Idiotsheet

GUSTON AND THE ART OF AGGRIEVEMENT

2010-08-19T11:43:00.013-04:00

TRUTH CONTAINS EVERY POSSIBILITY plus or minus negative one. No mere fragment of man's or even God's invention can be declared "the truth" any more than Werner Heisenberg's uncertain glimpse at his own smallest wink of matter can be shadow-boxed in pure certainty.

Humanity searches its treasure and its sanctimony, and grieves at her loss. The well-regarded artist may often attempt to portray this aggrievement, but no artist can ever succeed in portraying the whole truth in a brushstroke or a gimmick. While we may agree that Jackson Pollack is nature, but he is only a small speck of the universe we must synthesize as truth. Enter Philip Guston and his need for stories that point out the path of reconciliation...

"In Flatlands, 1970, the possibilities of this newly won freedom are spread out like a tableau—the possibility, say, of looking back without anger and at the same time being lord of the present. In his earliest works Guston had portrayed the martial activity of the Ku Klux Klan with the necessary gloom and acuity (Conspirators, ca. 1930).

"These killers now appear again on the scene, limbs of corpses paving their way. In fact there is nothing whole in this landscape: a conglomerate of ruinous elements, the result of a devastation that time has revealed. But the protagonists themselves have lost their nether parts like figures in a game whose rules they cannot fathom.

"The seams of their hoods expose the overblown puppets for what they are: the seams show that it is the women in the background who have sustained the masquerade with their handiwork.

"Herein lay Guston's new possibility of coping with everyday violence and terror—by exposing them to ridicule. This could only ensue from an equal portion of brute force and the pseudo-gay, as it has been put to the test here in all deliberateness. The artist did not hesitate to include a bit of self-criticism—in the form of a swollen hand that points to the only intact object, an abstract picture. The sun is also not missing, the sun that later in "Spleen" becomes a trauma. Here it is, together with the pink clouds, an ingredient that lends the scene's gay cynicism the last bit of spice.

"Dore Ashton has worked out how the grotesque was inscribed in Guston's late work, namely, as an expression of his split consciousness vis-a-vis the everyday, political terror and his very real powerlessness as an artist. Kayser, in his book on the grotesque, writes., "The grotesque world is our world—and is not. Horror mixed with smiles has its basis in the experience that our familiar world, seemingly moored in a fixed order turns topsy-turvy, its order nullified." This seems to have been Guston's basic mood these last ten years.

The massive irruption of those hooded figures into his new picture-world speaks a clear language. Whether they gang up before the gates to the city, ride through the neighborhood in open cars, or after a day of work—dismembered bodies piled up in the background as trophies—hold a palaver, their presence seem ubiquitous, almost normal. This is what makes such paintings and drawings so uncanny, that the evil arrives with the greatest matter-of-factness and, as such, seems to be an outright synonym of middle-class citizenry.

"The awareness of his own powerlessness led Guston to put himself into the role of the pursuer. We are suddenly confronted with the hooded man in the studio, holding the unavoidable cigarette in the right, plying the paintbrush with the right. "The idea of evil fascinated me... " Guston said. "I almost tried to imagine I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot?"

"In the last years this grotesque-comic side in his work was to recede more and more, while his dark pessimism about the state of the world grew. This is the period of apocalyptic fantasies like Yellow Light, 1975, or the three versions of a flood (e.g., Deluge II, 1975), from which there is no escape. He recognized his own alter ego in Goya's darkest engraving [sic]: it shows a dog trying in vain to climb a hill while he is being relentlessly buried under sand. (Un perro, 1820-21, Prado, Madrid).

"It is significant that in Guston's late works there is as good as no complete body to be seen, including his self-portraits. Anatomy is reduced to the head. In view of a world out of joint, his feeling of being imprisoned in the role of spectator must have taken over his consciousness more and more. And when some part of the body other than a head damned to watch and suffer appeared, It was no less dismembered. The paintings Feet on Rug, 1978, and Ravine, 1979, among the most agitating of his last years, show just such mutilation.

"The one shows two foot stumps, motionless on a rug specially made for them, before an empty horizon. The other is a ravine into which beetles make their way over what is, in reality, the anatomy between head and shoulder transformed into a topographical formation. These are documents of desolation that have yet found a unique form, testimony to an artist who is painting against his own downfall.

Thus spake Zarathustra. We suspect what Guston suspected. That loss is the it, and it is inside us, tearing its way unto the truth...

THE FETCHING AUDACITY OF PETER SAUL

2010-05-28T13:18:00.007-04:00

This New York Times article on LA artist Peter Saul was handed to me by my friend Cianne Fragione, a fellow artist, with the stipulation that she had the notion that I'f like him, that his work reminded her of my own. Initially, after scanning the one or two images published in the newsprint and reading the article, I decided that I was in mild disagreement with my friend's assessment. No disrespect to Mr. Saul, I just didn't see it. Nearly two years later I found myself desperate to google any information I could find to reassess my artistic relationship to some aging Orange County artist, which is all I could remember about him initially.

PETER SAUL'S ART IS NOT PRETTY, though it has many eye-catching pleasures. Nor is it polite. Indeed, the artist makes zealous efforts to ensure the opposite. In America today, he says in a catalog interview, “there’s a tremendous need to not be seen as racist, not seen as sexist. So I want to make sure I am seen as those things.”

He succeeds. What museum would be the right one for a painting of a knife-wielding O. J. Simpson strapped down for execution as a buxom blond angel points to a blood-stained glove and intones, “This is why you have to die”? Or for a picture of Christopher Columbus slaughtering New World natives who themselves hold platters of chopped human limbs in their arms?

What is the appropriate place for art that stirs together John Wayne Gacy and Angela Davis, Mickey Mouse and Ethel Rosenberg, Stalin and Willem de Kooning, Basil Wolverton and George W. Bush, then spikes the broth with prickly references to capitalism, Communism, homophobia, feminism, Black Power, racism, pedophilia and art-world politics and—last but not least—to the aging, decaying, self-lacerating artist himself?

Depending on who’s looking, Mr. Saul might be seen either to embrace or revile individual ingredients in this stew, though when his art is pressed to declare its loyalties, it gives no unequivocal answers. Indeed, it seems to be answer-averse, a species of painting as agitation, picture-making as button-pushing.

Mr. Saul, who was born in San Francisco, started pushing buttons in the late 1950s when he discovered that although he liked the way certain Abstract Expressionist artists painted, he couldn’t stomach the Existentialist mumbo-jumbo that surrounded their work. So he adopted the brushy style but dumped the pretensions. Instead of spiritual depths, he painted icebox interiors stocked with soft drinks, steaks, daggers, penises and toilets. In the process he created a painterly version—Larry Rivers did the same—of what would come to be called Pop Art.

Peter Saul, now 76, is a classic artist’s artist, one of our few important practicing history painters and a serial offender in violations of good taste. His career, while long, steady and admired, has never exceeded cult status. It’s an example of can’t-see-the-tree-for-the-forest visibility.

Read it all.

You be the judge.

MAGNIFICENT MIST

2009-09-21T21:36:00.012-04:00

THE SHEER ELEGANCE of this young Ukrainian artist and her work leaves me not with tears but with a sudden urge to jump up in the bleacher section and shout until the sky shouts back, but we cannot, now silenced by that pure unblemished admiration only an ancient echo knows...

The accompanying score is nearly perfect.

I am very jealous, and profoundly inspired.

(Please scroll down to stop the automatic sidebar jukebox before starting this video. While VNV Nation might very well lend her performance its due, the medley the artist has chosen to accompany her, enhance perfectly the mood she beseeches us to share...)

TEXT ON THE FLUXUS

2009-06-02T00:17:00.012-04:00

Artistic snares in flux where philosophy flutters and fair guerillas wink.

THIS WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED in the 1997 Fluxus Subjectiv catalogue. The formatting here mimics the original version.

Today there is great interest but also great confusion as to the Fluxus movement;

There are those who keep theorizing about Fluxus.

They say that after Dadaism and Duchamp, Fluxus is "the most radical movement"; those who make a fetish of Fluxus. They collect the trouser buttons by Maciunas, the handkerchief by Beuys or the dirty bath water by Ben;

those who speculate with the Fluxus. "If van Gogh's ear is worth 100.000 million dollars and the bottle rack by Duchamp is worth 300.000 dollar, how much will the water glass by George Brecht then be worth on the fair in Basel in two year's time?"

those who say that the Fluxus movement does only consist of spoiled children who make art by stating that they are against art, who expect to win fame by saying "we are against fame", who want to get back into the Louvre by staying in the bistro vis-á-vis;

those who say, okay, Fluxus is something mad, but still it's better than those who produce works of art for the consumer society;

those who say that Fluxus is rather a story of attitude towards life and art than towards products;

those who say Fluxus is individuals and not works of art;

those who say that Fluxus contradicts itself, that it consists of failures who happen to be succesful just now, anti-art stars;

As far as I am concerned, I think that
Fluxus is not a production of objects, of handicraft articles to be used as a decoration in the waiting rooms of dentists and professionals,
Fluxus is not professionalism
Fluxus is not the production of works of art,
Fluxus is not naked women,
Fluxus is not pop art,
Fluxus is not an intellectual avant-garde or light entertainment theatre,
Fluxus is not German expressionism,
Fluxus is not visual poetry for secretaries who are getting bored.

NO

Fluxus is the "event" according to George Brecht:
putting the flower vase on the piano.
Fluxus is the action of life/music: sending for a tango
expert in order to be able to dance on stage.
Fluxus is the creation of a relationship between life and art,
Fluxus is gag, pleasure and shock,
Fluxus is an attitude towards art, towards the non-art of anti-art, towards the negation of one's ego,
Fluxus is the major part of the education as to John Cage, Dadaism and Zen,
Fluxus is light and has a sense of humor.

Snagged off a page created by Ben Vautier and barely modified with just enough impulse to render this recreation pure fluxus, or not...

THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

2009-06-01T23:10:00.011-04:00

Being a translation of TRAITÉ DE SAVOIR-VIVRE À L'USAGE DES JEUNES GÉNÉRATIONS by Raoul Vaneigem...

[Chapter 20 is from the translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Left Bank Books/Rebel Press, 1983. No copyright claims will be made against publishers of nonprofit editions.]

Chapter 20—Creativity, Spontaneity and Poetry

Human beings are in a state of creativity twenty-four hours a day. Once revealed, the scheming use of freedom by the mechanisms of domination produces a backlash in the form of an idea of authentic freedom inseparably bound up with individual creativity. The passion to create which issues from the consciousness of constraint can no longer be pressed into the service of production, consumption or organization. (1). Spontaneity is the mode of existence of creativity; not an isolated state, but the unmediated experience of subjectivity. Spontaneity concretizes the passion for creation and is the first moment of its practical realization: the precondition of poetry, of the impulse to change the world in accordance with the demands of radical subjectivity. (2). The qualitative exists wherever creative spontaneity manifests itself. It entails the direct communication of the essential. It is poetry's chance. A crystallization of possibilities, a multiplier of knowledge and practical potential, and the proper modis operandi of intelligence. Its criteria are sui generis. The qualitative leap precipitates a chain reaction which is to be seen in all revolutionary moments; such a reaction must be awoken by the scandal of free and total creativity. (3). Poetry is the organizer of creative spontaneity to the extent that it reinforces spontaneity's hold on reality. Poetry is an act which engenders new realities; it is the fulfilment of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence.

1
In this fractured world, whose common denominator throughout history has been hierarchical social power, only one freedom has ever been tolerated: the freedom to change the numerator, the freedom to prefer one master to another. Freedom of choice so understood has increasingly lost its attraction—especially since it became the official doctrine of the worst totalitarianisms of the modern world, East and West. The generalization of the refusal to make such a Hobson's choice—to do no more than change employers—has in turn occasioned a restructuring of State power. All the governments of the industrialized or semi-industrialized world now tend to model themselves—after a single prototype: the common aim is to rationalize, to 'automate', the old forms of domination. And herein lies freedom's first chance. The bourgeois democracies have clearly shown that individual freedoms can be tolerated only insofar as they entrench upon and destroy one another; now that this is clear, it has become impossible for any government, no matter how sophisticated, to wave the muleta of freedom without everyone discerning the sword concealed behind it. In fact the constant evocation of freedom merely incites freedom to rediscover its roots in individual creativity, to break out of its official definition as the permitted the licit, the tolerable—to shatter the benevolence of despotism.

Freedom's second chance comes once it has retrieved its creative authenticity, and is tied up with the very mechanisms of Power. It is obvious that abstract systems of exploitation and domination are human creations, brought into being and refined through the diversion or co-optation of creativity. The only forms of creativity that authority can deal with, or wished to deal with, are those which the spectacle can recuperate. But what people do officially is nothing compared with what they do in secret. People usually associate creativity with works of art, but what are works of art alongside the creative energy displayed by everyone a thousand times a day: seething unsatisfied desires, daydreams in search of a foothold in reality, feelings at once confused and luminously clear, ideas and gestures presaging nameless upheavals. All this energy, of course, is relegated to anonymity and deprived of adequate means of expression, imprisoned by survival and obliged to find outlets by sacrificing its qualitative richness and conforming to the spectacle's categories. Think of Cheval's palace, the Watts Towers, Fourier's inspired system, or the pictorial universe of Douanier Rousseau. Even more to the point, consider the incredible diversity of anyone's dreams—landscapes the brilliance of whose colors qualitatively surpass the finest canvases of a Van Gogh. Every individual is constantly building an ideal world within themselves, even as their external motions bend to the requirements of soulless routine.

Nobody, no matter how alienated, is without (or unaware of) an irreducible core of creativity, a camera obscura safe from intrusion from lies and constraints. If ever social organization extends its control to this stronghold of humanity, its domination will no longer be exercised over anything save robots, or corpses. And, in a sense, this is why consciousness of creative energy increases, paradoxically enough, as a function of consumer society's efforts to co-opt it.

Argus is blind to the danger right in front of him. Where quantity reigns, quality has no legal existence; but this is the very thing that safeguards and nourishes it. I have already mentioned the fact that the dissatisfaction bred by the manic pursuit of quantity calls forth a radical desire for the qualitative. The more oppression is justified in terms of the freedom to consume, the more the malaise arising from this contradiction exacerbates the thirst for total freedom. The crisis of production-based capitalism pointed up the element of repressed creativity in the energy expended by the worker, and Marx gave us the definitive expose of this alienation of creativity through forced labor, through the exploitation of the producer. Whatever the capitalist system and its avatars (their antagonisms notwithstanding) lose on the production front they try to make up for in the sphere of consumption. The idea is that, as they gradually free themselves from the imperatives of production, people should be trapped by the newer obligations of the consumer. By opening up the wasteland of 'leisure' to a creativity liberated at long last thanks to reduced working hours, our kindly apostles of humanism are really only raising an army suitable for training on the parade ground of a consumption- based economy. Now that the alienation of the consumer is being exposed by the dialectic internal to consumption itself, what kind of prison can be devised for the highly subversive forces of individual creativity? As I have already pointed out, the rulers' last chance here is to turn us all into organizers of our own passivity.

With touching candour, Dewitt Peters remarks that, "If paints, brushes and canvas were handed out to everyone who wanted them, the results might be quite interesting". It is true that if this policy were applied in a variety of well-defined and well-policed spheres, such as the theatre, the plastic arts, music, writing, et cetera, and in a general way to any such sphere susceptible of total isolation from all the others, then the system might have a hope of endowing people with the consciousness of the artist, ie., the consciousness of someone who makes a profession of displaying their creativity in the museums and shopwindows of culture. The popularity of such a culture would be a perfect index of Power's success. Fortunately the chances of people being successfully 'culturized' in this way are now slight. Do they really imagine that people can be persuaded to engage in free experiment within bounds laid down by authoritarian decree? OR that prisoners who have become aware of their creative capacity will be content to decorate their cells with original graffiti? They are more likely to apply their newfound penchant for experiment in other spheres: firearms, desires, dreams, self- realization techniques. Especially since the crowd is already full of agitators. No: the last possible way of coopting creativity, which is the organization of artistic passivity, is happily doomed to failure.

"What I am trying to reach", wrote Paul Klee, "is a far-off point, at the sources of creation, where I suspect a single explanatory principle applies for people, animals, plants, fire, water, air and all the forces that surround us". As a matter of fact, this point is only far off in Power's lying perspective: the source of all creation lies in individual creativity; it is from this starting point that everything, being or thing, is ordered in accordance with poetry's grand freedom. This is the take-off point of the new perspective: that perspective for which everyone is struggling willy-nilly with all their strength and at every moment of their existence. "Subjectivity is the only truth" (Kierkegaard).

Power cannot enlist true creativity. In 1869 the Brussels police thought they had found the famous gold of the International, about which the capitalists were losing so much sleep. They seized a huge strongbox hidden in some dark corner. When they opened it, however, they found only coal. Little did the police know that the pure gold of the International would always turn into coal if touched by enemy hands.

The laboratory of individual creativity transmutes the basest metals of daily life into gold through a revolutionary alchemy. The prime objective is to dissolve slave consciousness, consciousness of impotence, by releasing creativity's magnetic power; impotence is magically dispelled as creative energy surges forth, genius serene in its self-assurance. So sterile on the plane of the race for prestige in the Spectacle, megalomania is an important phase in the struggle of the self against the combined forces of conditioning. The creative spark, which is the spark of true life, shines all the more brightly in the night of nihilism which at present envelopes us. As the project of a better organization of survival aborts, the sparks will become more and more numerous and gradually coalesce into a single light, the promise of a new organization based this time on the harmonizing of individual wills. History is leading us to the crossroads where radical subjectivity is destined to encounter the possibility of changing the world. The crossroads of the reversal of perspective.

2
Spontaneity. Spontaneity is the true mode of being of individual creativity, creativity's initial, immaculate form, unpolluted at the source and as yet unthreatened by the mechanisms of co- optation. Whereas creativity in the broad sense is the most equitably distributed thing imaginable, spontaneity seems to be confined to a chosen few. Its possession is a privilege of those whom long resistance to Power has endowed with a consciousness of their own value as individuals. In revolutionary moments this means the majority; in other periods, when the old mole works unseen, day by day, it is still more people than one might think. For so long as the light of creativity continues to shine spontaneity has a chance.

"The new artist protests", wrote Tzara in 1919. "He no longer paints: he creates directly." The new artists of the future, constructors of situations to be lived, will undoubtedly have immediacy as their most succinct—though also their most radical—demand. I say 'succinct' because it is important after all not to be confused by the connotations of the word 'spontaneity'. Spontaneity can never spring from internalized restraints, even subconscious ones, nor can it survive the effects of alienating abstraction and spectacular co-optation: it is a conquest, not a given. The reconstruction of the individual presupposes the reconstruction of the unconscious (cf the construction of dreams).

What spontaneous creativity has lacked up to now is a clear consciousness of its poetry. The commonsense view has always treated spontaneity as a primary state, and initial stage in need of theoretical adaptation, of transposition into formal terms. This view isolates spontaneity, treats it as a thing-in-itself—and thus recognizes it only in the travestied forms which it acquires within the spectacle (e.g. action painting). In point of fact, spontaneous creativity carries the seeds of a self- sufficient development within itself. It is possessed by its own poetry.

