Gustav Klimt – Mada Primavesi and Bikini Kill

Generally Klimt’s work is more busy and stylized, but here he keeps it light for a portrait of  9 year old Mada Primavesi. The picture is in The Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC, room 829. It hangs just at the entrance to the thin room devoted to 4 huge paintings. Klimt’s is at least 7 feet tall and the colors shine out of the canvas due to the white of the museum wall that blends almost exactly with some shades of the girl’s dress.

The work probably done to hang in the massive house of Otto Primavesi, her father and successful capitalist. Her defiant pose, legs braced against anything and a fist on her side, could have been on the cover of  Girls to the Front. Mada Primavesi was painted in 1912. There is no background, just colors that we can take to be a purple wall and a white and green floor, or a white river that Primavesi stands astride; either way the focus is clearly on the girl in a statement of power. The portrait is of the daughter of a wealthy banker and industrialist, so her confidence probably comes from her assurance that she won’t ever have to deal with any problems, but given a push in the right direction she could have grown up to wage war against the patriarchy.  She looks like she wouldn’t take any shit from anyone, that could be seen as rich entitlement, but the picture is far more enjoyable if her pose of control is thought of as a conscious push against the society that was oppressing her both as a woman and a child.

Reject all American is Bikini Kill’s second LP and Statement of Vindication is the first track. The subject of the painting, the colors used,  the pose and the size of the piece immediately called Kathleen Hannah to mind. This girl gets what she wants, and she knows that she is not allowed it and it won’t come without a fight.  Reject All American was less abrasive and rawly punk as Pussy Whipped, and wasn’t as refined as Le Tigre. Primavesi is certainly not punk, but she isn’t entirely polished pop either.  She needs the youthful energy and simple songwriting, especially multiple slightly off key vocals, that comes with punk, but needs the edges filled down a bit – she is refined. So the 2nd album by  Bikini Kill makes sense: still young enough to start a bar fight, not old enough to sit down and write an album for a year.

It would be remiss not to include I Busted In Your Chevy Window as an option, as it works equally well, but for different reasons.

Although the argument could be made for Le Tigre’s track Deceptacon which is defiant, bright and has a Devoesque rejection of authority to it.

Ozymandias reconsidered in the light of the Met.

Ozymandias reconsidered.

The poem is familiar; Shelly pened it in 1818 and the final lines are well known.

The jist of it is: A traveler in a strange land, a desert full of ruins, sees the bottom of what was once, judging by it’s foot, a giant statue and a head of a sneering, over-proud God-King. The inscription beneath reads:

“I am Ozymandias king of kings, look upon my works ye mighty and despair.”

The common interpretation of this is that, though the statue’s commissioner intended it to be a monument of their vast power and wealth, it has  become a monument to the ultimate futility of power, laughable as it is against the flow of time. Therefore, ye mighty, look upon the wastes and ruins and despair, because this is what happens to the King of Kings and this is what will happen to you.

However, there is a different interpretation that one could take. A 21^st century impression.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art contains statues of Kings of Kings from 3000 years ago, busts of rulers who were revered as gods and demanded to live forever. If in a glass case there was a giant foot standing on a base, and a stone head that through which hubris, command and authority still shone, then the words “Look upon my works ye mighty, and despair.” Take on the opposite of the accepted meaning. 3000 years later the work is being viewed by tens of thousands of people each year, who marvel at it’s construction, at the craftsman’s skill and {imagine} what the King of Kings must have been.

The mighty now would do well to tremble at that kind of legacy, Ozymandias has achieved immortality, as have Hatsheput, Darius, Alexander and the others who Shelley originally was faulting for their pride in creating vain statues.

In 3000 years we can imagine, Mount Rushmore and the Washington Needle sitting in a gallery with people wondering why Teddy Roosevelt was up there in the first place.
Monuments to the ancient world survive, and in them survive the leaders and the cultures.