lee Marvin, and Duke. This is a family affair. Even Mae Marsh shows up; she had appeared in at least four of Ford's previous films, and she was also prominent in films by D. W. Griffith. The relationship between Wayne and Allen echoes the relationship between Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in films such as Ford's The Quiet Man and the more recent McClintock. Everyone seems to be having fun in this film.

 

 Don Mabie and William Blake, Part 3

Parody and even satire feature in the work of both artists. The several sections called A Memorable Fancy in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794) contain a guffaw or two. I think especially of the fourth Memorable Fancy in which Blake and an Angel converse about the eternal lot of each of them. In the same year, Blake also wrote An Island in the Moon, another satirical treatment of the culture of his own day. Perhaps Blake’s best-known poem, “The Tyger,” illustrates Blake’s acerbic sense of humour as well as anything. The poem, as engraved and illustrated by Blake, shows a marked contrast between the tyger in the poem and the soft-toy tyger Blake draws for the illustration. Mabie too gives us parody and satire, but his sense of humour is more robust than Blake’s. One of Mabie’s more hilarious works contains the words, “PART OF ME SUSPECTS THAT I’M A LOSER AND THE OTHER PART OF ME THINKS I’M GOD ALMIGHTY.” I am reminded of Blake’s “All Deities Reside in the Human Breast,” only Blake is serious, whereas Mabie is decidedly tongue-in-cheek. Mabie’s humour is Dadaist in its irreverence and audacity.

            The presence of satire in these works might serve to indicate that both artists are products of the Enlightenment, but perhaps in different ways. For Blake, “Reason or the ratio of all we have already known. Is not the same that it shall be when we know more” (“There is no Natural Religion [b]”). Blake is reacting to what he sees as the excessive dependence upon reason in the Enlightenment project. His attitude is famously expressed in the monotype “Newton” (1795-1805). Here we see the great seventeenth-century scientist naked, seated on a rock, bent down over a scroll upon which he manipulates a compass, thereby measuring a ration for some purpose. Measurement, however, only gives us material information, not imaginative (or spiritual, if you will) information. For Blake, only imagination can create, and only by creating can humans build a better world than the one they find themselves inhabiting here and now.

            Mabie’s take on reason has the benefit of over two hundred years of development since the Enlightenment. He follows Juergen Habermas in both understanding valid criticism of reason, and arguing for reason’s continued importance to the human enterprise. In his article, “Pushing Art Out the Door” (1994), Mabie writes:

In sum then, Habermas agrees with the radical critics of The Enlightenment that the paradigm of consciousness is exhausted. Like them, he views reason as inescapably situated, as concretized in history, society, body, and language. Unlike them, however, he holds that the defects of The Enlightenment can only be made good by further enlightenment. The totalized critique of reason undercuts the capacity of reason to be critical.

We might draw a distinction between reason and ratiocination here. Reason, in the sense of ratiocination deals with what we can see and measure; it does not, as Northrop Frye points out, “create new images or forms.” Frye goes on to say that “Art proves the inadequacy of abstract and rational ideas by the rule that examples and illustrations are more powerful than doctrines or precepts” (86). Another way of putting this might be that humans prefer stories to instructions, images to directives. “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” I suspect that both Blake and Mabie are wary of complete dependence on formal logic, while they accept the crucial findings of reason, reason understood in the sense Wordsworth gives it in the Conclusion to the final book of The Prelude, when he says that Imagination is “Reason in her most exalted mood.” This is the Romantic amplification of the Enlightenment emphasis on reason. The Enlightenment makes a binary out of the head and the heart, privileging head over heart. The Romantic project aims to crumble this binary and prove the essential connection between head and heart.