For me spontaneity is immediate experience, consciousness of a lived immediacy threatened on all sides yet not yet alienated, not yet relegated to inauthenticity. The centre of lived experience is that place where everyone comes closest to themself. Within this unique space-time we have the clear conviction that reality exempts us from necessity. Consciousness of necessity is always what alienates us. We have been taught to apprehend ourselves by default—in absentia, so to speak. But it takes a single moment of awareness of real life to eliminate all alibis, and consign the absence of future to the same void as the absence of past. Consciousness of the present harmonizes with lived experience in a sort of extemporization. The pleasure this brings us—impoverished by its isolation, yet potentially rich because it reaches out towards an identical pleasure in other people— bears a striking resemblance to the enjoyment of jazz. At its best, improvisation in everyday life has much in common with jazz as evoked by Dauer—The African conception of rhythm differs from the Western in that it is perceived through bodily movement rather than aurally. The technique consists essentially in the introduction of discontinuity into the static balance imposed upon time by rhythm and metre. This discontinuity, which results from the existence of ecstatic centres of gravity out of time with the musical rhythm and metre proper, creates a constant tension between the static beat and the ecstatic beat which is superimposed on it."

The instant of creative spontaneity is the minutest possible manifestation of reversal of perspective. It is a unitary moment, i.e., one and many. The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself. Consciousness of immediate experience lies in this oscillation, in this improvisational jazz. By contrast, thought directed toward lived experience with analytical intent is bound to remain detached from that experience. This applies to all reflection on everyday life, including, to be sure, the present one. To combat this, all I can do is try to incorporate an element of constant self-criticism, so as to make the work of co-optation a little harder than usual. The traveller who is always thinking about the length of the road before them tires more easily than his or her companion who lets their imagination wander as they go along. Similarly, anxious attention paid to lived experience can only impede it, abstract it, and make it into nothing more than a series of memories-to-be.

If thought is really to find a basis in lived experience, it has to be free. The way to achieve this is to think other in terms of the same. As you make yourself, imagine another self who will make you one day in his or her turn. Such is my conception of spontaneity: the highest possible self-consciousness which is still inseparable from the self and from the world.

All the same, the paths of spontaneity are hard to find. Industrial civilization has let them become overgrown. And even when we find real life, knowing the best way to grasp it is not easy. Individual experience is also prey to insanity—a foothold for madness. Soren Kierkegaard described this state of affairs as follows: "It is true that I have a lifebelt, but I cannot see the pole which is supposed to pull me out of the water. This is a ghastly way to experience things". The pole is there, of course, and no doubt everyone could grab onto it, though many would be so slow about it that they would die of anxiety before realizing its existence. But exist it does, and its name is radical subjectivity: the consciousness that all people have the same will to authentic self-realization, and that their subjectivity is strengthened by the perception of this subjective will in others. This way of getting out of oneself and radiating out, not so much towards others as towards that part of oneself that is to be found in others, is what gives creative spontaneity the strategic importance of a launching pad. The concepts and abstractions which rule us have to be returned to their source, to lived experience, not in order to validate them, but on the contrary to correct them, to turn them on their heads, to restore them to that sphere whence they derive and which they should never have left. This is a necessary precondition of people's imminent realization that their individual creativity is indistinguishable from universal creativity. The sole authority is one's own lived experience; and this everyone must prove to everyone else.

3
The qualitative. I have already said that creativity, though equally distributed to all, only finds direct, spontaneous expression on specific occasions. These occasions are pre- revolutionary moments, the source of the poetry that changes life and transforms the world. They must surely be placed under the sign of that modern equivalent of grace, the qualitative. The presence of the divine abomination is revealed by a cloying spirituality suddenly conferred upon all, from the rustic to the most refined: on a cretin like Claudel as readily as on a St.John of the Cross. Similarly, a gesture, an attitude, perhaps merely a word, may suffice to show that poetry's chance is at hand, that the total construction of everyday life, a global reversal of perspective —in short, the revolution—are immanent possibilities. The qualitative encapsulates and crystallizes these possibilities; it is a direct communication of the essential.

One day Kagame heard an old woman of Rwanda, who could neither read nor write, complaining: "Really, these whites are incurably simple-minded. They have no brains at all." "How can you be so stupid?" he answered her. "I would like to see you invent so many unimaginably marvellous things as the whites have done." With a condescending smile the old woman replied, "Listen, my child. They may have learned a lot of things, but they have no brains. They don't understand anything." And she was right, for the curse of technological civilization, of quantified exchange and scientific knowledge, is that they have created no means of freeing people's spontaneous creativity directly; indeed, they do not even allow people to understand the world in any unmediated fashion. The sentiments expressed by the Rwandan woman—whom the Belgian administrator doubtless looked upon, from the heights of his superior intelligence, as a wild animal&@151;are also to be found, though laden with guilt and thus tainted by crass stupidity, in the old platitude: "I have studied a great deal and now know that I know nothing". For it is false, in a sense, to say that study can teach us nothing, so long as it does not abandon the point of view of the totality. What this attitude refuses to see, or to learn, are the various stages of the qualitative—whatever, at whatever level, lends support to the qualitative. Imagine a number of apartments located immediately above one another, communicating directly by means of a central elevator and also indirectly linked by an outside spiral staircase. People in the different apartments have direct access to each other, whereas someone slowly climbing the spiral stairs is cut off from them.

The former have access to the qualitative at all levels; the latter's knowledge is limited to one step at a time, and so no dialogue is possible between the two. Thus the revolutionary workers of 1848 were no doubt incapable of reading the Communist Manifesto, yet they possessed within themselves the essential lessons of Marx and Engels' text. In fact this is what made the Marxist theory truly radical. The objective conditions of the worker, expressed by the Manifesto on the level of theory, made it possible for the most illiterate proletarian to understand Marx immediately when the moment came. The cultivated person who uses their culture like a flame thrower is bound to get on with the uncultivated person who experiences what the first person puts in scholarly terms the lived reality of everyday life. The arms of criticism do indeed have to join forces with criticism by force of arms.

Only the qualitative permits a higher stage to be reached in one bound. This is the lesson that any endangered group must learn, the pedagogy of the barricades. The graded world of hierarchical power, however, can only envisage knowledge as being similarly graded: the people on the spiral staircase, experts on the type and number of steps, meet, pass, bump into one another and trade insults. What difference does it make? At the bottom we have the autodidact gorged on platitudes, at the top the intellectual collecting ideas like butterflies: mirror images of foolishness. The opposition between Miguel de Unamuno and the repulsive Millan Astray, between the paid thinker and their reviler, is an empty one: where the qualitative is not in evidence, intelligence is a fool's cap and bells.

The alchemists called those elements needed for the Great Work the materia prima. Paracelsus' description of this applies perfectly to the qualitative: "It is obvious that the poor possess it in greater abundance than the rich. People squander the good portion of it and keep only the bad. It is visible and invisible, and children play with it in the street. But the ignorant crush it underfoot everyday." The consciousness of this qualitative materia prima may be expected to become more and more acute in most minds as the bastions of specialized thought and gradated knowledge collapse. Those who make a profession of creating, and those whose profession prevents them from creating, both artists and workers, are being pushed into the same nihilism by the process of proletarianization. This process, which is accompanied by resistance to it, i.e., resistance to co-opted forms of creativity, occurs amid such a plethora of cultural goods—records, films, paperback books—that once these commodities have been freed from the laws of consumption they will pass immediately into the service of true creativity. The sabotage of the mechanisms of economic and cultural consumption is epitomized by young people who steal the books in which they expect to find confirmation of their radicalism.

Once the light of the qualitative is shed upon them, the most varied kinds of knowledge combine and form a magnetic bridge powerful enough to overthrow the weightiest traditions. The force of plain spontaneous creativity increases knowledge at an exponential rate. Using makeshift equipment and negligible funds, a German engineer recently built an apparatus able to replace the cyclotron. If individual creativity can achieve suck results with such meagre stimulation, what marvels of energy must be expected from the qualitative shock waves and chain reactions that will occur when the spirit of freedom still alive in the individual re-emerges in collective form to celebrate the great social fete, with its joyful breaking of all taboos.

The job of a consistent revolutionary group, far from being the creation of a new type of conditioning, is to establish protected areas where the intensity of conditioning tends toward zero. Making each person aware of their creative potential will be a hapless task unless recourse is had to qualitative shock tactics. Which is why we expect nothing from the mass parties and other groupings based on the principle of quantitative recruitment. Something can be expected, on the other hand, from a micro- society formed on the basis of the radical acts or thought of its members, and maintained in a permanent state of practical readiness by means of strict theoretical discrimination. Cells successfully established along such lines would have every chance of wielding sufficient influence one day to free the creativity of the majority of the people. The despair of the anarchist terrorist must be changed into hope; those tactics, worthy of some medieval warrior, must be changed into a modern strategy.

4
Poetry. What is poetry? It is the organization of creative spontaneity, the exploitation of the qualitative in accordance with its internal laws of coherence. Poetry is what the Greeks called poiein, 'making', but 'making' restored to the purity of its moment of genesis—seen, in other words, from the point of view of the totality.

Poetry cannot exist in the absence of the qualitative. In this absence we find the opposite of the qualitative: information, the transitional programme, specialization, reformism—the various guises of the fragmentary. The presence of the qualitative does not of itself guarantee poetry, however. A rich complex of signs and possibilities may get lost in confusion, disintegrate from lack of coherence, or be destroyed by crossed purposes. The criterion of effectiveness must remain supreme. Thus poetry is also radical theory completely embodied in action; the mortar binding tactics and revolutionary strategy; the high point of the great gamble on everyday life.

What is poetry? In 1895, during an ill-advised and seemingly foredoomed French railway worker's strike, one trade unionist stood up and mentioned and ingenious and cheap way of advancing the strikers' cause: "It takes two sous' worth of a certain substance used in the right way to immobilize a locomotive". Thanks to this bit of quick thinking, the tables were turned on the government and capitalists. Here it is clear that poetry is the act which brings new realities into being, the act which reverses the perspective. The materia prima is within everyone's reach. Poets are those who know how to use it to best effect. Moreover, two sous' worth of some chemical is nothing compared with the profusion of unrivalled energy generated and made available by everyday life itself: the energy of the will to live, of desire unleashed, of the passions of love, the power of fear and anxiety, the hurricane of hatred and the wild impetus of the urge for destruction. What poetic upheavals may confidently be expected to stem from such universally experienced feelings as those associated with deaths, old age, and sickness. The long revolution of everyday life, the only true poetry-made-by-all, will take this still marginal consciousness as its point of departure.

"What is poetry?", ask the aesthetes. And we may as well give them the obvious answer right away: poetry rarely involves poems these days. Most art works betray poetry. How could it be otherwise, when poetry and power are irreconcilable? At best, the artist's creativity is imprisoned, cloistered, within an unfinished oeuvre, awaiting the day when it will have the last word. Unfortunately, no matte how much importance the artist gives it, this last word, which is supposed to usher in perfect communication, will never be pronounced so long as the revolt of creativity has not realized art.

The African work of art—poem, music, sculpture, or mask—is not considered complete until it has become a form of speech, a word-in-action, a creative element which functions. Actually this is true for more than African art. There is no art in the world which does not seek to function; and to function—even on the level of later co-optation—consistently with the very same will which generated it, the will to live constantly in the euphoria of the moment of creation. Why is it that the work of the greatest artists never seems to have an end? The answer is that great art cries out in every possible way for realization, for the right to enter lived experience. The present decomposition of art is a bow perfectly readied for such an arrow.

Nothing can save past culture from the cult of the past except those pictures, writings, musical or lithic architectures, et cetera, whose qualitative dimension gets through to us free of its form—of all art forms. This happens with Sade and Lautréamont, of course, but also with Villon, Lucretius, Rabelais, Pascal, Fourier, Bosch, Danté, Bach, Swift, Shakespeare, Uccello, etc. All are liable to shed their cultural chrysalis, and emerge from the museums to which history has relegated them to become so much dynamite for the bombs of the future realizers of art. Thus the value of an old work of art should be assessed on the basis of the amount of radical theory that can be drawn from it, on the basis of the nucleus of creative spontaneity which the new creators will be able to release from it for the purpose, and by means of an unprecedented kind of poetry.

Radical theory's forte is its ability to postpone an action begun by creative spontaneity without mitigating it or redirecting its thrust. Conversely, the artistic approach seeks in its finest moments to stamp the world with the impress of a tentacular subjective activity constantly seeking to create, and to create itself. Whereas radical theory sticks close to poetic reality, to reality in process and to the world as it is being changed, art takes an identical tack but at much greater risk of being lost and corrupted. Only an art armed against itself, against its own weaker side—its most aesthetic side—has any hope of evading co-optation.

Consumer society, as we well know, reduces art to a range of consumable products. The more vulgarized this reduction, the faster the rate of decomposition and the greater the chances for transcendence. That communication so urgently sought by the artist is cut off and prohibited even in the simplest relationships of everyday life. So true is this that the search for new forms of communication, far from being the preserve of painters and poets, is now part of a collective effort. In this way the old specialization of art has finally come to an end. There are no more artists because everyone is an artist. The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.

The object created is less important than the process which gives rise to it, the act of creating. What makes an artist is their state of creativity, not art galleries. Unfortunately, artists rarely recognize themselves as creators: most of the time they play to the gallery, exhibitionistically. A contemplative attitude before a work of art was the first stone thrown at the creator. They encouraged this attitude in the first place, but today it is their undoing: now it amounts to no more than a need to consume, an expression of the crassest economic imperatives. This is why there is no longer any such thing as a work of art in the classical sense of the word. Nor can there be such a thing. So much the better. Poetry is to be found everywhere: in the facts, in the events we bring about. The poetry of the facts, formerly always treated as marginal, now stands at the centre of everyone's concerns, at the centre of everyday life, a sphere which as a matter of fact it has never left.

True poetry cares nothing for poems. In his quest for the Book, Mallarmé wanted nothing so much as to abolish the poem. What better way could there be of abolishing the poem than realizing it? And indeed a few of Mallarmé's contemporaries proved themselves rather brilliant exponents of just such a 'new poetry'. Did the author of Herodiade have an inking, perhaps, when he described them as "angels of purity", that the anarchists with their bombs offered the poet a key which, walled up in his words, he could never use?

Poetry is always somewhere. Its recent abandonment of the arts makes it easier to see that it resides primarily in individual acts, in a lifestyle and in the search for such a style. Everywhere repressed, this poetry springs up everywhere. Brutally put down, it is reborn in violence. It plays muse to rioters, informs revolt and animates all great revolutionary carnivals for a while, until the bureaucrats consign it to the prison of hagiography.

Lived poetry has effectively shown throughout history, even in partial revolts, even in crime—which Coeurderoy so aptly dubbed the "revolt of one"—that it is the protector par excellence of everything irreducible in mankind, i.e., creative spontaneity. The will to unite the individual and the social, not on the basis of an illusory community but on that of subjectivity—this is what makes the new poetry into a weapon which everyone must learn to by themself. Poetic experience is henceforth at a premium. The organization of spontaneity will be the work of spontaneity itself.

above copied from: The Scenewash Project.

SUNNY THOUGHTS ON A SUNNY DAY

2009-05-13T10:53:00.010-04:00

I NOTE THAT MY IDIOTSHEET BANNER may need to be updated, but then again the images and historical significance of a former studio space and its impact on my own development as an empirical artist, as opposed to what we may call, a public artist, should qualify it for an extended stay. Two point three years at 52 O Street Studios both strengthened and weakened me as a man on two legs, but the quickening impact of those years, the winsome fellowship of other artists working in the building and the lingering insights of unspeakable enigmas which presented themselves for Solomonic discourse cannot be quantified, except in terms of my own artistic movement, and emotion from which I derive whatever clarity the muse I call GOD, imparts.

This muse is neither male nor female, exists both inside me and outside me, is both grounded in history, and immune to history, for it is personal in nature. I expect one day to make sense of these statements, but today, these fragments are all I have to offer.

But yes, I shall soon begin to post, and comment on my work in this space. All in due time, dear strangers.

ORIGINATING STATEMENT

2009-05-11T10:22:00.017-04:00

Art is not a bargain! Art is available to 5% of our human race at any time. Leonardo da Vinci said it. Communists tried to make art public! Did not work. Andy Warhola even named his art POP art! Did not work either. Art belongs to the ones who deserve it, to the ones who are seeking it.
—Andrey Bogoslowsky, 2009

I SHALL NOT check my generalizations at the door, but am eager to embrace exceptions to those rules of thumb or fluctuating stereotypes which, despite obvious extenuating circumstances, comport with the same reality we expose when we come in out of the rain or choose to enjoy its wetness across our brow.

To paint images without the questioning the tools of meaning is to declare that painting is dead as a medium worth serious consideration in today's terse political climate for the simple reason we find it is historically self-evident that the exertion of all important art is political in nature and in nuture.

That painting is not dead as a medium for communicating the insights and travails peculiar to our own times while admitting that it may very well be classified as undead is a declaration of independence the revolutionary artist must express then sever from the petty crimes committed by those who prefer the spacious cult of idols and pedestrianism. This doesn't mean that happy and beautiful, simple or whimsical pictures cannot or should not be acclaimed in some measure, but to note that one plus one equals two is not quite the same as submitting that negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac over 2a is a solution less formisable.

Thus "painting" as "generalized propaganda" or "cultural artifact" should by definition reflect the "conflicting" forms of representation doing battle for supremacy in order to aptly address the social fissures of today's art pool, and that the painter must strive and push diligently into the breech of whatever fuller truth hides within a depicted situation in historically, as well as contemporary terms, while avoiding the ease of sustained pause at the reflection of fundamentals informed by the strong positivism of the herd instinct, or conversely, the ever hip and trendy faux negationism of more recent movements in the field of artist expression.

I admit, I have not reached a point in my own work where I can say I have mastered my stated objective. But the struggle continues and is as reflexive as expressing wonder that it even rains at all anymore.

ART'S LAST GASP?

2009-05-06T18:24:00.006-04:00

“In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their aesthetic heads up the aesthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland, and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments, and Xeroxed photos. This art deals in received ideas about appropriation, conceptualism, and institutional critique. It’s a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you. Many of these artists have sold a lot of work, and most will be part of a lost generation. They thought they were playing the system; it turned out that they were themselves being played.”

Seems I've been having this thought myself, ever more frequently since abandoning the DC art scene in a hail of sinking financials. Now, several months into my exile, I have created a phlegmatic video short to explain that defection. Glad I've gotten off that whirligig. Still, weaning oneself off ambition and the need to express oneself is difficult.

Indeed, who are the experts, and who are the fakirs?

Read it all.

