CHIMP ART
 

I woke up today not to the twittering of birds but to the 'lament' of Ray Bissonette. Ray, using the closing of the Anderson Gallery as his forum, expounded on the usual but not very creative arguments about abstract art. Ray admits he can't tell the difference between packing material and art, and that a trained chimp has more art sensitivity than some people, But Ray, who knows so much, being a Ph.D. in the medical field, objects to being hung out in the art world without some standards to guide him. He wants to see lines of perspective, see the body shading that will reassure him that it's art. He must have a lot of trouble when it comes to looking at sunsets, trying to decide if one is more interesting or poetic than another, without any perspective lines to help him out. He thinks that every academically taught artist using good technique, creates art. Wake up Ray, there's a lot of bad art on both sides of the fence. Knowing or using good technique does not guarantee the production of a good work of art. Even mother nature is often boring, that's why her great successes are so prominent. Look at Kansas; miles and miles of corn. Nobody frames Kansas. But I'm getting off the track. Ray thinks that only artists get away with undisciplined and fraudulent work. Am I hearing right Ray, you a PH.D. in a profession besieged by law suits, case after case of doctors who study many more years than artists yet still manage to cut the wrong arm off the wrong patient? Look at all the fakes who have managed to pass themselves off as surgeons, right under the noses of other doctors who apparently weren't paying attention. I admit we haven't been able to teach a monkey how to give bad medical advice yet, but they are capable of sign language now, so writing burned, that ple would exceed the size of Kansas, yet the energy produced wouldn't be enough to jump - start Bob Dole's campaign. Most artist work hard at their art. It's usually after working for a living. They do it because they want to or feel they 'have to'. They are rarely successful and almost never able to make a living at it. As a group, they earn one tenth of what doctors or other professionals earn. On occasion they get to hang their work and after much sacrifice, are criticized by art critics or other jackasses. Worse yet, they're just ignored. But their tenacity amazes me. Despite the pitfalls and disappointments, they persist. They plod along, homemade 'aliens' in a society that builds stadiums for millionaires and refuses to care about the homeless. So spare me any more art bashing. If art is to be criticized let it be done by the artists who work at it. And maybe Ray should save his critical judgments for his own profession. It could stand some improvement.

 

CHIMP, AGAIN
Recently someone publicly brought up the old and not very creative arguments about abstract art in order to in some way diminish it. I guess this in some way parallels the kind of thinking that diminishes other races, religions and classes, a kind of thinking that seems to say “ If it's not like me, or I don't understand it, then it must be bad, or fraudulent". Abstract artists are challenged to defend our art, because apparently some people have been fooled by the scribbling of chimp. In other words they have seen beauty or have found these scribbling so interesting that they thought they must have been done by man. It's not unusual for artists to find inspiration where others would find nothing, whether it be in a row of Campbell soup cans, the comics, the disarray of the kitchen sink or table, the aftermath of a storm, or the gore of the slaughter house. Frankly I'm tired of this kind of criticism, and feel that these people are just too lazy to make an effort to educate themselves, or are insensitive to this particular esthetic. It's not a crime but they are looking for a quick fix in a discipline that artist work their whole lives in and never exhaust.

Now I've read a few newspapers in my time, and it's not unusual for people to be fooled by very bizarre schemes, and often more than once. You may think that they were just poor ignorant fools, but professionals in medicine, the stock market, business and even the sciences with all their disciplines have been humbled by frauds. You all remember cases of frauds posing as doctors and surgeons, while fooling the staffs they worked among. Stock schemes abound, and anthropologists remember the 'Piltdown Man' charade. The truth is we don't know how many frauds are out there, in museums, board rooms, or your local medical center. How many real Rembrants exist and how many critics and art directors have been fooled, along with the average museum goer. 

The writer Eudora Welty said “Art is of human origin. And only human understanding, human experience and feeling can respond to it and appraise its meaning." She goes on to say that understanding art can't be instant, that it comes as result of exposure and is part of the growing process. Now the chimp may paint up a storm, but he will never be able to discriminate between which painting is good or bad, or what kind of feeling it may evoke. An artist or other sensitive person may and for this ability he is derided.

So what can you say to these people who continue these attacks on abstract art? I think they should get a life. While their feet are stuck in the mud they act like they're on their pompous high horse, but isn't there a small voice, that 's telling them they are missing the boat. Isn't that what's really bothering them?

 

 

CONCEPTUAL ART: A VICTIMLESS CRIME

A recent survey has shown that artists actually like the police more than art
critics. This could be because artists frequently get panned or ignored by critics but in any case you can't find one when you need one. I didn't want to be confused with the News art critic so I will refrain from littering this terrain with the latest art jargon or consulting my thesaurus. There is a point here somewhere but you’ll probably have to wait to get it. I woke up in the middle of the night and as often happens (the blood can get to the brain easier when prone) I started to mull over last nights foray into the art scene and to wonder what ever happened to the good old days of abstract expressionism when a painting was a painting. I'll have to blame what followed on Andy Warhol's funny idea to make a six hour film of someone sleeping. The idea was great but the film more than a bit boring Now leaping a few years to the present art scene and the proliferation of the “idea" painting, we can see that things haven't changed much. If we were dealing with music it would be easy to understand the relationship of music to word or lyric, how the choral in Beethoven's ninth reinforces the already fantastic and uplifting orchestral part. It even works for Willie Nelson's "On The Road Again". But some times the message and the music are not related and with conceptual art that is often the case. These artists are more wordy than visual. Is their constant use of included text revealing that the visual part can’t communicate or reinforce the message? The blank canvas or page awaits the novel, short story or cartoon. Unfortunately most concept art can't get up to the cartoon level. But its right up the critics alley. They love to chase these art ambulances hoping to get transfused. It's their love, no, adoration of the word, that has them scratching such fertile ground.