            Both Blake and Mabie have produced art that is large in the sense of dense, filled with detail. Take Blake’s “Fall of Man,” for example. This watercolour dates from 1807, and contains some sixty-three human figures, plus seven creatures, some eight scenes ordered in panels both vertical and horizontal, both linear and rounded. The scene depicts Adam and Eve’s ejection from Eden and the flaming cherubim that block any re-entry to Eden. The scene also reminds us of familiar depictions of the Last Judgement, a scene Blake drew several times. In Blake’s unique vision, the Last Judgement and the Fall are simultaneous. When Adam and Eve eat the apple, they initiate what was to Blake that Judgement that leads to the fulfilment of desire. The problem comes when they refuse to see that error may block the way to that fulfilment. Blake puts it this way: “whenever any Individual rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual.”

            An example of Mabie’s large works is “Off Centre Centre,” a tryptich crowded with lettering that consists of various gnomic sayings both Mabie’s own and quotations such as “We gotta get out of this place” from the song by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. The tryptich is a form of art dating back to early Christian art, and often seen in altar pieces, and in Mabie’s hands it becomes both homage and parody. Like Blake’s large works, “Off Centre Centre” is crowded with detail, some clear and some less clear. It offers a swirl of words both political and non-political. It offers words that dance across the visual field. That quotation from the song by the Animals reminds me that music is important for both Mabie’s and Blake’s work. Their graphic art displays a rhythm that serves up a visual dance.

            First, Blake. His most famous works are the sets of engravings known as Songs of Innocence and of Experience. These are “songs,” and they have been set to music several times over the years. School children in England will also know the lyric set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916, “Jerusalem.” The poem derives from the Preface to Blake’s epic work, Milton (1804), and it has become something of an alternative national anthem in Britain. Perhaps more pertinent are more recent musical renditions of Blake’s work such as “Jah Wobble presents the Inspiration of William Blake” (1996) or the various Blake-inspired songs by Patti Smith or Van Morrison. This musical connection nicely brings Blake’s poetic and graphic art into the world of music; his work appeals to eye and ear. At least one famous rock band alludes to Blake in its name; the band in question picks a word from a Blake aphorism: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

            The case differs with Mabie, although his performance art, as well as his stint as a DJ remind us just how he too marries eye and ear. His work contains many references to music, most obviously to Bob Dylan, but also to an array of famous Blues musicians from Robert Johnson to Howlin’ Wolf to John Lee Hooker to Muddy Waters and so on. Repeated references to these Blues artists signal a connection between the Blues and Mabie’s art. Like the Blues, Mabie’s work is, or seeks to be, popular in the sense that it speaks to the average person about average things, love and death, survival and hard times, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the good times and the bad, hard living and easy pickings. The Blues are most often associated with the downbeat, Fats Domino’s “Blue Monday,” for eample, but they are also have their positive moments, as in Blind Boy Fuller’s “Walking My Troubles Away.” In other words, the Blues are a celebration of life in all its messy conditions. The Blues is art at its most communal, its most basic, even elemental, visceral. The Blues is an art of survival. To sing the Blues is to assert that we gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. To sing the Blues is to celebrate the body in all its raw glory.

            Celebration might bring to mind one of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: “Exuberance is Beauty.” Exuberance has something to do with fruitfulness, from the Latin “uberare,” be fruitful. “Ex” carries the meaning here of thoroughly. Be thoroughly fruitful or ebullient, full of life and activity. Celebrate. High-spiritedness is another way of saying this. The work of both Mabie and Blake is active, energetic, full of fruitfulness, whether mellow or not. Their work celebrates line, language, shape, colour, and motion. It gives us energy at work. As Blake has it, “Energy is the only life and is from the Body,” or “Energy is Eternal Delight.” Energy well describes the works of Mabie and Blake.