AN EVENING OF IMPROVISATIONAL BUTOH

2009-04-20T12:17:00.005-04:00

VANESSA SKANTZE | SATURDAY, MAY 21, 2005 - 8PM
AN EVENING OF IMPROVISATIONAL BUTOH

Butoh is a corpse standing straight up in a desperate bid for life.
-Tatsumi Hijkata

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES OF AMBIENT industrial clang. An inspired female performer of the Butoh method of dance. A handful of mostly uninformed cheap-fisted gazers. Enough to tranform an ordinary Saturday night at the MOCA into an extraordinary syntax of human expression.

Originating in Post World-War II Japan, many consider the Butoh dance a mysterious ritual to be interpreted many ways. A contemporary form of dance, Butoh borrows elements from traditional Japanese and many western forms of dance. Variations in form range from the violently flamboyant to the tranquil poetry of a gentle breeze, from the painfully intimate to grandiose levels of spectacle, from subtle improvisation to the splendid choreography of highly stylized gesture. On this lovely spring evening not only did artist Vanessa Skantze introduce her rather intimate MOCA audience to this powerful expression of the spirit, she empowered several overheard to expand our own universes of self-exploration, self-commitment and spacial communication.

We first notice Ms. Skantze, her skin pale, submerged in white body makeup, peering from around a doorway as a sounding fog of metallic minimalism cogent of a busy seaport dock perhaps, announces the dance, her dark, matted tresses lending an air of Nipponese authenticity to this impressive performance. Clothed in a beige slip blending with flesh into similar tones of the gallery walls, the dancer's calm sensuality is never in question but is quietly integrated into the whole fabric of the event. Not all Butoh performers incorporate body makeup, a traditional visual clue of the Japanese arts, though gold, silver, red or black makeup are also common. Many artists choose elaborate costumes with extensive props, a simple leotard or loincloth, while others may perform completely nude. Rumor had it that the loincloth is Ms. Skantze's usual garb but the short slip was adopted for the sake of her parents who were in the audience.

At first, to the uninitiated eye, Ms. Shantze's dance in bare feet seemed to describe a familiar path, a path pitched in the metaphors of the human embryo scooting along the development process, pedantically trapped in a predictable world of darkness and physical limitation. While perhaps visually striking, had this dance remained framed as a dance of the embryo, an all-too-familiar cliche in these post-feminist times, the powerful and muscular limbs of Ms. Skantze could not have delivered the same stark yet writhing emotional glances required by the visual grammars of true innocense at work, anxious curiosity in play, mortal terror in vain, vivid self-awareness on parade - all of which are transformed by an industrialized experience evoked by the convincingly appropriate score arranged by local musician and painter, Andrew Corrigan.

However, this transformation does not rely on the past but builds upon it, insisting upon the present conviction that a naked raw energy is best extrapolated step by step, into a stride, then a glide beckoned into a feverish surge of self-satisfaction. Momentum inches toward an explosion of sarcastic exilaration which holds court before fading away into a wandering repose past the audience into a dark corridor before re-emerging none the wiser. Then collapse. Into the sheer indispensible exhaustion of it all.

It is this ALL that our Butoh dancer portrayed so persuasively.

No, if the first impulse of the observer is to dismiss as ho-hum this performance as yet another birthing passion sequel, the second impulse, that of recognizing one's own struggle with and adaptation to contemporary angst in the universal march toward one's own transformative powers is one of awe and resolve. As pathway on the critical search for joy long lost within the pre-fabricated ruins of an ephemeral culture, a cliche in its own right, the entire slowed down cadence of Ms. Skantze's movement of limb and facial expression becomes sculpture on the spot and furthermore, is the key to unlocking oneself as the witness who serves notice to both the spirit and the body - that life is worth living - that the struggle is merely to be challenged not as an imposter compromising life, but to be embraced and proclaimed in all its proclivities as the very nomenclature of life irrepressible.

In dance terms, an unconventional aspect of Butoh is its movement cadence. Just as important, perhaps more so, is the ritual the dancer undergoes to prepare. A dance which regards with equal measure meditation or martial art training as much as it does conventional dance wisdom, directing energy to the audience from the artspace itself serves both the inclusive nature of the dance and the individual artist as performance medium. Variations in training methods abound. Certain masters focus on a strong physical discipline to initiate a catharsis in the dancer. Indeed, those who have had no training in dance at all generally have the easiest time of it because Butoh teachers tend to stress the need to forget all training other forms of dance require. Masters claim there is no physical technique or common terminology for Butoh since each dance is the unique expression of the dancer, unencumbered by language, tradition, or constraint. The usual Zen doublespeak notwithstanding, there may be something real to grasp here.

It has been said that the development of a dancer or athlete or artist can only occur beyond a certain point if certain qualities already dwell in the aspirant. Thus, not all who try Butoh will excel at it, despite optimistic charms of Butoh theorists dizzy in the heat of pontification. However, this writer was extremely pleased with the performance of the youthful and vigorous Vanessa Skantze, and as she climaxed asprawl the cold gray floor of the gallery, eyes closed, music waning finally to silence, sweat beading, heart pounding, I felt I knew her and she knew me, if just for that fleeting moment before she stands and bows, and I am cast again upon myself, knowing once more that it is in the making of art itself that the victory resides.

Coupled with the realization that even the greatest uncompromised artist of them all can share only a beggar's sample of their genius for public inspiration, perhaps winning a fleeting moment of second-hand motivation in return, we too are moved to utter, "Yes, Virginia, the sweat and the blood and the everlasting life vibrates in the work. Only in the work." And I guess that was the point all along.

—Gabriel Thy

Originally published on the MOCA DC website.

ANDREW WYETH DIES AT 91

2009-01-16T14:36:00.005-05:00

ANDREW WYETH, the popular American painter of rustic landscapes, farmhouses and plain country folk whose pictures evoked a range of feelings and emotions and a nostalgic vision of times past, died at home early Jan. 16 at age 91. No cause of death was reported, according to the Associated Press.

Mr. Wyeth sketched, painted and drew the people and places of Pennsylvania's Brandywine River Valley and the rugged Maine coastal region near Cushing, where he had lived all his life. He died at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, according to Hillary Holland, a spokeswoman for the Brandywine River Museum, the AP reported.

His artistry was of fields and hillsides, wildlife, sawmills, springhouses, farmhands, farm tools, fixtures and furniture. It was symbolic and paradoxical, expressing tranquillity and turbulence, tenderness and rigor, cruelty and compassion. Some of it included such discordant details as hanging animal carcasses, rifles, hunters, meat hooks, peeling paint, cracked ceilings, fallen and sharply sawed or broken logs that conveyed subliminal suggestions of violence and decay, and a sense of loss.

One of the most widely recognized and highly priced American artists of his era, Mr. Wyeth was probably best known for his 1948 painting, "Christina's World," which shows a young crippled woman in a pink dress crawling across a brown field toward a bleak and distant farmhouse. In its degree of familiarity, this picture was once compared with the portrait of George Washington that appears on the $1 bill.

In the 1980s, Mr. Wyeth was the subject of an intense media spotlight for his "Helga" series of 45 paintings and 200 sketches. These pictures, many of them nudes, were the product of hundreds of modeling sessions with a Chadds Ford neighbor, Helga Testorf, over a 15-year period. No one else, not even Mr. Wyeth's wife, had previously known about them, and their disclosure to the public was arguably the art event of the decade.

A household name in the national artistic community since the middle years of the 20th century, Mr. Wyeth rose to prominence in the same period in which the abstract expressionist painters of the New York School were establishing their mark as the mainstream artists of the era.

His work was different. The abstract expressionists did non-representational compositions, characterized by what they said was a spontaneous and self-expressive application of paint. They often worked in bright and flowing colors with flamboyant brush strokes.

Mr. Wyeth painted in pale colors, lighter shades of brown, red, yellow and black, and the shapes and objects in his pictures were concrete and easily recognizable. Houses looked like houses and people looked like people. He favored fall and winter landscapes, which he believed gave the impression of a deeper and unarticulated meaning; his messages were indirectly conveyed. Rarely did he speak or communicate with others in his profession, and in his personal life he tended to be reclusive.

As an artist he was generally considered a realist, but he never accepted that characterization. "In the art world today, I'm so conservative I'm radical. Most painters don't care for me. I'm strange to them," he said in a 1965 interview with Richard Meryman for Life magazine. "A lot of people say I've brought realism back. They try to tie me up with Eakins and Winslow Homer. To my mind they are mistaken. I honestly consider myself an abstractionist. Eakins' figures actually breathe in the frame. My people, my objects breathe in a different way; there's another core—an excitement that's definitely abstract."

To many critics, Mr. Wyeth was out of touch with the primary artistic trends of his time, and the quality of his work failed to merit his popularity with the general public. Nor did it justify the prices people were willing to pay—a collection of Wyeth works including several of the Helga paintings brought $40 million in a 1989 sale.

"Compared to master draftsmen, Wyeth cannot draw," wrote Washington Post art critic Paul Richard in a 1987 review of an exhibition of the Helga paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. New York's Village Voice newspaper called Mr. Wyeth's art "formulaic stuff, not very effective even as institutional realism . . ."

The prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York refused even to display the Helga paintings. "We had an opportunity to show the Helga series. We quite pointedly and as a conscious decision declined to do so," said museum director Philippe de Montebello in 1987.

And so turns the vicious world of art criticism. Note the tone of this obituary, also a product of the Washington Post.

Read it all

SHIMMERING GROTESQUE AND GORGEOUS

2008-12-12T06:20:00.006-05:00

MARLENE DUMAS AT THE MUSEUM of Modern Art in New York City. Folks, this is an exhibition that meets the eye with the same might as a two by four.

Ms. Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer.

The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. She has not substantially varied her subjects or her habit of basing her images on photographs in about 25 years. And when you stand in front of her paintings, far too many other photo-dependent artists come to mind for the pictures to qualify as original. Her work tends too much toward well-done pastiches of ideas and tactics from the last 25 years, primarily Conceptualism, appropriation art and Neo-Expressionism

Ms. Dumas’s stained and brush-worked canvases are lurid in subject or color, and usually both. The subjects include pregnant women; rather monstrous-looking newborns; murdered children and victims of suicide and execution (mostly women); hooded prisoners; forlorn adolescents; bodies in morgues. Each image is served up in a blank, abstract space with handsome trimmings of lush colors and surface action that have their history in Abstract Expressionism and even Color Field painting.

Striking abbreviations and fuzzy blurs make us look twice. Is that woman asleep or dead? Has that naked child been playing with red paint or is that blood on its hands? In many instances such doubts keep you moving between the harsh, suggestive imagery and the brushwork and process, but after a while you may begin to feel a bit manipulated.

Other paintings go for point-blank sensationalism. “Dead Girl” shows just the head and shoulders of a fallen adolescent with blood streaming from her face. Yet in some of Ms. Dumas’s portraits suffering is subtle and implicit, a life sentence and therefore more convincing. In “Moshekwa” the resolute face of a black man fills most of a large canvas with an aura intensified by the shifting tones of his skin, which culminates in a gorgeous patch of dark purple glowing from his forehead like a mark of nobility.

Read the entire NYT review.

GALLERY CLOSES AFTER THREATS

2008-10-08T15:25:00.011-04:00

The following entry is adapted from an earlier quick comment I posted on another website earlier this year after it reported the news that a Berlin gallery had temporarily closed an exhibition of satirical works by a group of Danish artists after six Muslim youths threatened violence unless one of the posters depicting the Kaaba shrine in Mecca was removed.

IT'S ABOUT TIME a few extraordinary Western artists step up to the plate to take a swing or two at this crucial issue. This is a very serious issue in terms of defending our own culture against the egregious assaults made on it by ruthless newcomers with their strange gods and ideas, and since I work in the arts myself, a painter, I know that few artists are tackling the Islamic problem with anything more than fearless silence.

In fact, just the opposite position rules. I'd surmize that 95% of the art being created today in this most political of cities, and I speak from the underground art movement, is frivolous and redundant, lost in fairy tales and harmless charm, and anything remotely "controversial" is dismissed. The so-called controversial art is hardly controversial any more because how many times can Christianity or homophobia or the president be attacked in the generic way that artists depict their hyperventilated disgust with religion, sexual mores, or politics, and it still be new, iconoclastic, or controversial? But with all the world in flames and blood, hovering at the brink of financial crisis, most of the "ruthless honesty" work is anti-American at worst, anti-war (pseudo-lofty) at best, and nothing is ever presented that even hints of global incrimination due the jihadists and their copious allies in shepherd's clothing.

But what can be expected otherwise? The art world, unlike the more recently abducted halls of lower and higher education, has long been the high-browed bastion of the liberal cognoscente, and today's system of wine-tasting galleries and its stiltifying air of mass dementia is now vigorously geared to the boilerplate Left.

Scandal is often the fast track in the whirl to "make" an artist, but history seems to prove that this model holds only when breaking "preferred" molds.

Let's hope Berlin doesn't bend knee to this Islamic nonsense compounded by thuggery. It will only encourage more outrage. Don't we all deserve better than this?

STUDIO GALLERY

2008-07-16T17:49:00.008-04:00

I DELIVERED MY MATERIALS to the Studio Gallery this afternoon. Tonight the membership will jury some 65 selections in considering my application for membership. Studio Gallery is Washington's oldest artist owned gallery, located in a beautiful brownstone in historic Dupont Circle. The director, Adah Rose Bitterbaum, has been most helpful and courteous in guiding me through the application process.

I don't know if I am overwrought in the explanation of process of at the expense of highlighting the transliterative matter of the work itself. Below is the statement I offered along with three canvases 1200 square inches or better, and two smaller 24"x18" ones. In addition to these five paintings, I presented a portfolio of over 60 images—photographic glossy 10"x8" digital prints of other work.

My statement:

I work from the gesture, or rather, wherever my quivering stroke takes the brush.

Each painting I complete is nothing but the conflicted wonderment of an angst-driven subconscious on the prowl for a brutal honesty, urged to sniff out those personal heresies residing somewhere between a humble arrogance and an arrogant humility, harnessing hidden energies which instruct the flow of imagination. Rarely do I start with a pre-conceived notion of what "I would like to imagine" but instead, I struggle against the common elements of mind and materials the status quo presents. So, when painting, I follow the paint from first splash to finished canvas, making choices of color, syntax, and narrative.

Believing I privately owe each image to the Muse of Idea, to the God of Permanent Arrival, my attack of the canvas is best described as a tension-loosening charge of inertia transfixed in sequence as a terse mixture of hesitation, followed by an explosive jolt of fierce joy at what is happening, almost always followed in the end by a weak fear, anxious worry and misgivings until I eventually reach a plateau of reflex gratitude, or flat acceptance of what has transpired.

Concerning the veracity of any paint, I presume that my art begins from a "condition of need" and is a matter of ambiguous perception with carry-on luggage both in sociopolitical and metaphysical terms, and while I often struggle against my operative senses when confronted with an uneasy thought or a complexity I can't easily deconstruct, a certain unexpected beauty and intelligence are often the reward for faith and diligence, hence, each canvas is the physical battleground where an immutable struggle works itself out.

"Does this painting resolve itself in an apt equation? Is it a valid expression of real concerns, rooted in its own space and time and asthethic experience?" I ask. If I affirm that it does on all counts, I accept it as a finished painting, or mixed media work.

As a conflicted idealist, I find myself continually drawn to the manifested contradictions of global society in all its metaphysical flux. I use a strained figure, a rough erratic line, oscillative texture and virilent color to speak of that battleground where art and politics beat each other up while few are they who seem the wiser.

Self-taught, I work full-time from my 52 O Street Studios loft located in the northernmost reaches of the NoMa neighborhood of Washington, DC.

Yeah, maybe a bit too overwrought...

DEFACING ART THE ISLAMIC WAY

2008-07-06T10:02:00.008-04:00

NYC street piece by Swoon before defacement. See below for links.

PRO-TALIBAN MILITANTS in Pakistan have used electric drills to chisel off the face of a massive 7th century Buddha sculpture, raising concerns that hundreds of other Gandhara-era relics located nearby could also be at risk.

The picturesque Swat Valley has become infested with Taliban militants in recent weeks as the influence of the radical Islamic movement sweeps rapidly across northwest Pakistan.

The militants have launched a bloody vice campaign that has left 47 dead, decimated the valley's tourism industry and terrorized the local community. Locals tell ABC News authorities have made no effort to stop the spread of "Talibanization" in a normally peaceful region, often described as "Pakistan's Switzerland."

One Pakistani archaeologist described the Jehanabad Buddha as the second most important Gandhara monument after the Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, which were blown up by the Taliban in 2001.

"For me at least, the Jehanabad Buddha was the most beautiful," said Fidaullah Sehrai, a retired professor of archaeology and a leading expert in ancient Buddhist art.

Buddhism flourished in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 7th century, and the Swat Valley is considered the birthplace of Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism. In his memories, the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang described hundreds of Buddha sculptures, monasteries and stupas in the valley. Only a handful has been excavated so far.

The Jehanabad Buddha watched over a stretch of the ancient Silk Route, said Professor Sehrai, and was believed to offer protection for travelers and traders. It is the second Buddha destroyed by the Taliban in recent months.

Read it all.

Now in New York City, the same sort of art defacement is being charted by an unknown assailant who has been dubbed simply—the Splasher. Two different NYC street artists have had their works scarred recently. Two female artists, known only as Swoon and Gaia have had their work partially sprayed out or marked over in deliberate fashion. Any connection to the NYC phenomenon and the Pakistani one? Probably not, but have no fear. What the Taliban is doing in Pakistan, the keepers of the Koran have done all over the world whenever the Islamic regimes gain a modicum of power over a previous culture.

But let's be clear here, thee is no solid evidence that the defacement has been carried out by Muslims on the prowl. But those Muslim youths who agitate in the shadows against Western targets (evidenced here and here and here) often roam in packs and attack single defenseless victims, male or female.

THE WAKING LIFE

2008-07-05T13:22:00.020-04:00

JUST FOR THE RECORD, my painting is not a hobby, it's a work of pernicious desperation. And to be clear about that, allow me to put it another way. After fifty years of trench warfare, flailing, wounding and being wounded on the battlefield of words, I have chosen another weapon with which to wage battle against those who would demand from me my soul and insist upon my allegiance to any and sunder of these grotesque, viciously competitive arguments contemporary life offers. The inquisitive mind of the diligent seeker hacking through the kudzu of civilization, its sleepwalkers, and its enemies is always at peril. Whether delivered with a calm whisper or a bone-chilling rant, it's the same shouting of which side are you on? It's the same seductive shell game aimed to recruit and implicate, taking you off your own uniquely, sweat-and solace-inspired path. For what? the same old, same old, but now we are substituted a host of new partners who may or may not have one's best interests in mind as they squiggle in pursuit of their own. What rubbish! The Organization. Sanctified. Polished. Well-funded, or NOT. Either way, the trap is set before you.

Where on God's Green Acre is the DMZ in all this ? There is none. Not in one's own home. Not in one's own mind. There's always some entity ready to step up with you to the firing post or down with you in the dirty ditch as long as you agree to pursue the party line. Yes sir. Marching off as to war. Stuffed to the gills with pamphlets and profiteers piled high upon your back.

War and Peace. Brother against brother.