 

But why have one word merchant chasing another? It not only sounds incestuous but so much has already been written about most of these ideas and written so much better. Why are we calling it visual art if the visual part doesn't evoke some sort of esthetic, intellectual or emotional experience, or combination of these. Most of these works can be described as lacking craft, being weak, unimaginative, and visually boring. They are often crafty, large and/or motorized, and use projection. They call for attention but as the writer Jim Harrison says 'It's hard to develop the silence and humility necessary for creating good art if you are always yelling “look at me" like a three-year old who has just shit in the sand box.'I am being kind I know, but what is the sense of encouraging this drivel? Tell them they are nice people but they should get serious. Tell them if they want to write grab a pen, it’s cheaper and takes up less space. Tell them that if they want to paint to cultivate the space between the eye and brain.

For me the great paintings of history including recent history have never been completely comprehensible, they have always have a sense of depth and mystery that makes coming back a pleasure. But who wants to come back to these less than two dimensional products? Are we to believe that Mortimer Snerd was the progenitor of a race of conceptual artists? Quit boring us or you will force us to move to Cleveland or the north woods of Canada.

I'm not over abstract expressionism. Some of it was crap but in general it was a movement snipped in the bud as art merchants and critics demanded more and more 'development, growth, creativity' from the newly appointed deans of the brush, rushing them and the art scene to its present sad state.
Consider Vito Acconci, who, we are told by our local art guru, is, to say the least a major influence on the art world. He's up there with Andy Warhol, we are told, having grabbed more than his fifteen minutes of fame that Andy promised everyone. His roots are in poetry but he has outgrown that paltry field to become the fast food king of what, not art, that old stuff, but maybe theater. This philosopher vagabond wants to set a record running through the Louvre. While his ideas are interesting in a pathological way, he belongs either in theater (move over Patso ) or a halfway house. I've noticed that theater hasn't laid claim to Vito or any other of the performance or concept genius's and its about time they shared the load, pardon the pun. Hallwalls is the perfect place for Vito although most of the Hallwalls artists are more rooted in realism, expressionism or surrealism than in the abstract or Vito's "art" style. There is the possibility that great things are yet to be done in the old stuff field of art.

 

There are still a few artists trying to make sense of this crazy and tragic dream we call life. And although we gave up hope for the fifteen minutes of fame, we would like to die thinking we left some small footprints, not in the Louvre as we raced through, but maybe in candle illuminated caves. But this kind of serious painting doesn't go over too well with either the general public or the avant garde elite, a strange consensus Years ago the late Gordon Smith told me that Arakawa's sculpture wasn't esthetic. That was discouraging, but not surprising seeing that the gallery had then, and still has, gaps in its collection that could be filled by artists with great visions that are in other fine collections yet aren't 'esthetic' enough for the AAG. Even the gallery's concession to Francis Bacon is a poor example of his work. (Our art guru won't bite the bullet either, he won't say the 'M' word referring to Vito's sex act as sexual solitaire, Whimpville, let's not think about the dark or the dirty. But there I go again speaking ill of the dead.)

I think there are some questions to be asked like, are some artists who's art is firmly mired in the mud of the past, being denied their venue because galleries and critics are catering to the 'show biz' quality of this art? Are curators still suffering a short attention span as they press ahead for the bigger and better? It does take time to develop the craft and personal art language necessary for good art and it is important because we don't live in a vacuum, we do need response, reaction and the time to develop our work. I've seen great artists in my time frantically change their work, go from abstract expressionism to pop, op, hard edge, modular, etc., on and on trying to hold on to fickle audience and keep their avant garde galleries. It didn't come cheaply, they lost the time to really develop their art, lost self respect, and more importantly lost their unique vision. And we all lost too! We lost the products of their mature age Acconci will also find himself in the same situation, because time will replace him with the next series of new 'fad art' to sate the ever increasing appetite of the new trend setters.

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THE CONUNDRUM FILE

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 It's hard to start after laying down a title like that. I should call it The Great Conundrum File but that would assume that what I want to write about is great and it really isn't. Most of the articles I've written seem to start at 3 A.M , (It probably it has to do with blood and gravity). I wake up thinking about something, usually art critics and other despots, finally getting out of bed and typing when I get overly amused.

This time it happened when I thought of the word "conundrum". It's such a wonderful word. You can almost hear it rumbling on the horizon, a kind of storm cloud that looks amazingly like a huge Italian sausage. It's the kind of word that would have scared away the white armies had the Indians been able to write it in the sky with smoke before each battle. Unfortunately its meaning carries little power, (maybe we should reassign it a new more mysterious enigmatic meaning). I only thought of it as I started thinking of the boobie trio Newt, Dick, and Rush. Just the thought of them makes me want to go back to bed and that's the conundrum I find myself in; how to write about these nasty fellows when I spend so much time avoiding what they have to say. What I need is a higher pain threshold, and that's probably the problem with most liberals. I suggest that we take an equal number of hard core liberals and right wingers, put them into a metal cage and attach a few electrodes attached and prove out this theory. Rats won't do, animal rights and all  that . So there are only a few things I know about these guys. One is that Rush has set a new Guinness record for redundancy. Two is that Dick Army must have been named after the fact, and three is Gnewt must have modeled himself after Santa Skrooge.  