            And so we have celebration. As I set out writing this piece, I really did not know what I had for a thesis. A thesis is that thing or argument that holds a piece of prose together. I was bringing together two artists who lived some 200 years apart, and whose work is, on the face of it, so very different. But I find both their work attractive and energizing, and consequently I want to celebrate each of them. I found a few points of connection – their attitude to money, their commitment to art, their conjoining of text and image, their political vision, and so on – and I allowed the writing to do its thing, its thing being to take over and go where it will. It went in the direction of celebration as I had intended, but the celebration turns out to be not only for these two artists, but also what these two artists accomplish in their work. Their work is testimony to the human condition. It tries to unite, to trouble, to open eyes, to bring art into connection with the chaotic experiences of everyday. Blake, for his part, created a system rather than be enslaved by another’s. His system takes the form of a mythological universe with a cast of characters unique to Blake – Los, Enitharmon, Urizen, Orc, Urthona, and the rest. Mabie, perhaps without forethought, creates a world, a world filled to the brim with bric-a-brac. In Mabie’s various works and activities, we see the bricoleur at work. Using a great range of materials and a great variety of things, Mabie fashions his own world, he creates his own system. 

            We have, then, in William Blake and Don Mabie/Chuck Stake artists who offer us both respite from the cold world and possible entry into a warm world, a world brought into connectedness through art. This is work that participates in the forging of links in time and across places, that gives us material for the building of what Blake called Golgonooza, that city of art that brings clarity to the human enterprise, the human hope for tolerance and goodwill and peace.

 

Works Consulted

Blake. William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982.

Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971.

Don Mabie/Chuck Stake: Aspects of Practice: 1969-1996.Calgary: Illingworth Kerr Gallery, 1997.

Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. New York: Dover, 1954.

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967 (1947).

Mabie, Don.  “Pushing Art Out the Back Door.” Artichoke (Calgary), Summer 1994: 13-14.

 Don Mabie and William Blake, Part 2

My point about money deserves some expansion. Blake lived a modest life with his wife in London for all but the three years in Felpham. He had neither great fame nor much wealth. He relied on a very few patrons to help put food on the table, and yet he had the following to say to one of these patrons, Dr. Trusler, when Trusler dared criticize Blake’s work, apparently saying that its meaning was obscure: “that which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.” In this same letter, Blake says he is happy to report that his works “have been Elucidated by Children who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped.” Blake was willing to lose a patron who did not appreciate his work. As for Mabie, he does not seek out either patrons or customers. Rather he is known for his freely passing on his art through mail art or through artists’ trading cards sessions, and through the simple act of giving. Recently he has used Facebook to share his art. This is not to say that Blake and Mabie do not sell what they create, but it is to say that they do not go to any lengths to sell what they create. Their interest is in art, not capital.

            What connects these two artists for me is not only their fierce commitment to art as a crucial human activity and a political intervention, but also their desire to see connections between the arts. More specifically, I am interested in the conjoining of word and image. Blake is well known for what he terms his “illuminated” poetry, poetry engraved along with illustrations that are then hand-coloured. In these works, words and images share a visual field forming one aesthetic expression. The words are part of the visual experience. To hear Blake’s poetry is to miss half of the experience; to see this poetry is to experience the word as not only semantic but also semiotic. Most relevant here is an engraving Blake made in 1820. He engraved a drawing he had made of the ancient statue of Laocoon, the priest of Poseidon who warned his countrymen in Troy of the Trojan Horse. Blake surrounded the drawing with numerous epigrams and gnomic sayings, one of which I have used for the epigraph to this essay. Looking at the engraving, we see that the words serve to compliment the two snakes, good and evil, that wrap about the figures. Words, like snakes, are both good and evil. The various apothegms that surround the image are puckish, audacious, and provocative. They speak of art and its central place in human activity. They speak of the curse of money. They inform us that we “must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art.” The words not only follow the contours of the figures, but they also block and frame the central image. They appear both random and ordered. They are more or less legible. They include some Greek letters along with the English script. The image as a whole both calls on art from the past and reinvents it. In its own way, this is an early instance of placing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