I may cherish and respect them both but only at arm's length. Or I may loathe them with every ounce of integrity I command, but I reject them all as tightly torqued gears of the consumer society, eager to pounce and package me with the same wrapping they adorn themselves. The anti-uniformity packaging is easily pierced with a hard look beyond the surface tension of its delivery system.

Painting, painting exactly as I do, is my own brutalized response to each and every one of them. To quote the poet of my generation, sometimes the devil comes as a man of war, but sometimes he comes as a man of peace. I ask then, where is the false consciousness of those who would portray the Luxmachina of my own aspirations as merely the illusion of a "sensitive" personal constitution?

Not even Pablo Picasso (that asshole) could be ursurped by an ideology's need for famous lynchpins and reputations in their stable of tools and weapons for further recruitment. In a 1945 interview with Jerome Seckler, Picasso explains:

"If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean."

Death may be lonely, but life among the recruiters is far lonelier. Condescension is the law. The only mass movement I am interested in, is the movement of my own mass upon the path I am already storming so as to inspire my own sense of fear, awe and love, disappointment, recovery, crass numerology, entitlement and peace.

For our dear magnificent, delirious Picasso also said, "Painting is not made to decorate apartments, it's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy." (Tery, Picasso, n'est pas officer dans l'Armee francaise, Les Lettres Francaises, March 24, 1945)

Me? I've narrowed it down to occasionally wanting to hang out and talk the talk with fellow painters. To smash the knots governing painting. That's personal. Then there's the whatnot dealers, the galleries, the special collectors. If I have any say so in my future, it is that I want to confine myself to these people. To meet the mark. That's the challenge. Global politics IS about peace. And I think I am already in that combat, and have been for all of my conscious life, with exception of playing soldiers as a kid. But that kidstuff came natural as a result of heritage and culture. Not that it's been easy. I have blood on my hands, maybe, maybe not so much, but it's a life of bruises and egos. We have ALL, each and every one of us, contributed to the crimes of our own natures. Basic sin. We've all had to be dusted off every once in a while. All that is in my blood, and by deed of hand of head. Yours too, no doubt. And as the story goes I am staging myself from a family of pioneers, kings, governors, soldiers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, numbers keepers, carpenters, peach peddlers, drunks, and now, here I am barely in my fifties, but not yet thirty, the eldest son five of a navy piss drunk carpenter and his woman, my mother, a woman trailed by a remarkable track record of dog-eared discontent which become a staple in her childrearing arsenal. Then we rock on into MY generation.

That's the narrative I am poised to paint and weave into my worldview (without appearing passè).

The world is full of stories. I am one. We are another. I don't presume to presume a lot about other people except general nicety, but how so often even that small portion of human kindness is missing. Fortunately, I have my true spruce with Liberty Sue, and a handful of nice friends these days. But friends, well, as Jim Morrison put it, he preferred the feast of friends to the giant family, yet it's been one of the twisted poverties of my own peculiar life to have found neither to be much comfort or strength, both somewhat suspect, both very competent at failing to meet fair chunks of their own words even halfway. But my own corruptions and failures and spotty loyalty (in terms of ALWAYS putting THEM first) across the tracks can't be avoided either.

Go figure. Stuck. Stuckism.

Did I fail to mention that I watched Richard Linklater's Waking Life again this morning? Tough flick. Delivers an existential punch to philosophy framers everywhere they groom themselves. Third or fourth time I guess I've watched it over the years. A tough, intelligent objectivist-collapsing device at endgame. Awesome animation technique that Linklater picked up from a few pioneers.

I'd love to be able to say I can memorize the entire dialogue, do it, and then converse dazzlingly at fashionable dinner parties all across this brave land, but I'm just a painter now, and besides, I pretty much have internalized most of the chicanery, and had done so before sitting for Linklater. But it's still a cheeky flick to check out...

Five elephant trumpets.

Then there's Martine and Norman's Midnight Movie tonight. I do very much want to go, but with Liberty Sue gone to the Florida, me in a dietary rush, so much weight to lose, so little time, I tell myself I can't afford to place myself in a jovial crowd with lots and lots of calories to be passed around, with so much studio work awaiting me. But here's Norman's great plan for tonight:

"In lieu of true independence, Martine and I have decided to celebrate films that said "Fuck you" to standard Hollywood ideals, and are hosting the first of our "Midnight Movie Madness" series. We're kicking it off with the film that has been credited as being the first movie to be intentionally shown at midnight because the distributors had no idea what else to do with it: El Topo.

"This surreal western has been listed as favorites by John Lennon (who actually persuaded a friend to buy the rights and get its first distribution in the U.S. going), directors David Lynch and Samuel Fuller, actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and performers Bob Dylan, Marilyn Manson, and Peter Gabriel. It has been claimed that this movie was the beginning of Gabriel's inspiration for the classic Genesis concept album, 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway'.

So get your late night faces on and come enjoy "El Topo" with us! BYOB and snacks."

See what I mean? It sounds divine and delicious...

I'll decide later. I have a few hours before curtains.

WHY NEO-EXPRESSIONISM?

2008-06-25T16:21:00.016-04:00

THE CONTROVERSY OF THE RISE of American Neo-Expressionism in the very late 1970s, informed by Philip Guston's controversial 1969 show, rooted in the earliest salad days of Julian Schnabel and John Salle has been presented quite charmingly in the book I am currently reading—Art of the Post-Modern Era (From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s). Of course, there was a controversy. Change is always controversial. But what made this ideological controversy a bit different was that the movement's predecessors had declared painting itself completely exhaused, with nothing left to teach, ultimately worthless to the post-modernist sensibility, in fact, dead.

Guston, a first generation abstract expressionist of considerable reputation, helped rescue figurative art from the dustbins of history after coming to consider abstraction as "an escape from the true feelings we have, from the 'raw' primitive feelings about the world—and us in it."

As he put it, "the Vietnam War was what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue. I thought there must be some way I could do something about it. I knew ahead of me a road was laying. A very crude, inchoate road. I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid."

The Canadian-born painter concluded that there was "nothing to do now but to paint my life—my dreams, surroundings, predicament, desperation, Musa (his wife), love, need. Keep destroying any attempt to paint pictures, or think about art. If someone bursts out laughing in front of my painting, that is exactly what I want and expect."

Elsewhere he commented that abstract painting was hiding in mystery. He was bored with all that non-sense, and just wanted to tell stories.

We already know the sensation of Guston's new work. It shocked and disgusted the old guard and its devoted followers but inspired and redeemed the younger breed of new image painters following in his wake, new painters who also rejected the apparent vacuousness of the Warholian pop world then dominating the scene after its own rebellion against the stagnation of abstract expressionism.

What immediately followed were the "Bad" Painting and New Image Painting movements. The breaking down of the social order was reflected in the art world by identifying with "kitsch" and "low" art—considered reactions against the photo-realism and other post-minimalist work of the era.

...an essay in progress, and as the photograph above plainly shows, Gabriel's new studio does meet certain abstract expressionist criteria while he pauses to genuflect to mark the transition from feeling cramped like a passenger class hostage to keying up as an adeptly organized visionary ready to prosper within the framework of the semi-public posture, quite unlike those heady days of the 1980s when I first began to organize myself as an artist, but hardly in earnest...

PHOEBE LEGERE INTERVIEW

2008-06-24T20:54:00.007-04:00

THOSE WERE THE DAYS of simply letting it fly. So what were YOU doing in the 19 Eighties? Well, I was a leather and steel punk rocker with a real day job (more on that later), but I do recall the warm fuzzies when watching untouchable Phoebe Legere's bombshell appearance in the underground cult classic film—Mondo New York. Here's the hot link to that new interview by NYC's White Hot Magazine contributor Kofi Forson.

Also, pictured above is another shot of my new studio at 52 O Street.

LIMPING BACK INTO THE STUDIO

2008-06-24T14:03:00.018-04:00

RECOVERING NICELY, METHINKS. Still hobbling on weak leg, after knee surgery eight days ago, but am back to about where I was just before the surgery, so hopefully it's clear sailing to pain free walking from here.

Sue, with the help of an artist we met at Artomatic, broke down my space on the first day of de-installation. Thanks, though for the offer of help.

Kicking up at the last rites of Artomatic 2008, drinking with Matt and Dana, eh? Well, Sue and I tossed back a few with fellow 52ers—Peter Harper, Adam Eig, and Luke Idsiak—before getting there nearly too late for party favors that Friday night. Ended up hanging with Tariq Rafiq, that new artist friend I just mentioned, up at his space on the 12th floor, closing the place down at 2 AM.

Good luck on the appointment. Meteoric rise through the ranks! Does this mean that you are not a voting member of the board in the interim? Anyways, what do I need to do to formally apply for membership? I've been anxiously awaiting some news on that front since our little chat at the Mayorga a couple of months ago.

A Facebook contact I know in name only) just wrote me a one liner: Do you have any Work that is framed and ready to be hung? I wrote back saying, "well, uh, yes I do but the question is where and when."

Such informality is perplexing to me, but I'm still in the game I suppose. Crap! Just got a return message from this mystery tramp saying only to email him (her) at some new address she (he) posted. That is all that was written.

Fuck it. Another mystery tramp. Where is the literacy in this new crowd of supposed movers and shakers? Email what? I can't read minds, and I so vigorously loathe this tug of war game that everybody seems to play, hiding behind minimal communication skills, I suppose, aiming to gauge the gullibility factor of the prospective fish on the hook.

And then yesterday I was asked by phone to be interviewed by National Public Radio (NPR). But I wasn't at studio, and after learning why I wasn't, she said she didn't think it was worth my while to try to get down to 52 O with only an hour advance notice. I was to be one of three interviews she said, but Stevens [Carter] later said others also were added once the crew got to the building. So I lost out on another rather ample bit of publicity which was building-wide and I, highly recommended, am cast to the wind.

Pulling teeth, dead in the water, strange karmic odor...

But best of luck, Marina, with your own shooting star,

Gabriel

P.S. So I presume you aren't looking to check out the new studio, to see if you want a corner, and general run of the place, or anything like that. Not that I am really looking for someone, but I did promise you an opportunity if you wanted one. I fill the space rather nicely, but I certainly have room for a compatible spirit from the world of paint. If you are no longer interested, please tell me so I can close that particular book for now.

LOOK BUT DON'T REMEMBER

2008-06-03T21:17:00.004-04:00

THERE'S BEEN A GOOD amount of talk recently about photographers in Union Station being told by security guards there that photography is not permitted.

A couple weeks ago, Andy Carvin, a photographer for NPR, was stopped while demonstrating a panoramic camera. Sniffing a story, Fox 5 DC’s Tom Fitzgerald decided to investigate, and while an Amtrak spokesman was telling him that there was no ban on photography, a security guard stopped them and told them to shut down their cameras:

URBAN GRAFFITI

2008-05-24T10:21:00.007-04:00

WHETHER ONE HAS A TASTE for urban graffiti or not, this style of visual expression which found its mark in 1980s New York City is definitely exploding onto the local scene, and is moving from the streets into the art venues and into the home. This year's Artomatic '08 is larded with the stuff, every wall that would otherwise be empty is tagged, so let's cut to the chase. Here's an article with interesting follow-up comments presenting several sides of the question.

MAPPING RAW ESSENTIALISM

2008-05-17T22:07:00.010-04:00

MORRIS WEITZ, IN A GROUNDBREAKING publication entitled "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" took aim at a longstanding notion in art theory called essentialism. This work provoked much debate within the art philosophy community and is part of a larger movement known as anti-essentialism that was popular in the 1950's.

Weitz's piece, however, is arguably the most popular anti-essentialist pieces, as well as one of the most debated pieces in twentieth century aesthetics. Weitz positioned himself against the traditional essentialist methodology and proposed using Ludwig Wittgenstein's family resemblance argument as an alternate method for identifying art objects. Weitz proposed that in asking "what is art?" aestheticians were really asking the wrong question altogether.

The question he believed needed to be fundamentally addressed instead was "what kind of concept is 'art'?" Weitz used this question to propel both his defense of Wittgensteinian family resemblances, as well as his defense of art as an 'open concept.' Weitz is widely considered to have renewed interest within the analytical philosophy for aesthetics, where his claims have been challenged for over fifty years, most famously by Maurice Mandelbaum in the 1965 piece "Family Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts."

Weitz later developed a philosophy of criticism, in which the critic must describe, interpret, evaluate, and finally theorize about the work in question.

What Weitz argued against fell in lock step with much of 20th century thought in every field, including politics. In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must have. This view is contrasted with non-essentialism which states that for any given kind of entity there are no specific traits which entities of that kind must have.

A member of a specific kind of entity may possess other characteristics that are neither needed to establish its membership nor preclude its membership. It should be noted that "essences" do not simply reflect ways of grouping objects; essences must result in properties of the object.

An essence characterizes a substance or a form, in the sense of the Forms or Ideas in Platonic idealism. It is permanent, unalterable, and eternal; and present in every possible world. Classical humanism has an essentialist conception of the human being, which means that it believes in an eternal and unchangeable human nature. This viewpoint has been criticized by Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre and many modern and existential thinkers.

The point of this prologue is to highlight the notion that the foundation upon which the task of art criticism rests depends not on the framework but upon the foundation itself. Thus, we must question ourselves: does our worldview depend upon the incumbent strengths of essentialism (order), or the sprawling mysteries of its detractor (chaos)? In other words, is the universe a world of chaos, or a world of order?

To arrive at the proper response to this question, might we also presume that the world itself should lead us to the correct answer by showing us a living example? But after Heisenberg, despite the fine work of Popper and Hayek, we are still no closer to understanding the smallest particles in the universe, which appear highly ordered at certain phases in time and space, but still fall suspiciously prey to the lure of chaos when observed.

Yet, the question of creativity within the scope of aesthetics must be renewed with each generation. While we seem to have enough experimental data now to show that our minds are deeply involved in the quantum realm, we might inquire of The Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer by Henry Stapp with enough gusto to grab a clue.

We can believe that Stapp is close to something substantial, even essential, when it comes to the mind-body connection. He bases his projections on physics, but is sure to point out that we are not talking about billiard ball (Newtonian) physics anymore, but quantum physics. And we end by grasping not at straws but at the realization that the true nature of quantum physics is psychophysical, and therefore consequential.

But does this new knowledge help us sort out the debate between essentialism and anti-essentialism?

To be continued...

STALKING THE CENSOR V1.0

2008-05-16T10:48:00.001-04:00

Originally published on the Internet by Gabriel Thy, writing for the Scenewash Project in 1997.

AFTER FORTY YEARS OF STUMBLING around like a drunken beggar among the same strategies and tactics this American desert of cultural chaos has subjected its entire population to more or less under the guise of truth and consequences when from a minority perspective (that is to say, of one man, one vote) I must admit in writing that I comprehend this ruthless subjection of the populations to seem more provisionally suggestive of an insane carte blanche rape of both the individual genius and the collective cause by the well-entrenched intellectual forces that be, and so, acknowledging that no idea can set men free when driven by anti-individual political forces in means and ends against populations differing in collective character and individual resolve, I break with them all, and call into organization my own perspective Librahausen.

Understanding that a few paragraphs here will never contain these issues, I nevertheless am occasioned to attempt an hypothesis upon that language which we here in these United States call the Freedom of Speech clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution penned by the founding fathers as good and necessary in the struggle against the long grievous dynamic of official oppression, and its effect on the human spirit.

I am neither trained in law or literature, religion or government, and have no special accommodations in any field save my blue collar, thank God. I am a working man working, working without bail, prestige, or grandiose financial compensation, working with my own feeble hands, working from my own knotted gut, and have little choice as a willing slave to the only mind I can bring to this argument rolling on past the damp eyes of disenchanted generations lost in the fraud, treachery, and deception of free speech as we have learned to practice it, than to argue from that simple perspective only the powerless can argue.

The strong in this country place great faith in their own ability to interpret the past, the present, and the future in terms of what they want to achieve and how they want to achieve it. Despite all pretensions to the contrary the United States Supreme Court seems to operate as the highbrow puppetshow of these antagonistic political bands of strong movers and shakers, legitimizing or muddying each line drawn in the sand of an issue, a court consisting of mere flesh and blood, millions of musty words ratioed by changing tides of popular opinion impetuously tempered with an almost predictable jurisprudence as evidenced by the political cat and mouse games played with the court's occasional vacancies in the way of highly controversial party-line presidential appointments.

The First Amendment is the intimate friend of far left wingers and far right wingers alike. But of course they each find it within their own stormy projected biases the urgency to define both their own and their opponent's objectives, each accusing the other of evil, usually one of perpetuating evil via filth, the other of perpetuating evil via oppression.

Having recently sought insight in a 700-page hardcover called "Girls Lean Back Everywhere, The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius" beautifully researched and compiled by Edward de Grazia, an attorney practicing communications and First Amendment law here in Washington, DC, I am still nevertheless profanely distressed by the situation on both sides of this political equation. Mr. de Grazia comes with many prestigious credentials, was victoriously integral in the landmark Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs literary publishing cases, as well as the "I am Curious—Yellow" Swedish film breakthrough. The title of his book is drawn from a quote a small magazine editor named Jane Heap made at the James Joyce/Ulysses judicial hearing concerning some text in question. Her publication, "The Little Review" was the first to publish excerpts from what she sensed was the first 20th century literary novel masterpiece, and as such immediately felt the strong arm of the public decency law bearers reach out in fierce rebuttal in an attempt to smack down her own artistic sensibilities. The book thoroughly covers all of the major court battles from Zola in 1868 England to all the 20th century debates including Joyce, Lawrence, Nabakov, Miller, Burroughs, Karen Finley, 2 Live Crew, Playboy, Penthouse, and the Seven-Eleven Wars, and right on up through Mapplethorpe and Serrano in an exquisite commentary bulked up by full first hand accounts of the noted judiciary principals, and their hodge-podge of so-called principles. And yet I am still unsure how to approach this position paper.

While I believe in an artist's rights to exploit the tools of language and all media according to her own peculiar vision, I am also dead set against the public funding of this area of life. Zilch. Rock music and stand-up comedy get along without public grants. So can photographers, writers, and painters. If not prepared to give it all, or convince a private source for sustenance, then sorry charlie, tastes good, less filling. A paradigm shift of the ways in which we view both art and its marketplace may be required, but public funding is a sham and a scandal to both artlover and artloather. And while I believe that the artist should be as free to draw from real life as he sees fit, I am also certain that the media, specifically films, TV, and music have detrimentally contributed to the chaos of the past several generations with the sickening decline of the individual consciousness in regards to morals as they pertain to the rights and responsibilities of each human taking part in the great plan America once proclaimed to be, despite all the tax dollars thrown at so-called studies which deliver nothing but party line after party line of inconclusive evidence. Idealistic art is no better.

Jealousy and envy are perpetuated on a very large scale now due to the proliferation of a media which shows how others however mythically portrayed are living better off than they perceive themselves to be living. I would suggest that this everpresent barrage of images, advertisements, storylines, handsome bodies, has made us a very unhappy population, malcontented, bored, and yearning for something more, when in fact even the poorest among us live far better than most throughout the long rattling chains of history.