 

Born in a humble log cabin in Georgia, Gnewy, as he was affectionately known to his five friends, studied at his computer by candlelight so as to not overload his program. At first he found it hard to succeed, being put through K twice, but then the hard drive kicked in and before you newt it he was working on his masters degree submitting papers titled "Tanner and the Niebelung" and "Hubert Humphry King of the Hill". He was hedging his bets, being unsure of faculty liberal bias. Gnewy was very conscious of his image even in college, and was the first in his class to have hair implants even though he still had a full head of hair. That was what he learned from the Kennedys'; hair pays, but unfortunately that was all he learned. Gnewy lost his first election for class president but did win a disputed bid to be prom queen (charges of ballot stuffing were dropped). This was the springboard to his future political life and we all know the rest of the story. What? You didn't know he streaks his hair with gray? It gave him that professorial aura until he opens his mouth. And what a mouth it is! If opened wide enough you can see directly into Gnewy's brain or whatever. Sometimes he's been criticized for that trick. "He opens his mouth and his brains fall out." That quote from Ronald Re agan, a braIn himself, and one of Gnewy's heroes. R.R., as he's affectionately known to himself, caught Gnewy's attention when he spent 3.5 billion on his first presidential inauguration, He thought that was neat! Awe Inspiring! Boy, if the rabble can take that they can take anything. It was then that Gnewy experienced his first conundrum vision. He could see it on the horizon, like huge Italian Sausage stuffed with accolades, money and notoriety, rolling down the grill of life toward him! "I can be that sausage", thought Gnewy. "I'll be the RobinHood of the rich, The Pope of patronage, and the Poet Laureate of the proletariat." So with those words Gnewy set out to redefine the meaning of greed.

 

After all it worked with conundrum, You have to hand it to him , then you have to give him a hand . He
was a handy sort of guy, especially when it came to strategy. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but didn't he latch onto LBJ's radio station idea, multiplied by thousands, add fifty thousand Rush dittoheads, and feed X million baby boomers the simplistic pabulum they all so richly deserve? Did Gnewy understand and feed on the frustration of the rabble as a great dream of free beer and TV faded? Gnewy knew that American education had failed, that with the rlght formula the pubIic could shoot themselves in the foot, while muttering anti-government slogans, so do the right thing and dissing the environmental movement, the liberal and homeless immigrants, welfare mothers and other easy targets, scapegoats all. "Get those bums out of Washington, and put in someone who will really knowhow to punish us!" "Now," said Newey, "IT'S CONTRAT TIME!" No, not the" contract Gnewy meant the book contract ! Four million dollars for a story I could write in four minutes with a little imagination.

 

Gnewy’s imagination didn't stop with the book deal. He could see solutions to problems were just a matter of mathematics. Birth control is negative, family planning a negative, abortion choice a negative, single mothers a negative; so the answer is obviously orphanages. Positively brilliant. You're right, you never know the whole story, unfortunately it never ends Tax breaks for the rich, defeated minimum wage for the poor, decline of average wage, two working parents (will it soon be necessary to put kids on the payroll) and the short sighted rich get richer as they dismember the base of buying power that gave them the wealth to start with. Let's face it, the classes will soon be defined as the very poor, the middle poor, the uppity poor, the soon to be poor and the worried about being poor. A few middle class disillusioned saps who think they will either be struck by lightning or become rich; the rich and the filthy rich. Oh, I forgot all those middle class people that did so well after years of trickle down economics. Where are they?

 

Worst of all, we have to listen to more rhetoric from the right, splitting the frustrated victims of this greed into self destructing factions. But there may yet be a bit of light on the horizon. Sausage Man may yet split his sides as his appetite increases, and redefined greed comes home to roast.

 

Co-nun-drum  n. a riddle that involves a pun, any puzzling question or problem. 

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CORRUPTION

Last night I awoke after a night of many dreams. I must have had about a dozen, waking at the end of each and falling back to sleep to the next installment, except they didn't seem to be related. They were like the salad I ate for dinner, a little bit of this and that, none of which left much of an impression. Dreams were more respected as another kind of life by natives, but those were probably drug induced, not salad induced, and much more intense. Carlos Castenega wrote of experiences with American Indian guru's and the fantastic drug dreams he had that inspired much of the 'drug research' of the sixties. we're not so lucky today when we can only count on indigestion for a second life.

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You don't want to wake up thinking about indigestion, its another world down there. We kind of ignore thinking about that part of the body and its potential for embarrassment. It's OK to think about the heart, blood stream,
mind, etc., but don't dwell on guts. I did, in my weakened wakening state I recalled stories of an artist friend who had worked in the emergency ward at the county hospital. I'll spare you those stories, but they got me thinking about the 'after life’ and how we are 'prepared' for it. We all know about embalming, blood, formaldehyde, make up and maybe a few other things, but what happens to that lousy salad, burrito, pizza and big mac that helped dispatch you? Do they have a big vacuum, or do they just sew you up and hope for the best. Does the digestive bacteria keep working unaware that they have been laid off (or should we say 'terminated')? If they do keep working then what?  Is this a revenge for being dealt a boring life. And what would they say of you?

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Ever been to a funeral where the dearly departed cut cheese? I haven't, but if you have I'd like to hear from This is where I thought of the word 'corruption', the meaning of which is 'together' and 'to break!. Need I say more? just imagine the poor fellow exploding as an encore to a otherwise uninteresting life. Like he was thinking that sweet Channel Seven, News! ”Yeggs Knock Off Store and Corpse Co-ops Consistently As Funeral Goes Up In Gas", stories to follow”. 

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But as we know these fantasies never happen, unfortunately, instead we
have to endure years of Croatian-Bosnian headlines which make the adjective 'corruption' sound weak. It's better applied to the digestive tract. As we know coroners on rare occasions exhume the dead to examine stomach contents, and the rest of us are destined to be examined by future archaeologists to solve the mystery of the big mac.

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ART HISTORY

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I recently talked to a curator who asked, after seeing my recent work, what the thread was that connected my work. I said that it was probably my interest in using paper, but since then I have reconsidered it. She had only seen the last several years of work and it was hard to see a theme. I did have a history before that including a time that I wasn’t painting.