            Word and image – text – is also a central concern in Mabie’s art. Let’s take just one small instance, the painting “The Sun Is Not Yellow It’s Chicken.” Here Mabie uses words from a 1965 Bob Dylan song, “Tombstone Blues.” In the song, the words are spoken by the Commander-in-Chief who calls for the death of all those who “whimper and cry.” The Commander-in-Chief is either the U.S. President or Jesus. In any case, he calls for those who are fearful, who whimper and cry, who are, quite possibly, cowards to be put to death. To be a coward, in the vernacular, is to be either yellow or to be a chicken. Both words, yellow and chicken, denote a person who cowers, who shrinks from confronting something frightening. And so the colour of the sun may be yellow, but the sun itself is chicken, scared of its own brilliance perhaps. In effect, these words are both sensible in a silly way, and nonsensical in an equally silly way. In Mabie’s work, these words offer their silliness to the viewer/reader, and they present themselves as a visual design. Both the colours and the calligraphy draw the eye to shape and look of the words; they move us to experience the words visually rather than simply linguistically. The design is pyramidal, starting on top with a three-letter word. Under the apex is a four-letter word topping another three-letter word that sits on a six-letter word, then a three-letter word and finally a sturdy seven-letter word at the base. The pyramid nicely brings to mind empire, hierarchy, and politics. These are, after all, the words of the Commander-in-Chief. 

            This small painting is as audacious as, say, Blake’s verse, “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau.” Both these works, one visual, the other verbal, toss a challenge to the viewer/reader. These are works that rouse the faculties to act or at least they seek to rouse the faculties to act; the viewer/reader either engages with what he or she experiences here or walks away unthinking and unmoved. This is the kind of art we associate with what we now term Protest Art or Activist Art. This is art that asks the viewer or reader to think, and to think in ways that may be uncomfortable. We may think of this kind of art as relatively new, but like all art, it rests on tradition. This is art that gives us a fearful symmetry.

            Both Blake and Mabie draw on artistic tradition. Obviously both the “Laocoon” and the Bob Dylan song are works from the past, either a long distant past or a more recent past. We might say that both Blake and Mabie, in using works from the past so clearly, rob the past. They plunder and plagiarize and purloin. But such larceny is a form of praise, a form of memorializing. We might more accurately term this not plagiarism, but intertextualism. All truly great art takes from tradition, begs, borrows, or steals from that which has come before. Remember that rallying cry, “make it new,” well to make something new is to reshape what already exists. Indeed, the work of both Blake and Mabie celebrates and rests on the past. Blake’s drawing and painting echo Michaelangelo and Raphael, other Renaissance artists. Mabie draws inspiration from the Dada and Fluxus and Pop Art movements. Even a surrealist work such as Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” comes to mind, offering a similar playfulness to Mabie’s work. A more recent artist I also think of here is Jenny Holzer who gives us words and ideas in public spaces. Mabie’s digital collages are also relevant here, echoing such works as those of Richard Hamilton and others. And I would be remiss not to mention artists such as Duchamp, Warhol, and Steadman, whose works resonate in Mabie’s various productions. 

In other words, both artists know full well their debt to the past. Each of them makes use of Vitruvian Man as drawn by Leonardo da Vinci (c 1490). Da Vinci’s drawing has hand-written notes above and below the drawing, something picked up by both Blake and Mabie in their work. The figure with arms outstretched provides the original for Blake’s “Albion’s Dance,” aka “Glad Day” (1790/1793). Some prints of this image contain writing below the figure: “Albion rose from where he labour’d at the Mill with Slaves: Giving himself for Nations he danc’d the dance of Eternal Death.” The subject is political. Albion or England rises above this revolutionary period triumphant. The outstretched arms suggest the crucifixion; England sacrifices himself for all nations. The depiction of a young Albion is celebratory, welcoming a new day of liberty and community. Or something like that. 

            This figure with arms outstretched is the signature of Chuck Stake, Don Mabie’s artistic alter ego. In Mabie’s version of Vitruvian man, the outstretched arms signify several things. First, of course, we have the allusion to da Vinci. More audaciously, we have this allusion to high art woven into allusions to sports. The referee in hockey and the base umpires in baseball use this gesture to indicate either the wipe out of a call or that a player is safe. Connecting sports with art is a gesture worthy of Dada, an indication of Mabie’s expansive notion of art and its place in culture, especially popular culture. Of course, the gesture is also cruciform, and in Mabie’s world this means parodic, a daring negation of any religious significance the gesture might have in other contexts. And finally, this figure relates to Blake’s “Glad Day” in its exuberant celebration of art’s potential for making things new, for, as it were, rebirth.