Understanding that I am adamantly against the right wing pontifications and falsifications with their feeble interpretations of Man, and God, and Law, the issue is not easily thumbnailed. Every thought I render butchers another one a few minutes later. For all the threading of the needle that the Supreme Court has managed through such definitive principles (protections on speech vs. what is not speech, universally obscene and utterly without redeeming social value vs. the community standards or the greatest good test, the unabridged rights of an adult vs.the protection of children), it has proven nothing but its own profound confusion and yet the fear of government reprisal remains as an omnipresent suffocating blanket on artists who have given up on the phoney Walt Disney approach to improving intellectual and political conditions eons ago. Cliches only soothe the uninspired. Every mythshattering inspiration is punished by the authorities of the hour. Wasn't Jesus the Nazarene a mythbreaker, poking fun at the puffed up morality of the religious establishment of his day? And look how he was paid for his efforts.

No, Jesus did not advocate unbridled degeneracy. Quite the contrary. But he held hypocrisy to tough standards. And he knew how to prick a stuffed shirt, and he did so with great strides and quiet enthusiasm. American novelist Norman Mailer is quoted by de Grazia:

Every gain of freedom carries its price. There's a wonderful moment when you go from oppression to freedom, there in the middle, when one's still oppressed but one's achieved the first freedoms. There's an extraordinary period that goes from there until the freedoms begin to outweigh the oppression. By the time you get over to complete freedom, you begin to look back almost nostalgically on the days of oppression, because in those days you were ready to become a martyr, you had a sense of importance, you could take yourself seriously, and you were fighting the good fight. Now, you get to the point where people don't even know what these freedoms are worth, are using them and abusing them. You've gotten older. You've gotten more conservative. You're not using your freedoms. And there's a comedy in that, in the long swing of the pendulum...

And a second excerpt I found fascinating, enigmatically similar while certainly not wholly congruent with my own beliefs on this topic came from none other than President Richard M. Nixon who had this to say after reading the controversial Lockhart National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which he had commisioned:

The Commission contends that the proliferation of filthy books and plays has no lasting effect on a man's character. If that were true, it must be also true that great books, great paintings, and great plays have no ennobling effect on a man's conduct . . . The commission calls for the repeal of laws controlling smut for adults—while recommending continued restrictions on smut for children. In an open society this proposal is untenable. If the level of filth rises in the adult community, the young . . . cannot help but also be inundated. The warped and brutal portrayals of sex . . . could poison the wellsprings of American and Western culture and civilization...the pollution of our civilization with smut and filth is as serious a situation as the pollution of our once pure air and water . . . if an attitude of permissiveness were to be adopted regarding pornography, this would contribute to an atmosphere condoning anarchy in every other field.

Where does this inexplicable conundrum leave this discussion? As a law and order advocate how can I distinguish between what is allowable in a free society and what should be strictly and swiftly squashed or punished to the full extent a civil society has availed itself? I think for most civil libertarians, and I count myself intellectually among this group with a few notable reservations while refraining from membership or advocacy of any political party, public or private organization or sect, perhaps these distinctions are easier to make than for those who abide within religious and political cages vying for prestige and jobs, laboring for some ill-conceived hand-me-down god, or worse, such a restrictive a code of ethics hoisted in the name of freedom as to leave the modern psyche atrophied and floating off unattentive in a thoroughly pathetic and bewitched masquerade of what is known in this country as liberty and justice for all. We wish merely to embrace the unquestionable truth of reality and the unanswerable reality of truth. Freedom of expression is not about simple solutions. It is about the struggle to ask the most expressive questions.

Another angle of aproaching this nation's sticky and intricate questions of freedom and censorship might be useful. Let's consider recent moves to introduce into the American jurisprudence the concept of hate crimes. While the printed word on the heels of the William S. Burroughs/Naked Lunch decision has been effectively freed from judicial interference, a new spin by the liberal lobby with their eagerness to please legislators has cast another dark shadow upon the common sense and equal protection of the law wings of the American populations. In an opposition article published in a small press magazine called "Gauntlet" (no.6), Barbara Beebe, a self-professed "bald-headed, butch, leather jacket-bearing dyke" takes to task this recent wave of anti-crime legislation. Ms. Beebe is also black, and has been a victim of gay-bashing, and so is no stranger to the unfathomable wiles of law enforcement. Noting that everything from cross-burning to verbal bigotry uttered during the commission of a real crime can be and already has entered into various court histories, she nevertheless recognizes a faulty premise when she is confronted by one.

While several higher courts have struck down some of these laws in certain jurisdictions as ordinances "violating free speech because it sought to ban certain viewpoints", the perspective Beebe, a freelance writer with a B.S. in Criminal Justice, brings to this issue is both clarifying and in this author's humble opinion, quite on target. By dubbing this recent wave of hate crime legislation a typical, liberal cover-up, she suspects misplaced motives and simply poor judgement by those who seek to assuage their own consciences or real ability to change the social and economic fabric of the oppressed, but by attempting to placate the masses with more laws in an already over-litigated society, the waters of true freedom only become murkier. She writes:

"Proponents of hate crime legislation assume that one can actually attest and lay claim to hatred or bias by words expressed during the commission of a crime. The fact of the matter is, all crimes are motivated (whether expressed or not) by a form of bias, prejudice or hatred. Dr. Patricia J. Williams is correct when she states that the "attempt to split bias from violence has been society's most enduring and fatal rationalization." What else could motivate crime? What is greed, but the bias toward those who have what you want? There is the well-known modus operandi of robbing the old. They are perceived (as a group) as being physically weak and not well-sighted. If some young punk robs an old lady, in the process calling her an old decrpit hag, is he guilty of a hate crime?

Is something wrong with simply charging him with robbery and calling him the creep he is? Rapists generally rape women they perceive as weak...we're already aware of the possible lurid profanities expressed during a rape. Does what rapists say matter as much as what they've done? Hate crime legislation attempts to punish the motivations and not the crime. The St. Paul, Minnesota case in point: a white kid burns a cross in the yard of the only black people in the neighborhood. What is he charged with? Not trespassing, vandalism, or destruction of property. The poor fool is charged with a hate crime. Fortunately the Supreme Court ruled the ordinance unconstitutional. However, to now charge that same fool with vandalism or trespassing reeks of double jeopardy."

This St. Paul, MN example of the complete absence of social insight in the courts is further exposed to ridicule by the ruling that people who commit "hate crimes" motivated by bigotry may be sentenced to extra punishment without violating their free-speech rights, rendering a foul logic that you can say what you want, but not while committing a crime! Ms. Beebe:

"As ethnic minorities, women, and gay groups scramble to support such legislation, they assumed that they were above reproach due to their status as the oppressed. However, hate crime legislation is being applied to Afrro-Americans, artists, and the poor with a fervor that is frightening. Nineteen-year-old Todd Mitchell, who is black, received a double sentence for inciting the beating of a 14-year-old white youth. The ordinance he was convicted under permits longer prison terms for crimes motivated by racial or other bias. So, what has our fellow learned? The next time you beat whitey, just beat him—don't say a damn thing to him! This is not a viable solution to racial antagonisms."

Barbara Beebe sums up her analysis of these bogus laws by declaring her desire for a judicial system that does not pander to some "high-faluting, legal mumbo-jumbo that requires people to call me a nigger dyke while they kick my ass before I can get some justice." Too often the police merely look the other way when minorities or any disfavored class of crime victim has been assaulted or had a well-legislated crime perpetrated against them. This undoubtedly needs to stop, bringing sense to the laws we already have, and removing the clutter from our system which only confuses the issue, which always remains, liberty and justice for all. Can we use these arguments against hate crime legislation in the discussion against artistic censorship? I believe we can. Just as any man may be thinking to himself while standing on a crowded streetcorner, in an elevator, or strolling down a beach, that "Man what wouldn't I give to fuck the brains out of that good-looking woman over there?", he has committed nothing more than what is at worst a lamentable lust in his heart, and other than an unwelcomed, or depending on the very real physical and psychological features of both parties, the welcomed leer, nothing has transpired. His reaction to that beautiful woman may however work in such a fashion that he is prompted to meet and later marry this wonderful specimen of feminine grace. A verbal rendering of those same thoughts while to a greater degree opens both parties to any number of physical or psychological repercussions, one cannot expect to live in a vacuum created in our own likeness.

Invariably we encounter disagreeable notions perpetrated by the natures of things and the natures of people. The sheer variety of these notions precludes anything but a generalized mechanism for maintaining civic and personal freedoms and responsibilities. Mere legislation, particularly ill conceived legislation does not automatically create serendipity in a hostile environment preserved alone by magistrates and billy clubs without the consent of the governed. Into today's rapidly changing cultural environment, fragmented and aggregate powerful new subcultures are emerging, and it is inevitable that clashes of faith where new sensibilities show themselves laden with conflict should inflict themselves upon the whole.

But aside from the recent pendulum swing of the hate crime movement, and one glaring exception which I shall discuss later, the First Amendment ultilities of free artistic, political, and personal freedom of expression, go unchallenged and its debate has almost been completely removed from the whittling and hairsplitting of censorship judges and lawyers. Almost, as witnessed by the piercing of the envelope on cable television and the recent spate of ideology skirmishes concerning risk-free transmission of information over the Internet, but not so fast!

The Conservatives refuse to rollover and accept the erosion and ultimate loss of what they consider their eminent domain, that is to say, the constitutional power of the government to take private property for government use. In this case I refer to things of the mind. National defense is a ruthless job. Somebody's got to do it. The conservatives are not only willing, but demand to step up to the plate in this matter. As any schoolchild will tell you, war is hell. Bad things happen in war. Even the good guys do bad things. And yet very little is made by these conservatives concerning atrosities, real or imagined, great or small, by these same exact well-positioned conservatives right down to their name, rank, and serial number, of mind, body, and spirit perpetrated in the unimpeachable war for capitalism, or the frigging' holy war in the name of strategic land, mining rights, and oil reserves. Only when that free man, that soldier and those he has fought to protect is living on home soil enjoying his so-called freedoms of mind, body, and spirit, do the conservatives step in to control the vulgar tongues and impulses, purported unnatural and lascivious inner urges, rapacious and murderous options a soldier is trained, daypassed, and for survival ordered to swiftly accomplish, all with highest skill and toughest discipline on the planet marking him for distinction and honor. Is there any wonder we are a confused and nearly hapless society when it comes to knowing ourselves and our special birthrights as free citizens of a free nation?

The fact that the Conservatives act in one direction calls the liberals to the front lines to act in an opposite and equal reaction. The First Amendment suffers when one side seeks nothing but to uphold a basketful of Pollyanna fairy tale criteria as the watermark of what art is supposed to be, and the other side thrives merely by mocking all restraint and traditional standards armed only with flimsy transparent concoctions nearly always presented as art theory while stroking themselves as great liberators of the soul. Am I advocating a watered-down compromise of artistic integrity? No I am not. Integrity must exist before it can be compromised. Two paramount questions come to mind which I must answer with a full dose of integrity in order to resolve this issue within the framework of my own artistic yearnings. By what criteria do I suggest art be judged, and how would I define obscenity as the measure by which a work of art should be rejected?

MISPLACED SENSITIVITY

2008-05-15T19:17:00.022-04:00

©1985Joe Szabo

Racial sensitivity leads to censorship in Philadelphia (1985) after a black mayor accidental firebombs radical headquarters in a Philadelphia residential block.

ON MAY 13, 1985, PHILADELPHIA was in flames. Police attempted to serve arrest warrants to a group of MOVE members who were a nuisance to their neighborhood. The group built a small fort out of their headquarters, boarded up the windows, used megaphones to push their agenda, broadcasted obscenities, and members armed themselves. Police, running into resistence, dropped a satchel bomb to puncture a hole on the house intending to make way for tear gas. The house caught fire. With some delay, firefighters approached the MOVE headquarters trying to put out the flames, but were shot at by members of the controversial group. At one point, a decision was made to allow the building to burn to force out the occupants. The tactic did not work however, and eleven MOVE members, including five children, died in the inferno. The flames quickly spread out of control destroying 60 other homes as well.

That night was the first day that Joe Szabo started drawing editorial cartoons for the Philadelphia Daily News. In the next several days, he drew four cartoons involving the tragedy. Two of them were censored. In one of those, a man standing in the middle of smoldering rubble is uttering to himself:

"It was a damn Goode idea..."

Mayor Wilson Goode was ultimately in charge of the ill-fated operation, and the bombing was widely attributed to his leadership, or the lack of it. The cartoon was said to be in bad taste and was rejected. The other one (above) dealt with the issue of firefighters trying to put out the blaze, but being shot at by the radicals.

The Philadelphia Daily News, in its infinite wisdom, declined publication of the cartoon, reasoning that the MOVE member (on the right) "clearly shows African-American features," and that "it would incite the city's black population." All members of MOVE were black.

Moral of the story: What was the moral? Was it the pernicious silliness of misplaced empathy? The bloated perils of false vulnerability? The entire question of censorship strikes against the desperate urgency that someone or an entire priviledged class of harbored "feelings" or "intellect" must be protected from the honest opinion of another. These people need to learn how to cope, not be coddled as emotional cripples. Except in the special case of children, cerebral men and women should be—both free to express themselves with whatever tools are available to them intellectually as well as interpret for themselves the expressions of others—without this need of special protection. This is the laissez-faire marketplace of ideas we hear so much about, but rarely observe in practice, even as we continue to wallow in the bloody clues of free speech and expressive liberty of ideas.

The stilted practice of politically correctness is a totalitarian practice of social domination that is showing cracks in its armor, particularly in the political sphere. In the case of strident art, I suggest we should all prefer the anarchy of a free language rich in inert symbols that are meaningless until the poetic energies of social collusion create meaning—first among individuals, and engineered to oscillate outward into the clusters of what is nothing more than the miracle of spontaneous and makeshift literacy (Wittgenstein).

Political language is the language of control. Artistic language is the language of transcendence.

We are not talking about the legislating of morality in this essay. We are also not talking about exotic dance moves as titillating exercises in free speech. We are specifically talking about intrinsic human speech and the communicative arts of human articulation using man-made symbols of language and abstract or representative depiction. Do executive bodies have an innate right to forbid certain depictions by free speakers deemed undesirable especially when the ban is not exercised universally for whatever cause (affirmative action, political correctness, hate speech) existing within or beyond the powers of control these executive bodies hold?

This essay is in progress...

EXTERMINATION OF IRAQI ARTISTS

2008-05-12T08:47:00.010-04:00

Mohammed Jafaar, Demonstration, acrylic on canvas, 30" X 24", 2006

One wonders if the website I found this morning in a search for Iraqi work has incriminated these artists who have posted there. The colorful work of these painters is certainly exquisite, if mildly derivative of past Western art movements, but then, the same can be said for most of the contemporary painting populating Western galleries. We however, must not neglect to record our disgust with these code-bound jihadists of every stripe who have crawled out of the rubble of American intervention to murder and oppress their own people, but this is what we are fighting, people, if not over there, then soon in a neighborhood near you. The only strategy left to even the most rigid of peacemakers is the strategy of total victory.

Because this is the jihadist strategy also.

IRAQI SINGERS, ACTORS, AND ARTISTS are fleeing the country after dozens have been killed by Islamic radicals determined to eradicate all culture associated with the West. Cinemas, art galleries, theatres, and concert halls are being destroyed in grenade and mortar attacks in Basra and Baghdad.

According to the Iraqi Artists' Association, at least 115 singers and 65 actors have been killed since the US-led invasion, as well as 60 painters. But the terror campaign has escalated in recent months as both Shia and Sunni extremists grow ever bolder in enforcing religious restrictions on the citizens of Iraq...

In November Seif Yehia, 23, was beheaded for singing western songs at weddings, and painter Ibraheem Sadoon was shot dead as he drove through Baghdad. In February Sunni fighters killed Waleed Dahi, 27, a young actor, while he rehearsed for a play due to open at the Jordanian National Theatre this month.

Those remaining are in hiding as they make preparations to get themselves and their families to safety.

Haydar Labbeb, 35, a painter in Baghdad, said he had received five death threats and an attempt was made on his life as he drove his family home from a wedding. He is now trying to get to Amman in Jordan, where he hopes to continue painting.

'My art is seen by extremists as too modern and offensive to Islamic beliefs,' he said. 'For them, every painting has to be based on Islamic culture. But I am a modern artist.

Culture was encouraged during Saddam Hussein's regime, but no longer. Abu Nur, an Islamic Army spokesman, said: 'Acting, theatre and television encourage bad behaviour and irreligious attitudes. They promote customs that affect the morality of our traditional society.'

Read it all.

ARTOMATIC 2008 OPENS DOORS

2008-05-08T16:04:00.025-04:00

Artomatic 2008: May 9 - June 15, 2008.

WHERE DO YOU WANT THIS KILLING DONE?
We speak with the language of war. We laugh with the language of peace. Knowing that all life is born of crisis, punctuated by brief periods of solace, we also know that after all is said and done, we shall never cheat infinity, nor shall we extinguish the mark of a single thought.
—Gabriel Thy

I MUST ADMIT THAT I WAS LESS than enthusiastic about this year's spectacle of art. In addition to suffering from a bum knee for about a month now, I was disappointed that I didn't even receive a single phone call expressing interest after last year's event at the old Patent Office in Crystal City, and just wanted to stay in the studio and practice the art for which I stand, while the rest of my fellow artists brave the elements of mass hypnosis without me. But this year's event is just five walking blocks from my studio. The logistics of cross-pollination proved inevitable. Even though my knee was ailing, and I await probable surgery, I signed up, paid my entry fee, and plotted for the best of times.

Even though my horizontal allotment last year was more spacious and allowed for a more sophisticated prep job and display, I had already decided to scale down, keeping it simple, and present some of the older work, maintaining the theme portrayed above. I purchased a string of multi-directional lights that were made available by an on-site contractor, but they required a certain level of proficient assembly I avoided by opting for a three-bulb standing lamp I pulled from the studio. Like last year, the scheduling proximity to the 52 O Street Open Studios did nothing to ease an already tense situation.

But I'm hung, and prepared to greet the silence of competition and the noise of public curiosity. My work at this year's Artomatic...

1. Killer Corpse - $375
20”x16”, acrylic on canvas (2005)

2. Risk Management - $350
20”x16”, acrylic on canvas (2005)

3. Future Shock - $1050
36”x36” diptych, acrylic on canvas (2006)

4. Moirae (Klotho, Lakhesis, Antropos) - $350
20”x16”, acrylic on canvas (2006)

5. Manowar Destiny - $350
20”x16”, acrylic on canvas (2007)

According to event historians, Artomatic 2008 will be the largest Artomatic to date with over 1000 visual (2D & 3D), video, musical, and theatrical artists represented. Hosted by the NoMa (north of Massachusetts Avenue) Business Improvement District (BID), Artomatic 2008 will be held on nine floors (more than 200,000 square feet) of the Capitol Plaza I building. The building is located at 1200 First Street, N.E., just one block west of the New York Avenue Metro station, in Washington, DC.