 

I was a ‘lost’ student who went to college unprepared, almost flunking out my first year. I didn’t find a ‘home’ in art until I got into art school after three years of college and two in the army. My love started with ‘abstract expressionism’, some minimalism then turned dark with influences like Francis Bacon and my contemporaries. It included painting of dark grotesque women and metamorphic themes. I painted, worked for Adele Cohen, became a sixties pseudo hippie, protested the war, traveled thru European art museums and learned how to use my hands. I painted a series of small chairs that morphed, did a play set with Adele for an AKAG play, then started a small gallery with Adele, eventually giving up art to earn a living in remodeling and carpentry. I taught a year of college, managed a small theater, built a solar house with my own hands, taught myself my crafts including plumbing, wood working and electricity and familiarized myself with many materials.

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Later I started a ‘career’ in graphic design and returned to work as an artist although I had never been very far away from art or Adele’s art. I joined the “Martin Luther King Celebration Committee”, sorry that I hadn’t participate in the civil rights movement. With the help of the computer I learned to write a bit, who would have believed that. Later I started to do a book on Adele called “A Life In Art” which was finally published after her death, after six years of frustrations with the help of the Burchfield-Penney. 

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My art went from dark figures, metamorphic abstractions, to series starting with chairs, landscapes, Volkswagens, trees and portraits to reflections on Mexico. Somewhere in there I did a series of drawings called the Kosovo Series, survivors of war. I then turned to war themes using sculpture and project ideas. My first sculpture using black lunch bags was a mock up for “Illusion/Delusion” and was about lives lost in Iraq. That theme was quickly followed by the “War Ongoing Project” again about the real cost of war. That project was the first of my ideas that tried to involve the viewer in the piece. The viewer was forced to part a maze of black bags containing names of the dead to enter into a room full of other emotional materials.

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Bouncing back to a ‘pure’ art form I started a series of sculpture inspired by other artists work but using paper, origami, collage, and other materials and techniques to reform or recreate a new form with new materials including mirrors. My interest in mirrors in art forms again was a way for the viewer to’ participate’ as they became part of the work and the work became more abstract. Mirrors also expanded space as in my mirrored room and the environmental project. They expand both space and imagery. I explain this to show how I bounce between pure and emotionally based art forms. They are both part of who I am.

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I wasn’t the typical artist who developed a life theme in their work. Not a Klein, Rothko or Calcagno, working every day in their studios. I see that there are many artists who have bodies of work that reveals nothing about their lives or the times in which they live. My life and my art are not parallel linier developments. It’s not a theme that runs through my art, it’s my life that runs through it. 

I couldn’t do what my art now requires without my prior experiences of work, materials, techniques and knowledge. I couldn’t have done what I do without my values and my belief in the importance of a life. I believe that my work is a reflection of my life. It’s your life that is important even if it’s your art that you leave behind. Can your art have depth, if your life doesn’t? 

September 7, 2015

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“YOU HAVE TO KNOW WHEN TO FOLD THEM.”

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Thanks, Johnny Cash!

I don’t know where to start. As a young artist I wanted to do ‘serious’ art, you know, life, death stuff and whatever is in between. Loved Kafka, Francis Bacon, Robert Motherwell and Mahler. It still works for me. I wanted my art to carry a message. Being a minimalist was not my thing although I actually did some more or less minimal art while young and looking for a voice. I later ranted about that movement, hoping it would move away. 

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My favorite saying was ‘That’s life!’ not knowing what life was but content with its mystery. I can tell ‘young’ people, and that’s just about anyone now, that life’s a lot shorter than they may think. I’m sure that you don’t even get a fast forward replay before the lights go out. I know this is a poor preamble to what I want to talk about.

Let’s skip down the road to the present where things are darker than Kafka if that’s possible. Darker at least because we’re living it and it’s not between pages. After doing some large work that can be summed up as anti-war or for lives lost in war, my thoughts turned to the environment, global warming and the inevitability of its wrath now starting to be played out. 

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I had worked with Hugh Levick on one of my projects and we cooked up some ideas about a new and huge project to be called ‘Environment/Maze’. The idea was to put viewers or participants through an experience of simulated disaster. That was about 5 years ago when we started pushing that wet and gooey mass up the hill of hope. We did have a lot of encouragement, good advice and interest. There were also many people that gave donations to make it possible.

 

If you are an artist or creative person you know that good ideas, hard work, etc. often end up in the round file. We depend on failure, in fact failure is necessary  to learn from since success often reinforces repetition not creation.
 We have tried many places, here and around the country to find a host for the project with no success. It’s not unusual for large ideas to fail. Real failure is not trying. We see good ideas fail when people think out of the box and expand the perimeter of expected possibilities. Being large (the Maze was designed to be 8,000 square feet) is great until you have to find a place for it. So after several years of work and hope, yet not finding a home for it, we are giving up on the project. Continuing requires more work and energy than I have, as time squeezes my capabilities. Not quite like flying on wax wings I’m hoping that we can find a soft landing and still get the message or maybe messages out.

 

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FUTURE VISION

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I often wonder what I want to be in my next life. They are already predicting that we should have a few professions ready to use in this lifetime. It wasn't that long ago that we needed only one skill, one that we could kind of polish up with a rag called "experience" and later reap the rewards for a job well done.

 

Sometimes this only added up to a gold watch, but the real rewards were getting the kids through school and grabbing a few material goodies along the way. Today one wonders what kind of resume is needed when a college education starts you out at UPS or slinging hash at McDee's. Inventing a "McLoaf (that is a slice of meatloaf with gravy, over a burger with catsup) won't get you too far up the corporate ladder. Yet how are we to prepare for a "future" we can't envision?

