Art in the Cinematic Imagination

CHAPTER 6: Playing with Fire

CHAPTER 6 Playing with Fire Now at that time the men had no fire and did not know how to make it, but the women did. While the men were away hunting . . . the women cooked their food and ate it by themselves. Just as they were finishing their meal they saw the men returning, away in the distance. As they did not wish the men to know about the fire, they hastily gathered up the ashes, which were still alight, and thrust them up their vulvas, so that the men should not see them. When the men came close up, they said, ‘‘Where is the fire?’’ but the women replied, ‘‘There is no fire.’’ kakadu myth, from fraser, myths of the origin of fire Martin Scorsese’s contribution to the 1989 anthology film New York Stories cleverly acknowledged its director’s digression from the kind of wise guy theme for which he was, fairly or not, becoming known. The credit sequence of Life Lessons, his story of the relationship between two painters set in the somewhat rarefied New York City art world of the 1980s, runs over the image of ‘‘splattered ’’ paint.This splatter simultaneously references the kind of visceral processpainting (à la Jackson Pollock) executed by the film’s protagonist, painter Lionel Dobie (Nick Nolte), and the kind of viscera associated with ‘‘execution’’ of a different sort, more commonly seen in other films, such as Scorsese’s own Goodfellas , which would be released the following year. This pun suggests Scorsese’s self-consciousness about both the violence with which his auteurism is marked and the mounting of a scenario (written by Richard Prince and based on Dostoyevsky ’s The Gambler) that can so plainly be seen as autobiographical. And Life Lessons does feature its share of violence, though mainly of the sort expressed through artistic sublimation of powerful sexual impulses, and only occasionally of the more predictable sort associated with a virile temperament. Life Lessons is but one of several American films released during the 1980s that mixes themes of art, sexual desire, and violence. But its picture of the New York art world is somewhat retrograde, focusing on an increasingly obsolescent—or 124 Art in the Cinematic Imagination at least atypical—master/muse theme, and featuring a kind of muscular, male, modernist painting practice that was experiencing a rather histrionic last gasp by the late ’80s with the overexposed careers of neo-expressionist artists like Julian Schnabel, Sandro Chia, and Anselm Kiefer. The film does note, with some cynicism, the emergence of another art phenomenon: ‘‘performance art,’’ one of several relatively new and high-profile modes of artistic practice in that period that are by no means incidental to the disturbances that ripple through a number of films, as they did through the art world. As the film opens, Dobie’s studio assistant-cum-mistress, Paulette (Rosanna Arquette), has been spurned by her choice of lovers, Gregory Stark (Steve Buscemi), a performance artist rather in the mold of Eric Bogosian. An unreconstructed latter-day New York School type, Dobie is skeptical, to say the least, of this appellation. ‘‘Who is this guy?’’ he asks Paulette; ‘‘I know him, right?’’ ‘‘Gregory Stark,’’ she replies. ‘‘That kid?’’ he responds incredulously; ‘‘the comedian?’’ ‘‘A performance artist ,’’ Paulette corrects. ‘‘Performance artist,’’ sneers Dobie. ‘‘What the hell is a performance artist? The person’s an actor, a singer, a dancer . . . I mean, do you call the guy who picks up your garbage a sanitary engineer? A performance artist!’’ Dobie later accompanies Paulette to a Stark show, one reallyonlydistinguishable from stand-up comedy by its trappings. Set in an abandoned subway tunnel, Stark’s performance ends with a monologue that voices stereotypical male preoccupation with issues of anger, conflict, and confrontation, and concludes with the sudden explosion of a bare, jury-rigged light fixture over his head. The film itself supports Dobie’s suspicion of Stark and the very notion of a ‘‘performance’’ art by cutting away repeatedly during the scene in question to low-angle shots of Dobie’s stony, imposing, judgmental visage. Later, in the film’s most violent outburst beyond the action of the canvas, Dobie—in righteous, chivalrous indignation , supposedly in defense of Paulette (who is mortified)—assaults Stark in a coffee shop, giving large, histrionic form to the clichés disclosed in the standup performance. While Stark plays with exposing, but does not deconstruct, the ways in which masculinity itself is a performance, Dobie performs the big burly...