Artomatic opens Friday, May 9, 12PM
Wednesdays and Thursdays: 5PM—10PM
Fridays and Saturdays: NOON—2AM
Sundays: NOON—10PM
Mondays and Tuesdays: Closed

Artomatic closes on Sunday, June 15.

AN ARTIST HANGS HIMSELF

2008-05-06T11:13:00.020-04:00

ONE OF THE MORE interesting mental relics I took away from the recent Open Studios event was a conversation I had with a young fashion designer, probably in her late twenties. She and her male friend were my last visitors of the weekend, two marvelously upbeat African Americans. Almost immediately, we made our way to a painting that only hours later in the post-event gathering down in my studio would capture the attention of a fellow painter, who despite the controversial nature of the painting, was vigorously drawn to the "power and beauty" of it. Of course, as a friend and fellow artist working in the same building for nearly two years now, he might "see" the painting with different eyes.

The painting, perhaps unfinished, depicts an abruptly vivacious nude, a cosmetically-alluring young woman arguably of African origin. Although she is underpainted and defined by highlights of white paint, her face and lips offer little doubt as to her ethnicity. Her right leg is wrapped in several strips of white bandage. From one hand, a clear cup of blue-greenish liquid is being flung. And one breast, at once full and riveting, is painted out in what amounts to an imperfect cadmium yellow triangle, signifying yet another departure from a typically romantic depicture of what is obvious to anyone, a beautiful woman.

Behind this strikingly enigmatic figure is a wide sash of white with no particular objective reference to explain its presence, curving to some undetermined vanishing point behind her back. One might easily imagine this object, this sash of white—perhaps six to eight inches in extrapolated width—as a bolt of cloth extending across the canvas from side to side, whose only purpose would be to cover the woman’s nakedness at some future point in time. However, there is another reason to suggest that this “cloth” has instead, been torn from the woman, as there is a rather wide tear in the fabric.

In the distance beyond the woman and sash is an industrial smokestack with its gaseous plume spilling off into the background. Tossed around this smokestack is a noose, oversized and more in scale to perhaps match the woman’s upper appendage. It is the presence of the noose which in this racially charged environment is doomed to create scandal. There are only two other details in the painting as it currently exists. Etched into the light reddish-brown background in large black hand-painted letters are four words: SLINGS HOT DIXIE CUP, a menacing threat no matter how one slices it, as if to set all the objects of the painting in motion.

As a painter from the Old South of a certain era, stop! Actually that phrase is loaded with meaning that simply does not apply, and rather than use this space to eat away at those preconceptions, let’s revisit my earlier intentions. Let’s return to the young African American woman who visited me in my studio and upon seeing the painting I just described, asked me what the painting meant to me. My response was immediate, and not nearly as evasive as one might accuse, as I returned the volley back to her, “Well, what does it say to you?”

Allow the truth to settle in first. The truth is that situationally when someone coldly demands a “dancing bear” act of storytelling and interpretation on the spot without ever having said a word, positive or negative about a work, I nearly always clutch up, and have nothing to say. If I intuit a feeling that someone likes the work, is truly puzzled by a work after giving it some thought, or absolutely hates a work, and shares something of themselves from ANY of these three perspectives, perhaps in the utterance of merely a single word, I am free from my bondage of initial timidity and mistrust, and can suddenly speak a blue streak.

Sometimes the breakthrough will require a bit more from a particularly baiting individual to open up the floodgates of my daring generosity, for I refuse to be drawn into perfunctory traps, because demands like—tell me about this one—accomplish nothing but resentment in me towards the entire process of dealing with an insensitive or undereducated public, and of course, nothing but dismay and boredom in the individual passersby who's just weathered a half-baked yet wholly conflicted response from the artist himself.

It is my opinion that my work is often complicated, and even conflicted within itself, but it is narrative. As I have put it, I try to layer in as much ambiguity as I can manage. I am not a preacher, nor am I a player in the world of party politics, but my work is nevertheless the result of a lifelong struggle with religious and political concepts. Let’s put it this way—I’m not shallow enough to think I represent all the answers, but I’m inclined to think I’m deep enough to represent interesting questions.

But on this particular Sunday afternoon, this young fashion designer wasn’t about to leave me disgruntled, even though she tried one more time by uttering the same words any artist reluctant to wax beyond the nature of his own chosen art has heard too many times before, “Well, the reason I ask is that a lot of painters usually can tell a story about what they were thinking...”

I interrupted her there. The blue streak had begun, this time in ducking the obvious.

I mentioned industrial lynching, and talked about Wheeling, WV, and the industrial rot there, about my punk rock roots, of never having painted until three years ago, but I had indeed drawn a few conclusions on the wall with magic markers back in the day, about the struggle between the national and the international that had plagued me since I was a young kid down in the south. About the fact, I still believed in America.

She then surprised me with a few remarks. One might surmize that her remarks were aptly colored by the recent ascendency of Barack Obama’s race for the White House only now being tarnished by his beleagured association with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but my instincts tell me she had long carried these feelings inside her. She agreed with me that America is usually much too hard on herself. And that all these ethnic issues Americans sweat and toil to harvest or reject are minor compared to those in other parts of the globe and in world history. Her catchy reality-grounded metaphor of Americans having the same mother by different fathers and the social problems inherent to that situation, was a sparkler in the hands of this boyish painter who wants nothing more than to help bring forth from his generation a new way of looking.

The fashion designer and her friend then left, but only after I was thanked for returning to the visual arts.

I was humbled by youth, and glorified by honesty masquerading as itself. Makes me wonder if there’s enough hope to go around if I keep all I’ve got. And I wonder about the painting. It seems finished, but is it? The real question here is the problem of one group or another claiming ownership of divisive cultural symbols. What I did not give to this vibrant young woman were those thoughts on my mind when I was painting this image—when the noose was finally thrown into the mix, almost the final object to make its way into the scene thus far. Only one item has been added since.

I apologize for my cowardice. Inward cowardice explains the yellow swatch covering the right breast of the woman in the painting. A false stab at false modesty. The artist's own cowardice at the subject matter, the conflict created of not wanting to offend, and yet being compelled to tell the truth as he sees it. The yellow sheep. Chinese and Western zodiac hints. The yellow flag of cowardice is everywhere the artist turns.

He believes that the American race problem is self-perpetuating, and is being driven by false flags. Injustice is one matter, superficially inflated hurt feelings another. The insult industry knows no bounds, and eventually will consume us all. Better that we each look ourselves in the eye, and simply decide to get over it. The old "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" adage is most apropos in the age of creeping censorship of words and images that are historical in nature and common in the contemporary fields of our senses.

A few facts address the dilemma facing the artist. More horse thieves and bank robbers in the American West were hung by their necks to die than the estimated 400 or so blacks who died at the hands of white men in robes at the end of a rope, and yet the noose has become a condemned symbol. In Iran, homosexuals and adulteresses are still hung today, when they are not being stoned to death. Accused spies and traitors were often hung. Several of those involved in the plot and the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination were hung.

In 1776, American patriot, Nathan Hale was hung as a spy by the British. Hale is often attributed with the last words, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

Guilt or innocence simply does not enter into play here. Is the aphorism of "give a man enough rope and he will hang himself" contaminated forever, or at least never to be used in "mixed company" when trying to make the point of which that old saying was meant to convey? Find a better way of stating the same? What silliness!

Solution to this problem? Keep it simple, stupid.

You do not own the noose that hung the horse thief.

And so forth. Yes, this can be scandalous if not treacherous ground to travel, but this is the intelligent thrust of my most idiomatic work. Pushing the envelope of mental restrictions back to more sensible forms I will sometimes use symbols which both confront a problem by its very existence, while also using that symbol to make another point entirely because the use of that symbol is most suited within the framework of my own peculiar visual vocabulary of war and strife, peace and policy thrown into a syntax where nomenclature is multi-dimensional and of no single meaning, so as not to give fuel to those who seek to stir men's souls with pomposity and hatred rather than transcendence and humility.

It is not my intent to be vulgar in my bellicose use of raw nerve images, but rather, my intent is merely to be as precise as a mature work requires. Experiencing the difference between arrogant humility and humble arrogance is key to understanding the narrative of my work. If given the chance to explore, I dare hope I may actually uncover something fresh and revitalizing, something from which we may all find healing through the shared experience of expanding rather than contracting the universe in which we live.

WHERE DO YOU WANT THIS KILLING DONE?
We speak with the language of war. We laugh
with the language of peace. Knowing that all life
is born of crisis, punctuated by brief periods
of solace, we also know that after all is said
and done, we shall never cheat infinity, nor
shall we extinguish the mark
of a single thought.

We are spaceless stars
doing distance, mocking intrigue.

Or perhaps, I have just hung myself.

DUTCH MUSEUM REMOVES CONTROVERSIAL ART

2008-05-04T11:06:00.004-04:00

ONE DOES NOT HAVE TO LIKE or even appreciate this type of art to embrace the seriousness of the question before us today.

If Sooreh Hera had exhibited a series of photographs of homosexual men wearing masks of Jesus and the Apostle John, we could be almost certain that no one would be issuing death threats, nor would John Voll, associate director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, be pontificating about limits to free speech, but the media would instead be scowling with editorials about the dangers of censorship and the growing power of the Christian Right.

John Voll asks: "Can you imagine what would happen if John McCain used the n-word about Obama while campaigning? There are consequences. Free speech is not absolute."

What would happen, Dr. Voll? Oh, that;s easy. We’ve been here before. Would McCain be executed? No. Murdered? Probably not. Threatened with death? Again, probably not. Jailed? No. Vilified in the national press? Certainly. Would he lose the election? Almost certainly.

And that's the key difference. Sooreh Hera is being threatened with death, and the Dutch museum is kowtowing in the face of those threats, bowing to violent intimidation. If they declined to host her work because they found it tasteless and offensive, they would have a case. They have no obligation to host it. But Sooreh Hera should be free to exhibit it wherever she can find a place willing to do so, without having to hide behind a pseudonym and live in constant fear of being murdered. If McCain says something stupid that derails his campaign, Dr. Voll, that's his loss, but it is not illegal to say that word, and should not be, and he should not have to live in fear of being killed if he were to say it.

I say in the article: "The ultimate goal of people making threats is to make it illegal or too dangerous or both for anybody to say anything considered to be insulting to Muhammad or Allah." That is why everyone who does not wish to live under Sharia law should stand against violent intimidation from jihadists, wherever and whenever it manifests itself.

For the third time in four months, the controversial work of an Iranian artist has been suddenly yanked from a Dutch museum exhibition. The artist, who goes by the alias Sooreh Hera and who lives in exile in the Netherlands, said she received death threats after attempting to show her series of photographs entitled "Adam & Ewald, Seventh-Day Lovers." Some of the photographs include depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali in poses that would likely upset any believer in any religion. The most controversial images feature gay men posed in various stages of undress. In one, a man wears leather chaps with his buttocks exposed, wearing a mask of Ali, the son-in law of the prophet Muhammad. In other photo two men are shirtless wearing masks of both Ali (on the left) and Muhammad (on the right).

Museum directors initially planned to display the work of the 35-year-old artist. But now, citing fear of reprisals and political pressure, they've changed their mind, much to her dismay. Hera says she is fighting for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in a nation that once was known for its tolerance and peace, but now is a hotbed of religious and social tension.

"Freedom of expression has become an illusion in Europe," she told FOXNews.com in a phone interview from a home where she is currently in hiding. "We think we have freedom of expression, but in fact we live under a sort of hidden censorship."

But John Voll, associate director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, said Hera's works cross the line and are offensive. He said freedom of speech does not mean that one has the freedom to be as insulting as possible. "It isn't as if we have absolute freedom in the United States to be offensive and insulting just to be different," Voll said in an interview. "Can you imagine what would happen if John McCain used the n-word about Obama while campaigning? There are consequences. Free speech is not absolute," he said.

Hera said a fatwa, or religious pronouncement, of death has been issued for her as a result of her exhibit. "The fatwa was printed in the Iranian newspapers; they said they would kill me," she told FOXNews.com, and saying she can't go out now in public. She's declined television interviews to answer her critics, and won't even attend her own art exhibition.

"I will not be attending [Art Amsterdam] due to safety reasons," she said. "It's like being forbidden to go to your own wedding." She said her work is a direct response to the threats made by radical Islamists against her and against the Dutch government, adding "I did this to answer the Iranian government. I made some new work. In one of these photos the deceased spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, is in leather trousers, half naked."

She says the point of this is to expose the hypocrisy in Islam about homosexuality and to get everyone talking about the freedom of expression and speech in the Western world, "I'm hoping my work will arouse discussion. The thing that endangers the Netherlands is succumbing to fear and keeping silent about threats and not being alert in regard to freedom of expression. The Netherlands is very much a flashpoint right now. It looks as if there needs to be critical choices made about whether we're going to defend our civilization or not.”

Author Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch says this sort of pressure by Muslim groups "who don't hesitate to traffic in violent intimidation" will continue to undercut freedom of speech until it no longer exists. "The ultimate goal of people making threats is to make it illegal or too dangerous or both for anybody to say anything considered to be insulting to Muhammad or Allah, to impose the Islamic code, which is the goal of Osama bin Laden, upon the West," he said. "It's time to take a stand and say we believe in freedom of speech and that means some people will be offended."

OPEN STUDIOS POSTSCRIPT

2008-04-29T16:30:00.009-04:00

THE ANNUAL 52 O STREET Open Studios event was a riveting success for the building. if not specifically in terms of sales for some of us. However, the electric energy and upbeat response both days from the visiting public of record turnout was shared by all.

Commented one artist in the building just this morning, "I am still so jazzed about the turnout and having so many new faces in my studio. I am grateful for the new interest in my work, compliments of your friends and collectors. There was a general feeling from the visitors that 'O' Street is a happening place. I couldn't agree more."

I was initially thrilled by the response to my own work, having sold a few smaller prints and tiny paintings, and was inspired by the idea that I had finally found comfort among the breeds and was no longer working against the winds that were always changing. One of my six large drawings on paper from 1984 elicited lots of positive attention. More smaller pieces from that same period were lauded far beyond any expectations of the day when they were created. Several larger canvases are still potential sales.

But it seems I have created somewhat of a scandal with a recently completed large piece. I now realize I must step back, and bring my theories of both art in general and those influencing my own work into clear focus. And I must also revisit an earlier idea of mine. Since we have inherited the observation that a picture is worth a thousand words, and the art consumer, dealer, and critic all seem to require in this DIY Age that the artist nee businessman must dance to a requisite tune, while weaving a charming story for their entertainment and edification, I feel the composition might as well be politely considered, committed to media and presented in a fine light persuasive to the work. So be it. By the will of the people, I will tighten up my affairs before I again open myself up to whatever the world seems fit to do with me.

My populist notions have seen better days. So now is not the time to return to half-measures. I have a few thoughts I'm just itching to implement.

MOMENT OF DESTINY

2008-04-27T09:04:00.003-04:00

THANKS CHAR—actually our event continues today, but I understand.

Yesterday was a smashing success. Quite a few "big money" collectors were in the building, in the words of my mentor here. In fact, one of my several large "magic marker" drawings from the 1984 captured gratifying purchase talk from several "serious" collectors, but I had to delay any sale simply because I had not expected to sell the drawing which I have only recently had glue-mounted after years of being folded up in a box, and I needed to confer with that mentor for suitable pricing. It may actually fetch $3500-$5000. Amazing. Or it could just be another near miss, but by the end of the shift it was one long blitzkrieg of anxiety and exhileration.

52 O Street Studios is well-known in the DC art scene, so the annual open studios event does draw respectively well for a transitional location. Today should be a formidable encore.

And yes, I do occasionally mount a grudge against the powers. I mean, after all, ART is a contact sport, and when's the last time the art scene has been full body tackled, scenewashed, and then hung out to dry for its own good?

Oh, and thanks so much for the latest "rock" necklace. I'm wearing it today for the first time. My "public" is forcing me to "rock harder" so I suppose I might as well dress even more the part. Trust all is well with your own health and business. Give our love to Skip.

(Since he was so kind as to give us his flu back in March! Ha!)

Cheers and rising circumstances,

Gabriel

DANCE FOR ME, BUTTERCUP

2008-04-23T17:36:00.010-04:00

L-R: Dana Ellyn, Matt Sesow, Chris Schott, Gary Gill, Sue Hedrick

SOME NOTIONS OF ART are strategic impulses which create a snapshot of reality seen through keen eyes, others seek to depict a healthy disregard of reality viewed through a lens of distorting fantasy. The key to understanding a work of art is understanding which of these two strategic impulses best satisfy the work. All the rest in window dressing.
—Gabriel Thy

"Still, I've had my reservations. Not so much on the eventual outcome, but rather the timing of it all. In Lin's last show, I saw too much centered and seemingly static work that didn't quite get up and dance for me. Shafts of brilliance are mixed with moments of weakness, as befits the process of artistic growth. At 29, Lin's best work is most assuredly ahead of her."

Artist and critic Kevin Mellema wrote the paragraph excerpted above in his essay for the Falls Church News-Press. Because this is a criticism I often level at my own work, I felt compelled to clip his words for my own present and future edification, even though my work, and the work of Amy Lin have absolutely nothing in common.

Additionally, from the Washington Post:

Amy Lin is infatuated with dots. "Hybrid," a colored-pencil drawing that's part of the artist's show, "Amy Lin: Silence," at Heineman Myers Contemporary Art, features almost 350 of the li'l devils, strewn across the paper in blue and green strings like strands of broken costume jewelry.

And that's just a medium-size work. At nine feet tall, one picture, titled "Persuasion," boasts—well, you count them; I started to get a headache when I tried.

That's all the 28-year-old artist draws. A couple of years ago, when she was first starting out, Lin says she got a lot of "questionable comments" from folks who just didn't get her chosen medium. Although her dot-based pictures can call to mind everything from microbes on a glass slide to Mardi Gras beads to an overhead shot of crowds milling on the Mall, they are almost stoic in their open-ended abstraction. So much so that her dealer, Zoe Heineman Myers, was discouraged by those closest to her from even giving the artist a solo show, Lin's first in a commercial gallery.

Such misgivings may be starting to fade with the appearance of another kind of dot around Lin's work these days: the little red ones traditionally used in galleries to show that a work has been sold. At press time, five of the 13 works on view had found buyers.

Eghads, the question of making and selling art in Washington, DC seems to have a simple answer. But I'll keep that secret under my hat for a time.

ART RACE TV SHOW, OR 2%?

2008-04-22T00:27:00.007-04:00

Gallery HD and Illuminations Media are looking for two fearless, charismatic, passionate & Informed ARTISTS to take the definitive chutzpah road trip.

Two Artists (Art Racers) must cross the US in 40 days, surviving only on Art. Armed with art materials, cameras and a $1 dollar budget, the Artist/Art Racers must “trade” Art for food, shelter and other artworks.

Starting on opposite coasts (one in NYC and one in LA), the Art Racers’ odyssey culminates in a home-city exhibition of all the works they have created and collected along the way. The winner is the Art Racer who sells/trades the most artwork. Or at least the one who survives.

Looking for great communicators who interact well with all sorts of people and can make smart commentary as life happens. Intelligent, sassy and witty are good too. All participants must live in the New York or Los Angeles areas, be at least 21 years old and a US citizen or legal resident alien.