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What we need is a new kind of new news program. I'm kind of tired of the latest war, famine, terrorism and Republican victory news that's ready to send me to a Valium farm. It's not only depressing but can't help us with the future, since its just a repeat of the past. Pd like to see newscaster Irv, on Channel 7 be replaced by one of these mystics that have solved crimes all over the country, and with a little help from the stars and planets, give new meaning to the new in News. We already have accepted a woodchuck named "Phil" as a long range forecaster of seasonal change.

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Perhaps a few chirping crickets on the weather would do as good a job for tomorrow's rain or shine. (We already know it will be in the 80's). If this works out maybe Shirley McLaine will anchor the national news, although we may never know what "channel" she's broadcasting on.

 

We don't have to know all the details of the future, we don't want to take all the fun out of living, but there is a lot of good that can come of this, First of all these wonderful seers could tell us who is going to win the Iottery, so the rest of us won't have to waste our money. Secondly they could give us some insider information on the stock market, A few tips could smooth the playing field, although it may be awkward to flip burgers with a portfolio under your arm. Most importantly, we could find out if the Buffalo Bills will ever win a " Superbowl".

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“Future News" probably will never happen. The Republicans wouldn't want us to see ourselves manipulated in the future. I don't know why we even now can't admit the " successes" of trickle down economics, tax cuts and other less brilliant scams. So that's why I've decided that in my next life the best profession I could choose would to be an interviewer like Larry King or Teri Gross. What could be better than spending your time talking to the most interesting people, architects, philosophers, actors, writers, musicians, thinkers and doers, and occasionally a politician. For preparation, you have to do a lot of reading, not too shabby a life style. Larry King is not my first choice. If I have to be someone , I want to be like Charlie Rose, good looking, suave, intelligent, with lots of sex appeal. This I can see would take a major makeover. 

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GLOBAL TOMBSTONE   

   My muse and I often kid about what we would like on our tombstones. Mostly with a sense of humor. We agree that there are several inscriptions that bring out the laughs like “I knew this would happen” and “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go” but the funniest we agree is “I told you I was sick”. 
   

Let’s think about the present where things are darker than Kafka if that’s possible. Darker at least because we’re living it and it’s not between pages. After doing some large work that can be summed up as anti-war or for lives lost in war, my thoughts turned to the environment, global warming and the inevitability of its wrath now starting to be played out. The New York Times recently ran a magazine section, (dressed in black, every page) about where we missed the boat on fixing the oncoming problems of now apparent Global Warming. People realized what was coming down the tracks back in the 70’s, but who would listen. Who, apparently didn’t listen and that dark train seems to be coming faster and faster. We see it every day in the news if we’re not reading the comics. All over the world and in the US, heat, fire, drought, rising waters, famine and migrations are starting an upheaval that apparently goes unnoticed by those not effected directly. We go on with our lives, shopping, getting pedicures, eating and eating, and watching celebrities dance and sing. Hundreds of deaths in India from heat or torrential rain are met with apathy.

 
Epicurean philosophers believed leading a life of pleasure would be the greatest good, the reverse being that a life of pain really sucks. We’re on that road and our choices are few to none. Those who don’t believe in Global Warming support a leader who after many years gave up on the ‘birther’ belief but hasn’t a clue on climate change and won’t, until he’s golfing on a swamp called Mara Largo. Let the good times roll!

Eight years ago Hugh Levick and I got an idea for a project on the environment which we called “Environment/Maze Project” It was a great, very large multi-media piece designed to give the viewer a sense of what it would be like to be in a disaster.  We spent time developing it and more time trying to find a place in the states and elsewhere for it to be set up. We recently gave up on it, running into too much apathy and no senses of urgency. As Johnny Cash sings: “You gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them.”

Even if we were collectively wise and intelligent we would have to accept that our civilization has a limited shelf life. There are too many possibilities out there for disaster beside the man made ones. Dinosaurs made it through two million years without a thought in their heads but when extinction happened it happened very quickly. They didn’t plan ahead, sound familiar? One dinosaur called Frank, I think, was heard to be singing “That’s life, that’s all there is to it.” I wish I didn’t have to quote old songsters, but relied more on historians or philosophers. 

How many billions of years old is the earth? Like rings on trees the strata reveals how tenuous our time here is. If you believe in an afterlife it’s not so bad. Maybe you want to be recycled or if you have enough money shot into  vast space. It’s kind of romantic I think. We want to live forever and I can understand that. Life has been good for some of us and I wouldn't want to trade mine for any other person, rich or famous. On my tombstone, if I had one, maybe it would say “I told you, you should have listened” or “I’ve arrived and no one’s here!” or “Why have women put up with me?” Take that!

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MAKE US GRATE AGAIN

Hey, guys, I woke up this morning with a most brilliant idea. I can make America Great Again! Really! I don’t want to sound like Donald Trump, but really, it could work. It’s simple and unlike the Donald it would mean that we wouldn’t have to build ‘The Wall’.  Nor would we have to stop immigrants from coming over the border, or raise wages for the poor. And the Republicans would get their wish for smaller government, less taxes and a free land grab on some of the best underground wealth around. All these and many more benefits could happen with the proverbial flip of a switch.

 

Have you guessed where I’m going with this? Actually not to far, it’s right below us. Mexico! Yes, we just have to offer Mexico the right to take back all of the land that we grabbed over the pretention of a fight at the Alamo. Reparation’s! I mean that was really a lot of land to grab for a little fight. 

And the Mexican’s, they would jump at the chance to actually own the land that they have been working at so hard, doing all the poor paying jobs that we don’t want to do. That would make them so happy that they would gladly build a wall to keep us out! Some would hate the idea I know. After all some of the richest people in the world are Mexicans. They already own most of Mexican wealth and government. They think rich Americans are slow to get ahead. After all, how hard is it to buy the government and several sport teams to make the poor happy. We tend to think of Mexico as a poor country but they’re not. It’s more like poor people sitting on a rich country.