 The following essay is in 3 parts

Don Mabie and William Blake: A Celebration

 

“Where any view of money exists Art cannot be carried on, but War only”

                                    (William Blake, “The Laocoon”)

 

 

            The region in which I live has many gifted artists, but none more powerful than Don Mabie (aka Chuck Stake). What I propose here is a celebratory look at Mabie’s work alongside the work of the poet, painter, illustrator, engraver William Blake (1757-1827). First, full disclosure: I know little or nothing about the visual arts, with the possible exception of cinema, although I do know something about literature and language. In other words, I am hardly the person to be commenting critically on the visual works of either Blake or Mabie, but I note that both language and literature find a place in their visual work. Both of these artists incorporate words and, indeed, textual matter into their paintings, drawings, or engravings, effectively transforming the verbal into the visual thereby pointing out just how invested our language is in artistic expression. When language ceases to express beauty, when language itself loses beauty, when language ceases to be communicative in a multi-dimensional way, when language becomes one dimensional, what we have is dullness of the kind Alexander Pope wrote about nearly 300 years ago. We have the triumph of political dissolution, political failure; we have the fall into conformism; we have a colourless existence. Both Blake and Mabie are, ultimately, artists who understand and manifest the connection between politics and art and language and beauty.

            I begin with a brief biographical excursion. In his teenage years, William Blake served a seven-year apprentice as an engraver, and then studied briefly at the Royal Academy, an institution he later criticized for its deleterious effect on art. Blake lived in relative obscurity in his lifetime, eking out a livelihood by engraving for publishers such as Joseph Johnson and selling work to a few patrons. He gained a reputation as “Mad Blake” among his contemporaries for his complex and unorthodox views and work. He was married to Catherine, and the Blakes did not have children. They lived a quiet life away from the artistic mainstream, and for the most part, they lived an urban existence except for what Blake refers to as his “three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean,” when he and Catherine lived in the small seaside village of Felpham in Sussex. 

Don Mabie, on the other hand, is a well-known artist, although like Blake he does not enjoy the kind of life an artist whose main concern is selling art has. Grant Poier puts it this way: “Don’s ongoing investment and involvement in a broader collective and milieu are obviously not driven by expected fame or fortune.” In a similar vein, Donna McAlear notes that Mabie has “deliberately skirted the borders of the prevailing state gallery’s sanctioned paths to mastery.” Both Blake and Mabie are less interested in making money from art than in making art for both personal and political reasons. Mabie and his wife, fellow artist Wendy Twogood, also do not have children. Without children, both Blake and Mabie have devoted their lives to art. It is worth noting, in passing, that both Blake and Mabie have an affinity for as well as an understanding of children. This is famously apparent in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and it is also apparent in the collections Mabie has gathered over the years, collections that include children’s toys and games. Having mentioned Mabie’s collections, I note that both he and Blake are multi-dimensional artists. As I said before, Blake was not only an engraver, but also a poet, a painter, and an illustrator. Mabie is a painter, collage-maker, performance artist, rubberstamp and buttonwork artist, among other things. For Mabie, even his listings of books he has read during any given year become works of art. For both Blake and Mabie, making art is life itself. This is not so much art for art’s sake as it is art for humanity’s sake, art for the sake of human survival.

