Or, How The Wachowskis Taught Me To Stop Worrying and Love Red, Blue and Yellow III.
A serial art-attacker, that’s what we’re dealing with.
Or, if a serial killer is only a person whose killed more than 3 people, perhaps what we have in Gerard Jan van Bladeren is an attempted serial art-tacker. Kind of an Ed Gein of abstract expressionism.
However you define him, Gerard Jan van Bladeren has, twice in his lifetime, walked into Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam with a concealed blade, found his way to a painting by Barnett Newman, and – and this is where I take some license – with what can only be assumed little fanfare and much fury, slashed and struck the canvas before him, destroying millions of dollars of art in seconds.
“Millions of dollars” is a key descriptive here, because the idea that a painting like Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III is worth millions of dollars is exactly what drove van Bladeren to attack it in the first place, and for some van Bladeren supporters, into declaring, “this so-called vandal…be made the director of modern museums.”
If this story sounds familiar it is because it is not new territory.
One of 99 Percent Invisible‘s best episodes covered the subject – or at least, the story of the first attack – which took place in 1986, nearly 20 years after III’s debut. There’s even a hyperbolically titled documentary on the subject, The End of Fear.
If someone “murders” a painting, the painting clearly made them feel, to say the least, something.
So why does a painting that is almost empty, or very nearly without structure – it’s a few square feet away from being entirely red – fill people with so much anger?
The saga of Red, Yellow and Blue III is so captivating because it’s the perfect microcosm/petri dish/test lab for an idea many of us in the general public struggle with: after all the hubbub of the 20th century (you know, radio, TV, world wars, space travel, the internet), what even is art, anymore?
Well, I’m here to resolve all the debate.
How lucky for everyone!
Barnett Newman – and the entire history of Western art – can be understood by telling the story of the first time I saw The Matrix in theaters.
Or, rather, having Quentin Tarantino tell the story of the first time I saw The Matrix in theaters.
Tarantino Watching The Matrix
Though I fear this much quotation is akin to plagiarization – I must point you in the direction of the superb 3-part podcast from Amy Nicholson and The Ringer, “Quentin Tarantino’s Feature Presentation” – Tarantino sets the scene so well, and provides several key insights that we’ll come back to later – that I have to quote, almost in its entirety, his recount of his first viewing of The Matrix.
Bolding and CAPITALIZATION my own,
“Depending on the movie you’re watching, your anticipation of what it’s going to be, is not a generic thing. It’s going to be connected to that movie.
When we talk about something like that (anticipation), there’s one screening in the last 20 years that really kind of makes me think about…I saw whatever the evening show was, 7 o’clock or 830, I saw the Friday evening show at the Chinese Theatre, of The Matrix on the Friday that it opened.”
I remember the place was jam packed, it was jam packed, and there was a real electricity in the air. It was really, really exciting. Part of the reason we were there wasn’t because we read reviews. It was because the TV spots – and it was even more the TV spots than the theatrical trailer – the TV spots, really kind of turned the audience on.
It made us all want to see that movie this opening weekend. So it was the TV spots that really put all those assess into those seats on Friday. There was that certain electricity that was in the air, that was going on, we’re all waiting for it to start, but then this thought hit me, that was really kind of profound, and that was: it’s easy to talk about The Matrix now, cuz we know the secret of The Matrix but they didn’t tell you any of that in any of the promotions, in any of the…the…the movie trailer, or any of the TV spots.
So we were excited about this movie, but we didn’t really know what we were going to see…
We did not know the mythology at all. I mean, at all. We had to discover that.
And so there was this moment of me realizing how excited everybody was for what was going to happen, but we really didn’t know anything.
Can you imagine? The idea of turning a audience on so much that they’re there, loaded for bear, full of piss and vinegar on the Friday of the movie opens (sic) but we don’t really know what we’re excited about? We don’t really know what’s going to happen. and then…then..THAT MOVIE HAPPENS!? It was really…it was a profound experience.”
I cannot explain to a 20-year-old today, what sitting in the theater before the lights when down and The Matrix came up felt like, any better than the way Tarantino described it.
“…and then that movie happens” is perfect.
The world was one way before this jump kick, and one way after it.
The Matrix probably made me feel the way people seeing Star Wars – for whom the film was tranformative – for the first time felt: we went in thinking movies could be one thing, and left thinking movies could be anything.