 

But that’s not the deal. The Deal I would make would be that we would incorporate them into our wonderful democracy! All of their states could become states of the Union. It would mean that we would have to take on a lot more Senators and Representatives but we could pay them less and keep benefits to a minimum. Finally the Republicans can get another chance to reach out, as they proposed after the 2012 election, to all those potential minority voters, people that gladly vote for the ‘dream’ of better jobs and less discrimination. Dream on babies!

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No more ‘Nanny’ problems for politicians. No more trouble finding gardeners. No maid problems. No more trouble with factories being built in Mexico, they would be back in the States! Look at all the great beaches we could now own. No long lines going through customs. There are just too many benefits to name. Look at it this way Liberals; we could get rid of Texas! Ted Cruz too. Maybe we could throw in Utah and Alabama. I could make that deal! I could not only make America great again I could make it ‘Bigger and Greater’.  Might have to change the name a bit, like Amexica or maybe a corporate style name like AMX. Could work!

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Don’t worry about the drug wars, we wouldn’t have any fights about smuggling drugs into the country, we could actually attach them to the free trade agreement and really make out. It’s all plusses! And one more last benefit, the women down here are absolutely beautiful. There is something to say about the Mexican diet combined with high heels. It seals the Deal. Get another life Donald.

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HAPPY COUPLE

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There has been great interest lately in odd life styles. One of the strangest programs brought to mind is the obnoxious TV hour called “Lives of the Rich and Famous”, (you can rub elbows with wealthy people with bad taste via TV) if you can stand Robin What’shisname’s awful voice and accent. This program must have been aborted from between the pages of ‘Architectural Digest’, where they regularly show the houses of celebrities and are use to bad taste. When I started this I was thinking more of the life styles of gay and lesbian couples who want to adopt children or want them by artificial insemination. For some reason ‘normal’ people can’t seem to fathom that gays are just as sensitive, loving and rational as the rest of us. I think they look at them as a kind of ‘pod people’, most definitely alien. These stories come to us through all sorts of media, fodder for fat heads.

To find the most extreme cases of odd life-styles, consult your supermarket library, the tabloids. In my nest life I’d like to write for one of them just to get it out of my system. You have to admit they are the most ‘creative’ form of journalism, it’s just to bad so many people believe the stories. My theory is that after centuries of trying to believe politicians we are susceptible to almost anything. For instance how many of you believed the story about the CIA hiring psychics to solve their intelligence gaps”. Do believe the part about their success rate? Did you believe that our Intelligence Agency was satisfied being wrong eighty five percent of the time? That story, people, originated with the tabs and was later picked up by mainstream press. Here’s another test: did you believe that Nancy Regan had engaged a psychic to plan the president’s day? No? The truth of that story is that it stemmed from a misprint. She had hired a psychic to run what is know as the president’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ as it was so aptly called. That story wouldn’t have caused even a minor stir. Let’s face it, we’re like big gobs of putty, ready to be molded into any form by the most outrageous idea. 

Of course there are some stories that sound wacko but are actually true. You may have noticed that here in the business world where there has been a constant use and upgrading of computers that more and more employees have either brought computers home or had the company set up work stations in the home. Work home or home work as we use to call it has many advantages for the company and one might wonder why the workers have embraced it with enthusiasm. The truth is that may workers like their computers, I mean really like them as one would like a friend. After all they spend many hours looking at the screen and seeing what? Very, very subtly they see their own image reflected in the screen as the background image changes. Not only do they stare at that image they carry on a conversation with it in their minds. You know, they plan their day, make a shopping list, decide on entertainment, vacation, etc., much as we would do with a friend as they fall in love with the computer. I have seen it with my own eyes, this is more than just bonding! On the Internet there are many sources of consultation for users who are having ‘computer’ problems. If you read some of these inquiries they would embarrass you. All these users of the Internet do not have high standards. Some want to ‘cross-use’, others seek ‘group affiliations’. It’s only those with high standards that seek and find the Reverend Digital Disk, that will make this bonding legal in the eyes of the computer community. 
You may ask where is this taking us? 
I DON’T KNOW!

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HEADCHEESE

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I popped into Sybeles coffee house to pick up a latte to go, and inadvertently slid into an on-going conversation about, (you would never guess) - Headcheese! Don't ask me how it had started, I plead innocent. Believe me its not a pleasant subject. The waitress and another customer were discussing, or is it disgusting, what went into it, how gross it looked, who would ever buy it, why any one would make it, etcetera. I interjected my two cents, that I thought it was put together in a clear plastic resin that would last forever. Maybe future anthropologists would use the DNA therein to reconstitute several species. No one would ever buy any of it, (kind of like those fake dishes you see in the windows of oriental restaurants,). I added that I thought that it probably was just baloney before being ground into an unrecognizable mass. At that point I took off with my latte before thing got too ugly.

Later on I started to think about all the strange food we eat, and how we manage to disguise some of it mostly during the cooking and presentation. I remember reading stories as a kid, about ship survivors fishing off rafts and eating the fish raw. Like most kids, I thought that was really awful, but realized that they had to, to survive. Today we have Sushi. At Tops! At Wegaman's a trip to the fish department reveals a huge array of different species. You could imagine that there was a catastrophe at the New York Aquarium, (blame it on terrorists,) so all the tanks were emptied of their contents and sent on ice to Wegman's.