ART RACE shoots May 26–July 11 for appx 40 days on the road, plus up to 5 additional shoot days & voice over work. Each Art Racer will receive $25,000 US for participating.

Twenty years ago, maybe. Today, no way possible. Middle-agedness has its own set of perks.

STALKING THE BRUSHSTROKE

2008-04-21T10:46:00.010-04:00

The difficulties in your work may increase your present tendency to edginess, even to the blues. See to it that your problems do not bear on your home life. Force yourself to change your ideas. Make sure that your view of things is not tendentious. Distinct sensation of heaviness in your legs. In your work give precedence to flexibility and easiness, for you'll probably try too hard to achieve a gigantic project which you've been dreaming of since a long time, and some people will not see this with a good eye.

SO GOES TODAY'S Facebook Chinese astrology hint about the artistic struggles in my life. Frankly it reads almost as if I had made a keen diary entry in my private book of struggles, even to my load-bearing right knee which went lame about two days ago, and is giving me much pain, so much so I've decided not to enter studio today, but rather, spend time here on my laptop addressing a few persnickety theoretical issues in my own painting and those inherent problems in carving out a career in painting at this stage of the current Pop Renaissance movement. Allow me to explain:

Art as feckless retreat from industry that is no longer available. I do what I do. I am DADA II. Look around yourself. Prove to me you aren't DADA II as well, and have been for decades, if not generations...

All systems have been defined, fulfilled, and taken to the wood shed. Style is simply rote penmanship, but says nothing about the world unless the painter insists with theory and thumbnail that each mark is as meaningless and mundane as the one never imagined. It's time we understood the basics of ego, and applied that understanding in each of our conversations with the sputtering sand gnats of society, great and small. That includes those who talk only to themselves, begging confirmation at any cost. Please excuse me, I must now prepare my next box of carrier pigeons for their stool.

Okay, here is another queer statement oozing from the closet of my own strapping insinuations:

ART, IT IS SAID, RESIDES in the eye of the beholder. Clever critics may muse otherwise, but the ever diligent [conjugating] cogniscenti in fact, mostly fail to disprove this rather quaint truism. A work of art is also considered extremely personal to the artist himself. Even so, the seminal time-tested idea of creating the "compelling picture" regardless of subject matter, school of thought, or individual style is the driving force behind all genuine artistic motivation, whether that motivation be theoretically contrived or deemed naive by the tastemakers of the hour.

The articulation of a compelling "idea" or "emotion" is important but secondary since all art is subjective; in the general sense that the "picture" not prove interesting or compelling, then that idea or emotion is lost in a scenewash of indifference. Shifts in time and culture often betray the original significance of a work of art, and all that is left is a picture and the searing questions: is that picture compelling, or not? This is reality writ large. Conjecture and critical posturing, despite their obvious power, must of necessity, bow to the whims of the changing observer since compelling art usually outlives both its creator and its contemporary critics.

We are living in a dangerous, rapidly accelerating, greedy, image-saturated sub-atomic culture. There is no time left to paint paintings, write poems, or sing hymns to false idols. All of modern civilization cries out for redeeming action, even as the weary soul sighs, and prays for rest. Humanity has simultaneously witnessed too much, and remarkably nothing, at all. This political contradiction describes the artistic inertia of our heavy times, and informs my own artistic vision.

In short, one impetus to my work is a study in observing the observers. Another might simply be stated in Miro's terms of attaining the maximum intensity with the minimum of means. In many ways, I think Picasso's remark that his paintings are a pictoral diary of his own life, describes my own approach, especially in the more symbolic work.

Greatest influence: my own quivering brush hand and booby-trapped subconscious kicking and cajoling to make itself known.

PAINTING THE MORAI

2008-04-20T15:22:00.013-04:00

20th Century Sisters (left); 21st Century Sisters(right)

IN THE GREEK MYTHOLOGIES, the Moirai were known as the Fates, that is to say, the personification of the inescapable destiny of man. The Moirai assigned to every person his or her share in the scheme of things. Originally, only Zeus weighed out the "fate" of individuals. As the supreme ruler of Mount Olympus and of the Pantheon of gods who resided there, he upheld law, justice and morals, and this made him the spiritual leader of both gods and men.

Later there were two Fates, one at either pole of a person's life. Finally, the familiar trio of Fates came to be accepted, each with a specific function, although different traditions have tended to blur the talents and chores of these three fates. But for our purposes, let's work with this synopsis:

The three Moirai were Klotho, Atropos, and Lachesis. They were variously called the daughters of Zeus, Nyx alone, Erebus and Nyx, Kronus and Nyx, Oceanus and Gaea, or Ananke (Necessity) alone. Depending on the identity of their parents, they were variously called sisters of the Horai, the Keres, or Erinyes.

They were described sometimes as aged and formidable women, often lame to indicate the slow march of fate. Klotho, the youngest of the three sisters, spun the thread at the begining of one's life.

And Lachesis, the middle sister, snipped the thread at the conclusion of one's life. She was the apportioner, deciding how much time for life was to be allowed for each person or being. She measured the thread of life with her rod. She is also said to choose a person's destiny after a thread was measured.. The process was absolutely unalterable, and gods as well as men and women had to submit to it.

The oldest sister, Atropos wove the thread into the fabric of one's actions, chose the mechanism of death and ended the life of each mortal by cutting their thread with her "abhorred shears."

As goddesses of fate, the Moirai necessarily knew the future and therefore were regarded as prophetic deities. Thus their ministers were all the soothsayers and oracles. Then as now the concept of predestination presented the usual paradoxes, since if from one's birth he or she was destined to commit a crime, then punishment for the crime, itself preordained, place good and evil beyond human control. Yet the Erinyes unfailingly fulfilled their function in a kind of obbligato to the inexorable hum of the spindle and thwack of the loom.

For all the claims made for the immutability of fate, there were a few questionable instances in which destinies appeared to be altered. Apollo induced the Moirai to grant Admetus delivery from death, if at the hour of his death his father, mother, or wife would die for him. Some said he made the Moirai drunk in order to accomplish this.

I have painted two versions of the Moirai. They are known to me as the Mundane Moirai who posture themselves, and merely threaten fate, but like all the Greek Gods and Goddesses have proven to be mere reflections of our own vanities, each according to his or her own works and politics where life is likewise defined in false terms. Here are the fates: an early 20th century depiction, and an early 21st century depiction. Oddly enough, there is very little difference between the two depictions, no strong old school follies to mock, no contemporary embarrassments to duck, just a hundred years, or should I say, nearly a mere 144 minutes of Godtime frittered away by the Fates. Go ahead, do the math. If a thousand years is like a single day to God, then a hundred years is 144 minutes. Hmm, where have I seen that number before?

INVENTION OF THE BAGEL

2008-04-20T13:45:00.003-04:00

A common breakfast among commuters, bagels stand alone as the only bread that is boiled before it is baked, providing chewiness instead of brittle crumbs. Yeast dough is shaped into rings, allowed to rise, then briefly tossed into vigorously boiling water for a few seconds. Then it is baked, where the prior boiling creates a chewy texture. Those that like a bit of gloss on the crust can brush them with sugar water, the traditional method, or egg, a more modern method abhorred by purists.

The origin of the bagel is up for debate, although it seems to have early taken a foothold in Poland. The first printed mention occurs in Krakow, in 1610 in a list of community regulations that stipulate that bagels are to be given to pregnant women. (Interestingly, given the bagel's association as a 'Jewish' food, there is no mention of religion in this regulation-apparently Christian women ate bagels as well).

Others support the legend that the world's first bagel was produced in 1683 as a tribute to Jan Sobieski, King of Poland.

The king, a renowned horseman, had just saved the people of Austria from a massive attack by Turkish invaders. In gratitude, a local baker shaped yeast dough into the shape of stirrup to honor him and called it the Austrian word for stirrup, beugel. The roll soon became a hit throughout Eastern Europe. Over time, its shape evolved into a circle with a hole in the center and its named was converted to its modern form, bagel.

OPEN STUDIOS AT 52 O STREET

2008-04-10T12:48:00.011-04:00

TWENTY-FOUR ARTISTS, in one building, working in a wide range of media and styles open their studios for a rare glimpse into the process behind their art. This free event provides the visitor the opportunity to purchase artwork and meet the artists in a relaxed, inviting atmosphere. Occupying 28,000 square feet, over four floors, 52 O Street Studios is one of the largest and oldest buildings dedicated to the practice of Fine Arts in Washington, DC.

52 O Street Studios is located a short walk from Metro's New York Avenue Red Line stop, amidst the burgeoning North Capitol Street corridor. The artists working here are proud of this historic building, its idiosyncrasies, and the myriad of artists who have created here in the past.

Today, the building is occupied by painters, sculptors, photographers, jewelers, woodworkers, and video artists who seek to continue and advance the guiding principle behind its opening in 1979, "to create an affordable working space for artists in Washington DC."

This year's artists include:

Stevens Jay Carter
Brooke Clagett
Betsy Damos
Chris Edmunds
Adam Eig
Thom Flynn
Cianne Fragione
H2O n2 Wine Films
Andrea Haffner
Peter Harper
Mike Harris
Matt Hollis
Luke Idziak
B. Neal Jones
Micheline Klagsbrun
Raye Leith
Greg McLellan
Brandon Moses
Kendall Nordin
Holly & Ashlee Temple
Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Gabriel Thy

Ben Tolman

DYLAN WINS PULITZER CITATION

2008-04-08T12:07:00.015-04:00

SURE, IT'S JUST ANOTHER award ceremony, but surely they mean more to you than those you were battling as a kid (I'm thinking of the Tom Paine Award, an awkward event for everyone involved it seems). I hope so because you sure are winning lots of prizes these days. The Grammys come to mind. Now we've hearing that a 2008 Special Citation has been awarded to you by the Pultizer Prize Foundation for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.

So very true. Without changing gears, some of us survivors of the current phase of man will surely be breathing the air around Bob Dylan for a few hundred years, God willing. Still no word from the Nobel Committee, where Dylan was first nominated for the prize in literature in 1997. So let us pilfer and pillage through the ironies of time to get a beat on what's happening with this Nobel crowd.

While many music critics agree that Dylan is among the most profound songwriters in modern music, his repeated nomination for the Nobel Prize has raised a vexing question among literary authorities: Should song lyrics ever qualify for literature's most prestigious award? Christopher Ricks, co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University—and an avid Dylan fan who has written scholarly papers on the songwriter's work—said the question is "tricky."

"I don't think there's anybody that uses words better than he does," said Ricks, the author of highly regarded works of literary criticism such as "The Force of Poetry" and "Allusion to the Poets," as well as books on T.S. Eliot, Lord Alfred Tennyson and John Keats.

"But I think his is an art of a mixed medium," Ricks said. "I think the question would not be whether he deserves (the Nobel Prize) as an honor to his art. The question would be whether his art can be described as literature."

It definitely can, said Gordon Ball, an author and literature professor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, VA— who has nominated Dylan every year since 1996. "Poetry and music are linked," Ball said. "And Dylan has helped strengthen that relationship, like the troubadours of old."

The Nobel Prize in literature is given out annually by the 18 lifetime members of the 218-year-old Swedish Academy. Candidates can be nominated by members of other literary academies and institutions, literature professors and Nobel laureates. Each year, the Swedish Academy receives about 350 nominations for about 200 different candidates, which is narrowed down to about five finalists. The winner is announced in October. The finalists, except for the winner, are not revealed for 50 years.

Ball said he first nominated Dylan after the writer Allen Ginsberg urged him to do so. Ginsberg, a Beat poet whose literary circle included Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, nominated Dylan in 1996. "Dylan is a major American bard and minstrel of the 20th century" who deserves the award for his "mighty and universal powers," Ginsberg wrote in his nomination letter, which Ball read to The Associated Press.

The literary value of Dylan's texts are also supported by The Norton Introduction to Literature, a textbook used in American high schools and universities, which includes the lyrics to Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." University of Virginia professor Alison Booth, who co-edited the anthology, said she doesn't "have any trouble at all considering (Dylan) for a literary interpretation."

"Literature has historically been defined very broadly," Booth said. "I don't think we're testing some radical limits of literature by putting that in." Several collections of Dylan's lyrics have also been published as books. Still, most Nobel watchers say it's unlikely the Swedish Academy—traditionally drawn to novelists and poets who are often out of the mainstream—will expand the scope of the prize to include songwriters.

"If so, it would be in a fit of marvelous free-mindedness," said Svante Weyler, head of one of Sweden's largest publishing houses, Norstedts. "It would be very surprising."

But not entirely unprecedented.

In 1997, the prize went to Italian playwright Dario Fo, whose works also need to be performed to be fully appreciated, some say. And when Winston Churchill received it in 1953, for his historical and biographical writings, the academy also cited his "brilliant oratory" skills.

While the academy never discusses individual candidates, Carola Hermelin at the academy's Nobel Library said songwriters are not excluded from the prize. "Song lyrics can be good poetry," she said. "It depends on their literary quality." But Weyler said he was skeptical about including songwriters. "Then you're categorizing everything that includes words as literature," he said. "Literature should not have to be read by the author for it to be good."

Well, as usual, Dylan himself, put it best: They can talk about me plenty when I'm gone.

Not only have I collected and burned into my psyche nearly every song he has ever sung over the course of my lifetime I count myself as one of the fortunate fans to own one of 900 signed and framed lithographs of Dylan's Self-Portrait, which was used as the cover of an album of the same name, seen here among my books, photographs, and other fine perishables celebrated by the flesh.

GERHARD RICHTER

2008-03-29T08:53:00.022-04:00

GERHARD RICHTER IS AN IMPORTANT German painter whose work spans five decades. Most noted for his photo-realism images, particularly the ones that are blurred, just as they would appear blurred in a shifting photograph, Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932.

Richter's artistic achievements vacillate between pure abstraction and a reconstructed form of realism. His realistic paintings, based primarily on personal photographs and images from newspapers, range in subject matter from the banal, like rolls of toilet paper, to the extremely potent, such as famous Nazi "doctor" Werner Hyde. The paintings have in common an emotional remove; the re-creating of photographic images points us toward our own possible emotional detachment to the influx of images in the world. A blurred chair, Jackie Kennedy, burning candles, family portraits—Richter lays them all out before us as if to say, Here, they are all the same. The insightful text by MoMA curator Robert Storr provides an in-depth look at Richter's life in postwar Germany, tracing the influences and environment that made his work possible.

Richter is by many considered a "conceptual painter" whose "paintings are statements about ideas for paintings". Richter himself said that he wanted to express "the inadequacy in relation to what is expected of painting" through his art, the inadequacy of the making of images and the critical examination of it. He is considered a master of "deconstruction" of formal conventions of painting. He kept a "skeptical distance from vanguardists and conservatives alike regarding what painting should be". According to Storr, all of Richter's works point toward "the basic loss of bearings"; he is "an image-struck poet of alertness and restraint, of doubt and daring". Whatever your interpretation of Gerhard Richter's oeuvre may be, he is a major contemporary artist.

THE BEAVER MILL STUDIOS

2008-03-16T17:07:00.009-04:00

Beaver Mill Studios in North Adams, MA

I WAS POISED to move into this building. With 4000 square feet of working studio space, I was convinced I had found my permanant and final working space, large enough for large art. These several large tables would have been tremendous assets for someone with ambitions to open up dozens of boxes with solid projects in each of them.

But reality hit home hard. Home being in DC, North Adams is nearly eight hours away on a good drive. Moving into the Beaver Mill Studios would have taken a tremendous amount of energy and capital, and given my failing health this winter, prospects were bleak that I would be able to suffer what is always an unforgivingly frigid winter in that corner of Massachusetts nestled remotely into the Berkshire Mountains. So...

My pursuit of a credible art form still relies upon my time here at 52 O Street.

INVESTING IN THE ART MARKET

2008-03-16T15:15:00.008-04:00

Looking out from Bertha's in Fells Point, Baltimore

By Deborah Brewster of The Financial Times. The article was originally published on July 13, 2007.

ART HAS EMERGED as a serious alternative asset class in the past few years, in spite of the disdain of art lovers and the scepticism of many dealers and collectors.

Randall Willette, who advises collectors, says: "There are increasingly two types of buyer in the market. The idea that you should buy purely because of your passion is becoming less common. More buyers are coming from a financial background and people want to support their buying decisions with financial information. Increasingly, art is part of the balance sheet of private clients."

There are two questions for investors to consider before treating art as part of their financial portfolio. The broader one is whether the art world can be considered a true market in the same way as the stock market is. The second is whether the price boom is cyclical, or part of a longer-term trend that will see prices move higher permanently. The answers may not be conclusive, but it is important to bear them in mind before following the legions of new buyers with the idea of making a killing.

Artworks are bought and sold at prices reflecting perceptions of their value, and these can change sharply. In that sense, it is a market, but many are unconvinced that it can ever operate according to the rules that govern other asset classes.

"I love art, and I love a bargain, but the fact is you cannot apply any kind of valuation analysis to artworks," says one longstanding collector who is prominent in the financial world.

"When I analyse a stock, I look at future income stream, how it is priced in relation to its competitors and the quality of management, and other criteria that can be measured quantitatively. The sole measure of an artwork is the cultural perception of value attributed to it. That is not something you can make any reasonable prediction about in relation to its future value."

This has not stopped an avalanche of financial analysis on the art market. Much of it sheds light on which types of works command value and how that value has changed over time.

Some of it bears out what dealers might intuitively understand. Research has shown that figurative works are valued more highly than landscapes; that the larger any given painting is, the higher the price per square inch; and that middle-tier works are likely to rise in value further than top-priced masterpieces. However, most people who have built up collections that have risen in value did not pay a great deal of attention to price, but rather to a unifying aesthetic.

As records topple at each auction, the stories of profits are encouraging more buyers into the market.

Adam Sender, a New York hedge fund manager, has said he had made more money from his art collection than his hedge fund.

Art market cycles usually last six to seven years, and the present upswing has been going for six. By that measure, a correction can be expected soon. The most recent Impressionist and contemporary auctions surpassed the price and volumes of the peak of the last boom in 1990.

However, the market is not monolithic. It spans collectables such as stamps, fountain pens and teddy bears (which have rocketed in value), to contemporary sculpture and photography, to decorative arts, to paintings by Picasso.

Each cycle has its favourites. Last time round, in the late 1980s, the Impressionists had their day. Japanese property tycoons formed a passion for works by Van Gogh and Rembrandt. A few years later, the value of such works had plummeted. The latest cycle has seen a huge rise in the value of contemporary works. However, another new aspect to the present cycle is the global nature of demand. It is not just one group of people buying one type of painting.

Newly wealthy people in Russia, China and India are buying works by indigenous artists as well as by western artists. US and European hedge fund managers are buying Chinese contemporary art as well as Andy Warhol. Demand is lifting prices across a range of categories. Michael Moses, who, with Jianping Mei, devised an Impressionist and contemporary art market index, has launched a Latin American index. But even the most optimistic believe some sectors, such as contemporary art, are due for a drop in prices.

