Equalling The Greatness Of The Past Poem by gershon hepner

Trying to equal the greatness of the past,
we emulate its masters and renew
what probably they’d never guessed would last
forever when we make a rendez-vous
with their creations, with which we engage
by copying and even criticizing,
projecting in a diachronic age
what we find in them to be most surprising,
though what we see may have seemed less extraor-
dinary to its masters when created,
for at a later date we may see more
than could be seen before their works had dated.

The same does not apply to our own lives
when trying to repeat our past successes.
The inspiration from the past survives,
but we can’t go back to our old addresses,
retelling all the stories that we told
when they were young and new and very fresh,
before our bodies started turning cold;
the old address of spirit is the flesh,
and we’re no longer synchronous with it.
Although new ages do not need new morals,
the past’s a place that everyone should quit,
not dwelling on it, or upon its laurels.
Roberta Smith (“Master of Many Styles, and Many Mentors, ” NYT, September 12,2008) , writes about an exhibition of Chinese paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, describing how Wang Hui left “notions of original, copy and originality in a jumble that invites much sifting:

Wang Hui, too refined and independent to follow Dong exclusively, takes over in the show’s fifth gallery to staggering effect: the 22 album leaves,4 of his handscrolls and 10 hanging scrolls show him at work in the 1660s and early 1670s on what his contemporaries called his “great synthesis.” The album leaves show him riffling through the past with completely loose joints, at top speed, constantly shifting the calibration of calligraphy and description. One, after an obscure painter named Gao Kegong, might almost be a Milton Avery. Then the fluency of album pages graduates to the commanding scale of the hanging scrolls, which are as amazing for their stylistic variety as for their individual consistency. They are often paired with photographs of works earlier in the show that Wang copied — reaching back to masters who were themselves reaching back. In “Clearing After Rain Over Streams and Mountains, ” we see the washy dots of Mi Youren stretched apart to intimate a barely-there mountain; in “Autumn Mountains, Red Trees” Wang opens up the tapestrylike denseness of Wang Meng’s “Simple Retreat, ” seen two galleries earlier. Even in those works that hew closely to the originals, there is a tightening and sharpening of compositional or spatial tensions. This show leaves notions of original, copy and originality in a jumble that invites much sifting. It highlights the way artists always strive to equal the greatness of the past, but also to improve upon it, and their faith, as the postmodernist Richard Prince has implied, that making it again makes it new. It also suggests that the desire for newness is something inherent in all people, not just citizens of the West.


9/12/08