            On the political front we have a couple of things to note. Blake was notorious for an incident that took place on August 12, 1803. On this day, Blake encountered John Scofield, a Private in the First Royal Dragoons, drunk in the garden in Felpham where the Blakes were living as part of their sojourn by the sea. Blake asked Scofield to leave, but he refused. Blake proceeded to kick the fellow out of his garden, and in retaliation Scofield went to the authorities and accused Blake and his wife of treason. A trial for sedition ensued and Blake was acquitted on January 10, 1804. Scofield thereafter appears in an unflattering manner in Jerusalem, a work Blake began in 1804. As for Mabie, his foray into politics took place when he ran for parliament as leader of the Boredom Party of Canada in the early 1980s. Both Blake and Mabie are politically on the left, the far left. Their commitment to art has little to do with making money and much to do with building community, forging a world in which equality, justice, and acceptance of others are paramount. Blake’s stand against empire finds commentary in David V. Erdman’s Prophet Against Empire (1954). More forceful are Blake’s own words:

Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field,
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air;
Let the enchainèd soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,	45
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open;
And let his wife and children return from the oppressor’s scourge.
They look behind at every step, and believe it is a dream,
Singing: “The Sun has left his blackness, and has found a fresher morning,
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night;	50
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease

This passage derives from Blake’s poem, America (1793), one of Blake’s first considerations of revolution. The plate with mother and child, cannon, and darkness drawing down is a harrowing indictment of the “oppressor’s scourge.” 

Mabie expresses his attitude toward government succinctly in the drawing, “WHY IS IT YOU ALWAYS END UP VOTIN’ FOR THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS?” This work refers to the Alberta provincial election of March 1979, or even to the Canadian Federal Election a couple of months later that year that ended 11 years of Liberal government. Mabie’s wry comment is evident in his rendering of the words, “campain” and “candydate.” His choice of “votin’” rather than the more formal “voting,” suggests a common voice, the voice of the average voter perhaps. His use of black and white points out the contrast between parties, a contrast that is semiotic only, not substantive. The small maple leaf with the dollar sign parodies political insignia and foregrounds the importance of money in the political system. And the design with the large dark map of Alberta has the look of a political poster. Another work, CAMPAIN 84, is perhaps even more explicit. Mabie describes this work on his Facebook page: 

I think this was one of my most interesting and successful Correspondence/MailArt projects: CAMPAIN 84. Over the years I did a number of CMA projects focusing on politics and elections, but this was probably the best of the lot.

One evening in Calgary, during the Canadian federal election of 1984, I was watching the TV news when they broadcast a video of Liberal leader/Prime Minister and candydate John Turner arriving at the Calgary airport. As Turner entered the airport a heckler yelled out: "We don't have any choice. The Conservatives and the Liberals --- it's all patronage and baloney. The system stinks." I thought that was an excellent comment on the election and the next day I produced a drawing of that quote as well as a quote of Brian Mulroney's, then leader of the Conservative Party, "Let's face it there's no whore like an old whore. If I had been in Bryce's [Bryce Mackasey's] position, I'd have been right in there with my nose in the public trough like the rest of them." After I completed the drawing I had fifty coloured Xeroxes made of the drawing. I then purchased a large package of baloney and took fifty slices of baloney and wrapped each one in Suran wrap and put each one in a Ziploc bag. I then put each bag of baloney, along with one colour Xerox, in a hand decorated envelope and mailed them off to media outlets across CanaDaDa. So, depending upon how long the envelope took to arrive at a particular person, the baloney was in various stages of decomposition --- this reinforced the heckler's statement about baloney and that the system "stinks."

I got a lot of positive response to this mailing from the media .… I did a number of projects like this over the years and part of the process of the projects was to engage the media in covering what I was doing in order to amplify the extent of the mailing and reach a larger audience. In this case the coverage in the Calgary Herald reached potentially tens of thousands of people. I thought of the article in the Herald like an artist's print, not hanging in an art gallery but published in a newspaper.

Don Mabie – Facebook, November 13, 2020.

This work serves as an example of the multi-dimensional aspect of Mabie’s work. Even his Facebook page is a work of art. Facebook is as good an expression of Mabie’s notion that art is for everyone and ought to be available to everyone at minimum cost. It does not take money to view art and even to practise art on Facebook. Art appears just about everywhere, if only we look for it. 

