Peter Schjeldahl's Incendiary Criticism

Perhaps the most significant essay in Peter Schjeldahl’s great new collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light is “Fireworks,” a sparkling consideration of his enjoyment of things incendiary – bottle rockets, firecrackers, “all manner of blazing gizmos that jump and spin, and fireball-spitting (thup thup thup) Roman candles.” Of bottle rockets, he writes,

A contemporary bottle rocket (“Air Travel” brand, made in Kwangtung) is a two-inch-long cylinder of paper-wrapped propellant and explosive attached to a splinter-thin, nearly foot-long, red-dyed stick. Stand it upright, ideally in a beer bottle, and ignite. Fss. Swish, trailing sparks and smoke. A hundred feet or so up, a flash followed by a crisp bang. Then, if it’s daylight (who can wait for night?), you see the bare red stick drift innocently down.

That last sentence is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! I think “Fireworks” is significant because there are traces of its influence scattered throughout Schjeldahl’s oeuvre. In Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light alone, I detect at least a dozen fireworks-related metaphors. For example:

The buzz of a Friedrich occurs when what have seemed mere tints in tonal composition combust as distinctly scented hues – citron lights, plum darks – and you don’t so much look at a picture as breathe it. [“Caspar David Friedrich”]

Aesthetic sensation inhered in every particle of a world like an explosion, things flying and tumbling. [“Andy Warhol”]

The painting’s violent intelligence detonated pleasure after pleasure. [“Willem de Kooning”]

And none other boasts perhaps his single most satisfying work, the songful One: Number 31, 1950, more than seventeen feet wide: interwoven high-speed skeins in black, white, dove-gray, teal, and fawn-brown oil and enamel bang on the surface while evoking cosmic distances. [“Jackson Pollock”]

I fancied an irritable shudder in the Frick’s sensitively indefinite Chardin, Still Life with Plums (circa 1730), at the blazing Zurbarán’s sudden proximity. [“Zurbarán’s Citrons”]

Looking more than twice her age of twenty-six, the slinky erotic dancer, prostitute, and notorious bisexual preens in a skintight scarlet dress against a blood-red ground – a one-woman general-alarm fire. [“Otto Dix”]

Matisse cross-wires sight with other senses, sparking phantom thrills of taste and smell. [“Henri Matisse – I”]

The show starts slowly, like damp kindling smoldering into fitful flames. [“Henri Matisse – I”]

Matisse burns with resentment for subjects that resist being schemetized. [“Henri Matisse – I”]

His art is fuelled by sex, and it burns clean. [“Henri Matisse – I”]

Cradled in a hammock the other day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere in the world I would rather be, tracking subtle variations in the changing slides: for example, a matchbook first closed, then open, then burning, then, finally, burned. [“Hélio Oiticica”]

The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires. [“Peter Hujar”]

And, of course, there's this memorable line in Schjeldahl's great "Édouard Manet": "The painting goes off like buried erotic dynamite."

Once you’re aware of the “fireworks” motif, you see it everywhere in Schjeldahl’s work. He's pyromaniacal!