We can talk about the story telling – The Matrix works so well because every jaw-dropping effect is in concert with every world-building turn (Neo can quickly become a martial arts expert because…there is no spoon) – but the first time you saw its special effects, you could not believe your eyes in a way that your eyes had never lied to you before.
The Rise of Visual Effects in The 1990s
To try to explain to Gen Z what the world was like before The Matrix, I will share what it was like to live through the rapid evolution of special effects that was 90s film, culminating in (fittingly) the year 1999 – the end of the decade and a millenia- with the release of The Matrix.
While my generation came too late to explore the earth, and too early to explore space, we certainly got to witness one thing: the advancement of computer visual effects in motion pictures.
The 90s in 6 Breakthrough Movie Moments
1991: Beauty and The Beast’s Dancefloor
The dancefloor in this scene was the first use of computer generated effects in an animated movie and it generated quite a buzz.
It doesn’t look like much now, but the buzz of this Stockholm syndrome of a fairtyale was enough to score Beauty and the Beast an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, the first animated film to do so.
1991: T1000 Rises From The Flames
It’s hard to believe Terminator 2 came out in 1991, but James Cameron’s special effects are not the same as the special effects of the era James Cameron is making his film in.
There were countless articles and news magazine TV episodes about T1000 in Terminator 2 and none of them prepared us for the end of the LA River Chase scene. When T1000 rose up out of those flames, he immediately rose to the top of Horror Movie Villains Getting Back Up After You Thought They Were Dead lists.
1993: The Brontosaurus in Jurassic Park.
By today’s standards, Jurassic Park is largely a tutorial in the genius-level use of practical effects.
But the moment of first seeing the CGI brontosaurus (I can hear graphic effects artists now, “well technically, CGI is when…”) and hearing the score underneath it: you were seeing something while not understanding how you could be seeing the thing you were seeing.
To paraphrase Chuck Klosterman (I’m like 98% sure it was him on a Bill Simmons podcast): when people went to Jurassic Park they felt like they were going to see dinosaurs.
Like a trip to the zoo, or an amusement park: it really felt like I was about to get as close to seeing dinosaurs as I was ever going to be when I went to see Jurassic Park, in a sold-out room months after its release, in 1993. And Spielberg did not disappoint. The man gave us fucking dinosaurs.
Laura Dern’s reaction has to be one of the most meta moments in movie history, as hers is exactly the reaction every movie-goer had to seeing the thing she was seeing.
1994: Lieutenant Dan’s Legs
Sure, Jurassic Park had already been out for a year when Forrest Gump landed in theaters, and Terminator 2 for 3 years at that.
But that didn’t stop us from marveling at Gary Sinise’s lack of legs.
It was like…we knew he didn’t lose his legs. “Gary Sinise HAS LEGS” I kept telling myself. But there they weren’t. And there Lieutenant Dan was, lifting himself in and out of a wheelchair, verbally abusing sex workers on New Years Eve.
A younger person may say, “well, you already had Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park why was anyone marvelling over a couple of shins?”.
And I think it’s because, in Jurassic Park the computer generated dinosaurs don’t interact with the actors – they get close, the chase, they even eat a lawyer, but there’s no fight scene with the CGI monsters – and in Terminator 2 you have a sci-fi universe for context.
In Forrest Gump the effects are so subtle, but so intricately tied to a human character, in the middle of a very human (compared to dinosaurs and time-travelling morph-bots) story: no Best Picture – or, major studio drama for that matter – had ever used a computer like that before.
1996 and all of Toy Story
Starting computer animation off with a story in the realm of children’s toys was a stroke of genius.
What Pixar does so well can be seen in the way the graphics in Toy Story still stand up today.
Pixar doesn’t try to make things ultra-realistic, but rather, stylized in an unimpeachable way.
No one can watch Toy Story and say, “well, that doesn’t look like a Buzz Lightyear doll” because there are no Buzz Lightyear dolls. The humans in Toy Story have actually aged the worst because we have a reference for them – but all the toys still look great because who would ever know what a moving, talking, horny Mr. Potato head would actually look like?
1997: The Face Stretch in MIB
Vincent D’nofrio’s perfromance as Edgar in MIB is an underrated masterclass in physical acting. He twitches and contorts his way to making bug-in-man-suit-lost-in-big-city a believable character.
There are many scenes in MIB that were a leap forward at the time (the head shrinking shot comes to mind), but none may have stood the test of time – and befuddle effects artists to this day ? – to the degree that this 3-second gif does.