 Some World Cinema:

Pixote (1981), directed by Hector Babenco.  This exercise in neo-realism is harrowing. It follows the development of a young Brazilian child brought at an early age to a reform centre for youth. Life in the reform centre is truly ugly, brutal and, for some, short. Here young Pixote learns to smoke dope and sniff glue. He confronts abuse of various kinds, the worst kinds imaginable. What we see reminds me of the many prison movies from Hollywood, only with children and youth instead of adults and with a brutality and a filth barely touched on in the American films. The scene in which Pixote cleans a toilet is well-nigh impossible to watch. In the film’s first half inside the reform school, we have an indictment of the reform system in Brazil. Scenes are dark and grubby and closed in to accentuate the sense of entrapment and hopelessness. Halfway through the film, a group of children escape from this hell-hole. Outside is brighter with sunshine and even ocean vistas after a few of the youngsters ride the rails to Rio. Free to explore the world, they learn new trades such as thievery, pimping, and murder. The film is unrelenting in its look at the lives of the impoverished street kids of Brazil. In a brief prologue prepared for audiences outside Brazil, Babenco shows us the home of the lead actor in Pixote, Fernando Ramos De Silva. And in a short introduction to the restoration of the film, Martin Scorsese tells us that this child never did learn to read and therefore could not continue an acting career, and that he was shot and killed at the age of 19.  Learning this makes the experience of the film even more troubling than it would be without such information. 

After the Curfew (1954), directed by Usmar Ismail. This film from Indonesia tells the story of a resistance soldier returning to civilian life after the war for independence against the Netherlands. Things do not go well. What especially interests me is the way this story plays out because it is close to several films noir we see coming out of Hollywood at the same time. The returning soldier who finds himself caught in a web of intrigue and violence is a familiar noir turn. Here the focus is on the trauma the soldier has suffered from the war, and also the miserable lesson that plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose. The soldier’s back story in the war comes to us in flashbacks. We also have dark city streets and a collection of people whose dreams and desires will go unfulfilled, and also a few unsavoury people who manage to turn things to their monetary advantage. This is cinema that combines seriousness of purpose with a pulp turn. 

 

Soleil O (1967), directed by Med Hondo. This is the first film of the Mauritanian film maker, Med Hondo. He made it over some four years for about $30,000.  It follows the travels of a Mauritanian immigrant to France and he encounters people and their bigotry in Paris. Early scenes are striking in their pointed commentary on colonialism, a commentary that is both humourous and stylized. Indeed, humour travels throughout the movie, and without it what we see would be wrenching. Well, it is wrenching, but the humour and the music work to give us some hope that what the young man from Mauritania experiences is, as Peggy Lee says, not all there is, my friend. The narrative, such as it is, gives us something of a picaresque adventure, the various scenes stitched roughly together, but somehow they manage to cohere. I was reminded of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1981).  I was also reminded of Welles’s Othello (1952), filmed over a three-year period. I might also add that this is one of the first films from Africa.

 

Dos Monjes (1934), directed by Juan Bustillo Oro. This is an early example of Mexican cinema, and it shows the influence of Murnau, Weine, Lang and the rest of the expressionists. Stark lighting, sets that have twisted and fluid decor (clocks, furniture, doorways, etc.), menacing hallways and statues, canted angles all deliver a film that borders on the uncanny. The narrative gives us two accounts of the same story with significant changes in each telling, something of an early practice-run for Rashomon. This is an impressive combination of horror, romance, social drama, and gothic atmosphere. A commentator interviewed for the DVD asserts that the film reminds him of Citizen Kane in its delightful experimentation with form. I like this suggestion because Dos Monjes (Two Monks) gives the viewer so much to see. This is pure cinema. Although this is a sound film, it could easily be silent because its delights are so intensely visual. Dare I say, it is deliriously visual. This is a film I knew nothing about, and I am pleased to have stumbled across it.