 

There are species we never would have consider eating, not too many years ago. They use to call them 'junk fish' and were thrown back or cooked in a boulebase until unrecognizable Eating junk fish, octopus, calamari or shark, isn't just a trendy thing to do. We're eating them of course because we're running out of the more popular species through over fishing. That and the ever increasing flow of new peoples from other lands bringing in new foods and recipes. Why do you think they call this the 'melting pot', It's because of the introduction of all these new and unusual food forms to throw into our already overflowing boulebase. This country exceeds any other in the world, not necessarily in quality, but defiantly in the variety of foods to eat. I've been to Italy, France, and Greece. The food there is great but its all available on Elmwood Avenue, those and more, not quite the same, sometimes not as good, sometimes better. After a while, even if you're squeamish about some of these varieties you find yourself trying them. You could even get to like them. You could, as long as you stay away from headcheese. Never, never, never!

 

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NOTES ON ITALY

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I just Returned from a trip to Italy where I traveled from Rome to Florence and environs. My biggest disappointment was that the bread was bad. Yes, it was awfulsuspect that this so called bread that I tried to eat is only a 'mock up', an adornment only to be seen not eaten. The same basket is passed from diner to diner, meal to meal, day to day, without ever being eaten. It must be economy, it makes the meal look bigger without adding to the already substantial cost. It wasn't possible to get the price below ten dollars a meal, even in moderate or economical restaurants, so be prepared to pay when you visit the 'cradle of civilization’.

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When you visit a place where tradition seems to be everything, be prepared for an occasional shock. Walking through the narrow winding streets is a little like time travel. These buildings have been around a long time. I have relatives that I know have occupied the same building for well over a hundred years, so I'm sure that some buildings have been in families for centuries. Little Towns sit on hill and mountain tops where they were better able to defend themselves from invaders and unwanted plagues that ran rampant through larger cities and towns. The terrain determined the layout of streets, they were never planned, unless you consider trails left by goats two thousand years ago the inspiration for future development. When you get into Siena, you swear that your in a designed maze and that someone up above is checking your progress and assigning you an I.Q. Travelers should come equipped with a mini computer program to assist or at least a ball of string.

The up-side of all these problems is the art of course. You can now see the "Last Judgment", freshly cleaned, as much as it was when Michelangelo descended the scaffolding and said "One small step for art, one large step for Tourism”. 

I have a couple of favorites that aren’t paid a lot of attention. One is the wooden Mary Magdalene, of Donatello. The figure looks emaciated, dark, eaten away by ants or scorpions. Not the pretty picture of a woman saved by a God. She was an early model of redemption possibly saved from being stoned at that time. Her life may have been interesting before joining the crew of an early religious ‘Merry Pranksters’ but I wouldn’t want to read the book. 

Another gem, in front of all that visit St. Peters but rarely noticed, is the main bronze gates of the Vatican. Huge and all sculpted by different artists. They may not equal the amazing golden ‘Gates of Paradise’ by Lorenzo Ghiberti at the Florence Cathedral Baptistry but two of them caught my eye with very abstract figures flattened out but still revealing form and dimension. Don’t know who did it, but a he was a leader of his time.

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Enough art, let’s eat. Where to go? Anywhere in Tuscany where you can’t find a bad meal even if looking. Stop in any small restaurant and love awaits you. Is there a dish with mushrooms, get it. Pasta cooked perfectly and varieties unknown here. Not a lot of tomato sauce, these are mind exploding recipes brought down in the black aprons of wise old crones, secrets that come from making something out of nothing and finding jewels. 
I love french cooking but ‘Oh you Gal!’

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KANSAS CITY, MO

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There is a massive hurricane going on in Florida but in Independence, Missouri the weather is perfect. There is a Tom Toles cartoon depicting an array of disasters, flood, heat, tornados, etc. and in the flood there are two figures, one asking if it God punishing us. The other says it’s us punishing ourselves. How much will the earth boil before we decide to not only admit it but to take some drastic actions.

My last day in the KC area, and I’m wondering about what I have learned here. Gerry, visiting her family and having a high school reunion brought me into contact with many people that I have found to be more interesting than I would have thought. Last time we were here her family gathered around her sister’s living room. There wasn’t a lot of exchange between me and them, everyone spread over the living room watching the football game and me on the periphery feeling ‘out of it’. This time there was no game and we all interacted exchanging family history, photos and other travel interests.  Warm and personal, it could have been a picture on one of Norman Rockwell’s magazine covers. The closeness of the family would have been the central theme. 

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Independence you may know is the birthplace of Harry Truman and it’s hard not to know that with all of the roads and other places with his name attached. People here know where he worked as a kid, his simple house where his family lived and there is now a huge library with his presidential papers and information on his term as president. Harry no doubt is the reigning hero of Independence. He was a simple man known for his phrase “The buck stops here.” He didn’t mind responsibility and didn’t blame others for mistakes.

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Yesterday we went to the Nelson Atkins Gallery roaming through galleries of old paintings some of which depicted martyrs of religious belief. Today is also September eleventh, 9/11. It’s a day of infamy as on that day over three thousand people died helping several true believers get to heaven. It’s not easy being a believer in a cause to the extent that you can give up your life for that cause. Having a reward of heavenly gifts could help but it’s a lot to justify taking all of those people with you. They felt they were at war with us, a war we weren’t too aware of.

 

Sometimes it’s an automatic reaction, and taking a life to protect yourself or your family is the right thing to do. When that’s extended to protecting your home and country there are many who have and still give up life, love, and future. But I do have a hard time understanding the violence that seems to percolate from the top, politics and religion, down to the streets where tooting your horn can get you into a lot of deep trouble. 

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Politics and war are good bedfellows. We know how war can make us less than we should be. We Americans can’t justify many of out actions. Being aware of that and keeping it in mind should temper our actions especially when we have the upper hand. I blame Truman for dropping the bombs on a country on its knees. It didn’t bother him too much, he never looked back and as he said “the buck stops here.”  That casual action without reflection, without feeling the pain of that action sets the stage for other violence against us. As in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. 