All of this is to say, there was no Lord of The Rings, there was no Avengers, there wasn’t even Transformers or second wave Star Wars in the 1990s. Every year during the final decade of the 20th century we got to experience a leap forward in the capabilities of computers in film.
And yet, when The Matrix came out in 1999 it still blew our minds more than any of the decade’s previous films.
So What’s All This Got To Do With Art?
Alright, let’s condense the entirety history of Western art into a few paragraphs.
Most people – and I can say this because I include myself – probably think of “art” as “paintings” and, to take it one step further, we think of “great art” as “paintings that take incredible technical skill to paint”.
The latter understanding is probably, again to widely and wildly summarize, the way all people thought of painting until the 20th, or late 19th, century.
In the engulfing prose – poetry really, and a style I often bite off in chunks larger than I can chew – of Peter Schjeldahl’s art criticism, specifically his essay on Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, the critic reveals two insights that, in their dense brevity explain the path of art in the 20th century in the same way my diluted-by-comparison (everything is diluted in comparison to Schjeldahl) examination of 90s visual effects in movies, explain The Path, or The Story, of special effects that led to The Matrix.
The first insight I will quote is almost an aside.
“(Oiticica) devoured modern philosophy, favoring Nietzsche. Back in Rio, he wrote plays, studied painting, and, in 1955, joined a group of artists who were strongly influenced by European geometric abstraction. (This put them on a course alien to artists in the United States, where Abstract Expressionism – seen to be followed by Pop Art and minimalism – sought to eclipse Europen modernism. The split proved enduring.)”
In one paranthetical, Schjeldahl conveys The Path, The Story of modern art post-World War II in the West and how Brazilian artists diverged from that path.
The Path, for lack of far-better terms, is the key.
It explains why some art is considered important and other art is not: art evolves as a story in relation to what came before it. A group of Brazilian artists took European geometric abstraction (see the Cubism above) and reacted to it in one way, while American artists reacted to it in a way that led to Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol.
In the past The Path moved a lot slower, the conversation, perhaps, a little easier to keep up with.
But by the modern age the conversation sped up, The Path wound quickly through the woods, leaving much of us lost.
To speak briefly to that rapidization I will paraphrase this already simplified timeline of art history.
The Renaissance period in art is said to have taken place over the course of 2 centuries, 1400-1600. That’s, more or less, one era of art that lasted 200 years. And yes, there were movements within movements, and movements that overlapped movements. But for the sake of this example, for the sake of trying to compare 1990s Hollywood film to all of Western art history…
The Renaissance period was followed by the Baroque period, from 1600-1750, 150 years. Which was followed by neo-classical, from 1750-1850, 100 years.
Impressionism, in contrast, lasted only 20 years, from 1860-1880, and was followed by Post-Impressionism, which people like me subconsciously think of as the last era of “real art”, which also only lasted 25 years, from 1885-1910.
It’s around WWI – which can be crudely used as the divider between the story Western society told itself since antiquity, and the Modern Era – where art starts to become more abstract (with other movements, like Surrealism, still using classical concepts of “skill” well into the mid-20th century).
If you thought of the entirety of art throughout known history as, more or less, leading up to something like this:
Then, this, Cubism, was a real fuck you:
And so the story of art accelerated in the 20th century, each generation changing in reaction to the previous in much shorter intervals, bubbles exponentiating in the boiling water.
Oiticia’s art – and all Installation or Performative art – was, if I am to perform brain surgery with a cudgel, a reaction to the limits of art. Jackson Pollock’s drippings were, in their way, saying the same thing as Oiticica’s sand.
Classism and Outsider Art, a Brief Aside
The frustration inherent in van Bladeren’s attack on Newman was his lack of inclusion in the conversation. He was a struggling, or perhaps, failed artist. I know how that feels.
As in all things human and imperceptible to the socially stunted like myself, there appear to be lines in the sand, ladders available to climb by only a chosen few.
For hundreds of years these ladders were flung down only from castles, to the likes of Leonardo and Michelangelo, via patronage. Only the rich and elite had access to paints, to training, to the mentorships needed to ingratiate oneself into the restrictive social circles that decided whose art would be revered and whose art would be ignored.
Like everything else, modern life has confused the ladder-climbing-hopefuls and regular Joes alike.
Why does Newman’s basic-looking paintings get to be considered the next paragraph in the conversation that is modern art?