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KING DAVID

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The story goes that King David was a benevolent king and every thing was
hunky-dory until he decided to institute taxes. The people were furious, (not unlike today's reaction), but unsure about how to attribute this action. If David was Gods emissary, how could a good God do this terrible thing? To answer this dilemma the devil was invented| David was the very first world leader to be heard to mutter "The 'debil' made me do it." David either had a speech impediment or hadn't yet been advised by God on how to spell 'devil'. But the crowds knew. They were saying "How the hell" and/or "How the devil does he expect us to pay" Thus in the short space of a day or two both the devil, hell and taxes were created. That's not a bad accomplishment for mankind seeing that it took God a week to create the heavens and earth etc. And look how well that concept has been used.

Before David, if you did something wrong, your friends and neighbors would say "don't do that". Today your neighbors may picket your house with signs saying 'baby killer' or 'polluter' or your name may be attached to a sermon from the pulpit condemning you to a barbecue in the south. That's not so bad when you consider other punishments that were doled out by fellow man. These punishments were usually perpetrated against women, whose capacity to hold another being within them, was seen by men to be a strange and mysterious thing, probably attributable to the devil. Maybe it was even possible that the devil resided within them, and that could explain their bad moods after being abused. That opened up the way for a lot of creative cooking ideas like lake marinating before masting at
the skewer. A little hell on earth, but it saves God aIl that work.
You often hear the right wing decry today's moral degeneration and wish
for the 'good old days'. I wonder if deep down they aren't wishing for the 'fire and brimstone' of that era. If they could get rid of those liberals they could really have a ball, but in lieu of that they have to be 'subtle'. The I right', so wrongly named really latched onto this devil concept. They could see how well it worked in religion, from the crusades to the inquisition, jolly well good! All those feelings against Hitler were soon to find another subject and conveniently it was communism. What a terrible idea and philosophy! Sharing the wealth! That's worse than sharing loafs of bread and some fish, and conflicts with our wonderful ideas of the cream rising to the top, theory of society. Ten percent rich and the rest of the skim clawing away to get up there (It gives them something to do).

After the collapse of that Reagan's 'devil' society, and since the right no longer had the boogie man to scare us into the spending policies of the Reagan era, I thought we could move on to a new time of rebuilding But the right wasn't about to be wrong They created a new devil to take the blame for the results of massive spending under Reagan, That devil was the poor, the unemployed, and the immigrants. They were sucking up the wealth of our society. While the few and getting fewer liberals stood around with their mouths open, the right refashioned the devil. In the attire of the lowest classes. Well, if the bottom of society is the devil, reasoned all those ditto heads, then the top must be the heavenly, most worthy, and most god like of us all. Makes sense. Isn't that why we're all trying to get there. But let's take a look at who's all up there that we want to join. Donald Trump, John Steinbrenner, Leona Helmsley etc., you know all those great people the republicans want to give tax breaks to, the other breaks going to breaking the backs of the disenfranchised. Now we don't want to back 'the wacko right, and other convicted felon' broadcasters into a corner with this logic but isn't this system designed to keep the poor down? Doesn’t Allen
Greenspan keep a lid on the economy, that is, interest rates are raised to keep production down so that the job market won't cause the pressure on wages to rise? In the name of slow inflation we allow the poor no wage inflation. As a matter of policy we create the unemployed, and then blame and punish them so the right can squeeze out more tax breaks for the rich. 

Don't ask the right to explain this, they can only tell you that "the devil made them do it".

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LANDSCAPE

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I've heard that the Native American Indians could more easily define information in a vertical format than the Europeans, who were horizontally oriented. This may be explained by the Indians relationship to and life among the trees. Some tribes, it is said, had names for individual trees.

We immigrants came to this country, already acclimated to a horizontally written language, and used to clearing trees to farm. We made our landscape flat and broad; (the artists horizontal format is also referred to as a landscape format). Today of course many of us live in cities among tall vertical buildings, so our processing of information may be in the state
of confusion, somewhat like that of the Native Americans, coming from the other direction.
But the artists landscape us more than of our relationship to the mother earth. That has become more abstract as we plow the aisles of supermarkets, and blanket our homes against the weather. Even farmers play stocks and other investments. They politic government subsidies in elbows. Painting the traditional landscape seems to be an escape.

 

We are crowded with changing people and ideas and attitudes. Book stores are full of our stories, dreams, fantasies; our thoughts, history, philosophies and memories. They form a wonderful though incomplete mosaic of mankind. The missing titles fascinate and motivate artists, writers and others; we want to finish the work; to know ourselves; to
control our destinies.  Previously written articles that included art, politics, religion
and social observation; usually intermixed. I admit I have an "attitude" and I have some fun with it. I usually try my best to knock the ivory tower, elitist reviewers that make art into a game of sophist ideas. Their altar bears the image of Vito Acconci, their psycho-babble praises “Bel du Jour” as a wonderful joke on the bourgeoisie. Death is preferable to living the life of the art critic for one day.

My objection is that the art scene should be broader, even though each artist must focus and develop his own particular image. Humor, sentimentality, grief, satire, all have their place and should not be excluded. If we are what we eat, then our intellectual diet better include all aspects of this strange and wonderful existence, both the “positive” and the
"negative." It would be very strange if our "footprints” left for future historians didn't reflect the great contrasts between the rich and the poor, the obese and the starving, the free and the oppressed.

Art should be a part of everyone's life, freeing them from the pedantic struggle of daily routines, recreating their lives. The object of this is not to outwit the Japanese; not to develop several Gauguins, but to develop our humanity. Who wouldn't like to strap Newt into a chair and force feed him with shredded Art Voice copies until he shit a little creativity or showed a bit of compassion for the poor. Maybe a diet of art at an earlier age would have helped him and maybe some political talk as part of a larger menu would be good here.

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More roughage! Better processing! We could produce a better product than Vito Acconci.

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