While the extent that class determines who is an artist and who is an outsider will forever be purposefully obscured by those who bestow insider status (it’s rich people, it’s always rich people), there is one thing Schjeldahl says about Oiticica that stuck with me.
“Oiticica’s feel for spatial arrangement and proportion, developed in his early paintings and sculpture, is just about preternatural”.
Anyone can paint a canvas red.
But just how much blue and yellow to include, just how much texture to impart with your paint strokes (Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III was “restored by Daniel Goldreyer in 1991. The restoration initially cost some $400,000, but was heavily attacked by critics who claimed that subtle nuances in the three monochrome sections had been lost and that Goldreyer had used house paints and a roller.[10] According to critics, the painting had been destroyed twice: first during the attack, and again during the restoration”) and the completely uncontrolled timing of your existence, is the difference between the next sentence in the conversation that is modern Western art and not the next sentence.
The fact that Oiticica’s work wasn’t more popular in the West – due to a lack of attention to any countries that weren’t English-speaking – speaks very loudly for those in support of van Bladeren’s existential cries, “why is THIS what you celebrate?” or, maybe, “I KNOW why this is what you celebrate”.
But it’s that talent – for spacing, proportion – that makes Tropicalia a classic piece of art, out there in the world waiting for the world to catch up to it, no matter how much you or I think we could put some sand on the ground and hang up some changing room curtains.
And it’s that same talent for “spatial arrangement and proportion” that makes Who’s Afraid III beautiful and not, as van Bladeren may have thought, banality worthy of assault.
If van Bladeren meant to convey something more subtle by his reaction to Who’s Afraid III, well, let’s just say his artistic statement – his stabby-stabby-time – was sophomoric, shallow, and derivative. His artistic message, if we are to give him all the benefits of doubt, was lost in its delivery.
So, What Does This Have To Do With Gen Z?
Gen Z has never lived in a world where The Matrix hasn’t existed, just the way I never lived in a world where Andy Warhol didn’t exist.
They can’t watch The Matrix and understand why it’s anything special (other than the fight choreography, special effects, overall mythology, crazy amount of guns, cool leather jackets…I like the movie, ok?).
They will never really understand a world where the special effects in Avengers: End Game are incomprehensible just the way I will never be able to comprehend a world before, and without, Hip Hop.
Kids these days (fist shake) didn’t listen, in real-time, to the conversation 90’s films were having with each other, a conversation that piqued in look-at-what-we-can-do-excitement with the release of The Matrix.
In that way, by the time I got to the Art party, the conversation was hundreds of years beyond my context. I can only try to imagine how a painted box of Brillo pads was shocking or exciting.
The reason Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III made someone angry enough to physically attack it, is because of all the other paintings that came before it.
What the theoretical supporters of van Bladeren that live in my head now, miss, is the fact that if someone gets so riled up by a piece of art that they stab it, then that piece of art is powerful.
The attack on Who’s Afraid III actually proves the point Newman was (or wasn’t) making when he made it: this painting is evocative and full of emotion.
As Tarantino tells us, your anticipation of what it’s going to be, is not a generic thing.
This applies to movies as it does to Fine Art.
“The secret of The Matrix” – it’s groundbreaking special effects – was something unexpected…to a certain extent. The movie-goers in the still-lit-theater, before the lights were dropped, still living in a pre-Matrix world, knew about T1000, they knew of the aliens in MIB, they knew the commercials they had seen for The Matrix, and it still didn’t prepare them for what the experience of watching The Matrix.
The general public in 1967 knew of Andy Warhol, they knew of Wassily Kandinsky, they knew of Mark Rothko, and they still were not prepared for Barnett Newman.
No, red paint is not as technologically advanced as bullet time, but it is, in the hands of the right artist at the right time, arguably, just as shocking to people who had never thought about red paint as stab-worthy before Barnett Newman.
Will Gen Z Have Its Matrix?
Can anything amaze us after The Matrix? After Avatar? After we’ve lived in a world with 18 Jurassic Parks?
I’m not sure. I feel I’m venturing on End of History-levels of presumption but I’m not sure it’s possible for movie-making to take another leap as large as the leap it took from 1989 to 1999.
Just as I’m not sure it’s possible for art to, again, shift as dramatically in 100 years as it did from 1860-1960.
But if the history of Western art and visual effects has taught me anything, it’s that the next generation is always capable of making something older generations could’ve never imagined.
I am happy that I observed this blog, precisely the right information that I was looking for! .