DECONSTRUCTING REPUTATION

2008-03-16T14:50:00.007-04:00

Artist Peter Harper in his 52 O Street studio

ON TUESDAY, July 24, 2007, fellow 52 O Street artist Stevens Jay Carter posted a few questions on his blog.

The other day I was viewing the work of an artist. As I was admiring the work I began to think to myself is it possible to accept my thoughts if I removed myself from my association with this artist? What would I actually think about this work through a stranger's eyes, unaware of the artist's history or background?

I responded, "Conversely, can the opinion of a critic or arbiter of a work of art be judged without including such biases as "credentials" or "personality" or "sexual orientation" of that critic, whether he be of some renown for such services or merely an ordinary passersby? Schools of thought betray themselves in this argument.

"Basically, there is always more than one way to do nearly anything under the sun. So, in judging a work of art, there will be some who insist upon knowing the "artist" and others who deny the importance of such criteria.

"After all, do we need to know anything at all about the creator of the polio vaccine or the bicycle to deem worthy these works?

"And recall de Kooning, who is damned near unique in his field in appreciating the skills and artsmanship of the ordinary house painter or artisan, while most of us who posture within the art world would simply laugh at such a charming but gross sentimentality."

I thought that I was saying something real, but I had missed the mark. I knew that humans are inescapably drawn to fame and reputation. Human fascination with success and prestige is such that we are not surprised when artists, even iconoclastic artists mimic that old EF Hutton television commercial, when EF Hutton speaks, the whole world stops to listen.

Another 52 O Street fellow, Peter Harper then opined, "Pablo Picasso was an asshole!!! But a great painter. He wouldn't be my friend but I admire his work."

Yes, but we can never escape the sway that a Baselitz, a Warhol, or a Basquiat holds and the realization that an imitator will never measure up to the power of the original master with all that implies.

INTERVIEW WITH GERHARD RICHTER

2008-03-16T14:04:00.016-04:00

I WAS RECENTLY introduced to the reputation of the highly regarded German painter Gerhard Richter by a collector who bought a small work of mine. Some consider Richter the greatest living artist today. This collector, a philosophical writer and novelist, was sure I would find this noteworthy man of particular interest, specifically the painter's extensive pronouncements on art.

Here is a brief snippet from an interview I found fascinating, and while the bulk of my current work has little in common with Richter's, I do agree with his declared independence from the hordes and the art theorists, despite my penchant for muddying my own waters.

There is a substantial body of work on Richter to be found on the web. I think, for my part, Gerhard Richter may very well herald a shift away from the figurative towards abstraction as a matter of confidence building. Time will tell.

From the Journal of Contemporary Art, January 15, 1990. Translated from the German by Klaus Ottmann:

Sabine Schütz: About a year ago you created a great stir with your painting cycle "18. Oktober 1977." This group of fifteen paintings, done in the black & white blurred photographic style of your earlier work grapples with the death of the RFA [Red Army Faction] terrorists in the Stammheim prison and unleashed a controversial and emotional discussion which went far beyond a purely artistic debate. Were you pursuing with these paintings a direct political concern?

Gerhard Richter: No direct political concern, especially not in the sense of political painting which has always been understood as politically left, as art which exclusively criticized the so-called bourgeois-capitalistic conditions—that was not my concern.

Schütz: But the subject has not only been highly explosive but it was also expressly politically left . . .

Richter: . . . which now can be considered completely laid to rest . . .

Schütz: . . . exactly, and it is also already history. One could ask now why you came forward with these paintings in 1989 and not already ten years ago?

Richter: This time distance was probably necessary. But I cannot exactly explain the reasons for making something at this or at that point in time; something like that does not proceed by plan but rather unconsciously. It seems important to me that the paintings now, with the breakdown of the socialist systems, obtain another, more general component which they did not have so evidently a year ago. On the other side, I shun to talk about the concerns or statements of the paintings. I do not want to narrow them down through interpretation.

Schütz: Do you see the terrorists today as victims of a false idea which was inevitably doomed to failure?

Richter: Definitely. Nevertheless I also feel a certain sympathy for these people and for their desperate desire for change. I can understand very well if one cannot find this world acceptable at all. Furthermore, they were also part of a corrective which we will first be missing in the future. We will find other attempts at criticism eventually which will be less sentimental or superstitious and more realistic and therefore more effective—I hope.

Schütz: This cycle has been described as a resuscitation of historical painting which has been largely ignored by modern and contemporary art. Would you agree to this categorization?

Richter: This does not interest me that much. Even when it occurred to me, while painting, that these pictures could be regarded as historical paintings, that is, as something reactionary, it didn't make any difference to me. This is more a problem for theoreticians.

Schütz: In your journal you once said that it shouldn't actually be possible to paint the way you paint: without subject matter. Was it different with this cycle? Was there a subject matter?

Richter: Yes, there was. But this "black" note referred more to the abstract paintings and beyond that to the general helplessness and powerlessness which then of course can itself become a subject matter. But on the other hand, one has sometimes enough motivation which renders questions such as these abstract—one then just paints.

Schütz: When you begin a painting, do you always know from the start what you want to paint? Could one say that you are a conceptual artist?

Richter: No, that I am not, and I don't always know what I should paint or how the painting should look in the end. Even with the Oktober cycle I did not know what kind of painting would come out of it. I had an enormous selection of photographs and I also had quite different ideas. Everything should have been much more comprehensive, much more to do with the life of the depicted, and at the end there was this small selection: nine subjects and very much focused towards death, almost against my intention.

Schütz: One would not necessarily have expected from a painter who twenty-five years ago already once painted toilet paper, to confront a subject so rich in content. Even the record player is in itself a banal object. However, the relation to the pictorial subject seems to have changed considerably since that time.

Richter: Not considerably, because a toilet-paper roll is not necessarily a funny picture. Neither is it true that I am now old enough to paint only sad things. But the record player painting is of course a very loaded painting, since the viewer knows that it is the record player of Andreas Baader, that in it was hidden the deathly weapon, etc. That doesn't make it a better painting, but it obtains first more attention, because one can attach more of a narrative to it.

Read it all.

CONSIDERING POLITICAL ART

2008-03-12T12:05:00.008-04:00

So argues Nick222:

Actually, for reasons that I detail in a my blog, I think that Geert Wilders made a mistake by producing the film and would make another mistake by releasing it. Of course I agree that Wilders has the freedom to offend Islamic ideas and agree with him that the Koran is "a fascist book inciting hatred and violence", but (as Thoreau would say), Wilders is "hacking at the branches of evil" rather than "striking at the root."

To strike at the root (and more), I think that the ideas of C.W. Walton, Jefferson, and H.L. Mencken are crucial. Respectively they are:

"Believers are interested in fulfilling emotional and spiritual needs, not intellectual needs. In some cases, one might as well try to use reason on a dog. For many people God is primarily a warm feeling. How can one argue with a warm feeling? Arguing with someone who places reason below faith... is blowing against the wind." (C.W. Walton)

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them…" (Thomas Jefferson)

"The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe – that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent." (H.L. Mencken)

He then concluded:

Therefore, my recommendation to Wilders would be that, if he wants to help both his homeland and humanity, then he shouldn’t release his film criticizing the Koran. Not that the criticism isn’t correct, but it’ll just harden the Muslims’ bunker mentality. Instead, he should (for example) hire some competent comedians whose wisecracks would ridicule all religions, excoriate all clerics, and most importantly, get all who bought into their clerics' con games rolling in the aisles—not in some religious trance but laughing at themselves for paying fortunes, forfeiting their freedoms, for permission to live within fairy tales.

But not all people agree that chopping at the tree of religion is the intelligent thing to do. Islam is a political manifesto dressed up in the rag doll outfits of religion. We must address it the same way we addressed Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Imperial Japan—as a very dangerous political ideology that requires a thunderous defeat. Whacking at the persistent windmills of religion is not going to solve our immediate problem. Only then will the "arts of life" survive to encourage us another day.

We can an undaunted quote generator for these two gems:

Edmund Burke once wrote, "No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

And if that was not plain enough, shall we turn to Sir Winston Churchill, who observed that "When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber."

GT

BERLIN GALLERY HARASSED BY MUSLIMS

2008-03-02T02:08:00.005-05:00

A BERLIN GALLERY has temporarily closed an exhibition of satirical works by a group of Danish artists after six Muslim youths threatened violence unless one of the posters depicting the Kaaba shrine in Mecca was removed, it said on Thursday.

The Galerie Nord in central Berlin said it had closed its “Zionist Occupied Government” show of works by Surrend, a group of artists who say they poke fun at powerful people and ideological conflicts. Four days after the exhibition opened, a group of angry Muslims stormed into the gallery, shouting demands that one of the 21 posters should be removed, said the gallery.“They were very aggressive and shouted at an employee that the poster should be taken down otherwise they would throw stones and use violence,” the gallery’s artistic director Ralf Hartmann told Reuters. The Muslims objected to a depiction of the Kaaba—the ancient shrine in Mecca’s Grand Mosque which Muslims face to say their prayers—which gave a “bitingly satirical commentary against radicalism,” said the gallery in a statement.

To his credit, Hartmann has said the gallery was working with German authorities to improve security and he hoped to re-open the show as soon as possible.“It would be unacceptable if individual social groups were in a position to exercise censorship over art and the freedom of expression,” said the gallery in a statement.

It’s about time some Western artists stepped up to the plate on this issue. This is a very serious issue, and since I am in the arts myself, a humble painter in Washington, DC, I know that few "political" artists are tackling the Islamic problem with anything more than smug indifference.

In fact, just the opposite position rules. Sadly, 95% of the art being created today in this most political of cities, and I speak from the underground art movement, is frivolous and redundant, lost in fairy tales and harmless charm, and anything remotely “controversial” and it’s not anymore because how many times can Christianity or homophobia or the president be attacked in the generic way that artists depict their hyperventilated disgust with religion, sexual mores, or politics, and it still be new, iconoclastic, or controversial? But with all the world in flames and blood, hovering at the brink of financial crisis, most of the “ruthless honesty” work is anti-American at worst, anti-war (lofty) at best, and nothing is ever presented that even hints of global incrimination due the jihadists and their copious allies strutting about in shepherd’s clothing and Brooks Brothers suits.

But what can be expected otherwise? The art world, unlike the more recently abducted halls of lower and higher education, has long been the high-browed bastion of the liberal cognoscente, and today’s system of wine-tasting galleries and its stiltifying air of mass dementia is now vigorously geared to the Left.

Scandal is often the fast track in the whirl to “make” an artist, but history probably proves that this model holds only if breaking “preferred” molds. Let’s hope Berlin doesn’t bend knee to this Islamic thuggery. It will only encourage more outrage. Don’t we all deserve better than this?

WAREHOUSE ARTS COMPLEX SHOW 2/22/08

2008-03-02T02:02:00.004-05:00

I AM PLEASED to announce that I will be showing several works at the Warehouse Arts Complex Group Show “PEACE NOW!”

Artist Reception: February 22, 2008. 6-9 PM.

The show will stay up for the observance of the 5th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the March 19, 2008 “March for Peace” in Washington and other cities around the country. The show will feature painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, et cetera.

Curated by Molly Ruppert. Come out and join the spectacle!

ON THE NATURE OF ART OVER TIME

2008-03-02T01:52:00.008-05:00

IN A LETTER to Stephan Lackner, dated January 29, 1938, after fleeing Germany for Amsterdam after being dubbed and banished as a painter of “degenerate art”, Max Beckmann nevertheless writes, “politics is a subordinate matter whose form of appearance is forever changing according to the need of the masses. Hence, it is nothing essential - what mattersis that which endures, the unique, the being in the flight of illusion—the withdrawal from the workings of shadows—perhaps we’ll succeed in that.”

We should not confuse the specifics of political intrigue with the costumes and postures of the times in which any particular artist works. While Beckmann continued to stress his reluctance to consider the politics of his time anything more than the passing fancy of accidental geography, he did not shy away from depicting in his work the shapes and depths of such external geographies while digging deeper for the internal, or the invisible.

Writes Beckmann, “Politics is an odd game, not without danger, as I have been told, but certainly sometimes amusing.” He observes that “making war and peace” are natural components to the catastrophic nature of the modern world, and seeks to assail it by artistic investigations.”The greatest danger which threatens mankind,” he said, “is collectivism. Everywhere attempts are being made to lower the happiness and the way of living by mankind to the level of termites. He is more interested, like the writer Henry Miller once put it, not in society, but in individuals, in the particulars as well as the whole, because he finds in the “I” and the the “you” emanations of the “self: as the great veiled mystery of the world.

I would add to Beckmann’s words that the world is self-evident. The world is what stresses us, divides us, threatens us, confuses us, tricks us, buys us, sells us, gives us over to strangers. The loss of liberty is a quickening of the spirit of the world. The opening lines of my long 1982 poem - Contrapunctus America - Section 1, Some kind of joke - highlights those points made by Beckmann:

The year is nearly unimportant. Zinc is in pattern
but I can only purchase my thoughts on even numbered
days. Poor, acquainted more clearly
with a poor folk’s rag theory
than with the possibilities awaiting
to be chosen, I swear on a stack of paperbacks
I ain’t no fucking prophet…
but a walking man walking,
walking without bail and rolling on past
damp December, born into debt,
a free state, and a slap upon
the cheek…born to choose, born to hesitate,
free to lose in storming screaming success,
my swelling head tossed off in oft repeated duress,
and designated on some long lost Monday
to openly investigate.

So let us presume now that the poet has few means beyond those into which he is born. He writes that he is born into debt, that is perhaps to say original sin with individual and trillions of dollars of national debt in the worldly extreme. Which of these two debts is more persistently pressed upon his life? It has long been presumed that he is born to choose which path might set him onto the most glorious pursuits of liberty, the pursuits of personal success even to the ends of loss. But the world is everpresent. And thus, he is also born to hesitate as a sudden residual of the free state of mind in which free choice is the common denominator of all humanity except when corruption and worldly notions intercede.

The world’s inertia claims his attention and even mimics his attention span. He is lost in time, but has no choice about one matter, the most import matter—that urge within him that he must openly investigate in order to transcend the chaos of a world marked with lies and illusion. In this succession of aims, the man becomes artist, regaining his soul in his death to the world. It is only later that he learns that this investigation is the path of perpetually competing claims, the path of argument, confusion, confuscation, and the mirage of intersecting lines, not the path of the transcendent self but the path of sorrow and self-destruction, the path of violence and bitter sweetness, the path to nowhere in particular.

Here we find a few articles on Beckmann:

The Mythic Imagination of Max Beckmann in Exile in The New York Times by Ken Johnson

Germany's Black Years in The New York Times by Alan Riding

An online biography can be found here.

BRITAIN'S FASCINATING MUSLIM ARTIST

2008-03-02T01:42:00.002-05:00

AFTER REVIEWING the previous blog entry, I am pleased to note there seems to be a notable exception to my previous comment. And while many may speculate that it is always easier to comment upon one’s own culture and whatknots, it cannot be overlooked that Islamic insiders don’t often have the same luxury of criticizing the inner workings of its own culture than many others do. So in that regard, this particular artist’s reputation should be considered even more profound.

Sarah Maple is a British artist. Sarah Maple is also a Muslim. Here’s an interesting link to an interview of a young British Muslim, who also happens to be an artist named Sarah Maple who questions with audacity and style the conflicting aspects of her own identity.

Excellent interview. An intelligent woman, and exquisite rising young artist, Maple’s talent, humility, and intensity of spirit should take her far.

BRITISH ARTISTS AFRAID TO ADDRESS ISLAM

2008-03-02T01:26:00.001-05:00

American artist treads lightly in criticizing Islam

BRITAIN'S CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS are fêted around the world for their willingness to shock but fear is preventing them from tackling Islamic fundamentalism. Grayson Perry, the cross-dressing potter, Turner Prize winner and former Times columnist, said that he had consciously avoided commenting on radical Islam in his otherwise highly provocative body of work because of the threat of reprisals.

Perry also believes that many of his fellow visual artists have also ducked the issue, and one leading British gallery director told The Times that few major venues would be prepared to show potentially inflammatory works.

“I’ve censored myself,” Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”

Perry’s highly decorated pots can sell for more than £50,000 and often feature sex, violence and childhood motifs. One work depicted a teddy bear being born from a penis as the Virgin Mary. “I’m interested in religion and I’ve made a lot of pieces about it,” he said. “With other targets you’ve got a better idea of who they are but Islamism is very amorphous. You don’t know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction so I just play safe all the time.”

The fate of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker who was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004 after he made a film portraying violence against women in Islamic societies, is the most chilling example of what can happen to an artist who is perceived to have offended Islam. Perry said that he had also been scared by the reaction across the Islamic world to Danish cartoons deemed anti-Muslim in 2006 and by the protests against Salman Rushdie’s knighthood this year.

Across Europe there is growing evidence that freedom of expression has been curtailed by fear of religious fundamentalism. Robert Redeker, a French philosophy teacher, is in hiding after calling the Koran a “book of extraordinary violence” in Le Figaro in 2006; Spanish villages near Valencia have abandoned a centuries-old tradition of burning effigies of Muhammad to mark the reconquest of Spain, against the Moors; and an opera house in Berlin banned a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo because it depicted the beheading of Muhammad (as well as Jesus and other spiritual leaders).

Read it all, and don’t neglect the comments. That’s where the REAL story exists.

GABRIEL HANGS IN NEW YORK CITY

2008-03-02T01:08:00.001-05:00

Gabriel's work in Antagonist Show, centered around For Denmark

Originally published on September 9, 2007

IN NEW YORK CITY, on Thursday September 6, I showed a few antagonistic paintings in a tiny sweltering East Village basement. Highlights included a long chat with a New York poet named Julian Stockdale about the enigmatic state of literature from the perspective of Generation Z still searching for its own voice, networking with a fellow who owns and operates the same image press I’ve had my eye on for some time now, and the pride of beautiful young fancies who flashed this old poet and painter a smile or two.

Then there were the three young folks from Denmark who spent several long stints staring at my large centerpiece called FOR DENMARK, which is a painting I whipped out in a mere fifteen minutes in a bluster over the Cartoon Rage going on in Europe and across the Islamic world on February 12, 2006. The three Danes, two young guys and a gal, approached me at one point to confirm their interpretation of the work, thanking me for the peace. Well, a Christ-figure complete with stigmata and tears of blood, two fishes painted in a corner and a Jewish bagel popping up from a toaster, and the words FOR DENMARK etched in red across the background renders the explanation rather bluntly, doesn’t it?

There was some talk of an Antagonist Movement Berlin gallery which interested me for some swirl down the road, and I even sold a couple packs of postcards to two NYC artists…

Shout out to Alex (girl in photo above), Scott, Tom, Julian, Kari, Ted, Un, Ethan and Liberty Sue, each for your generosity of spirit…

If you are a MySpace member you can view more pictures here.

ANTAGONIST SHOW IN NYC ON SEPTEMBER 6

2008-03-02T00:51:00.001-05:00

YES, THAT'S RIGHT. Outsider art by definition is antagonist art. Self-annointed artists are often antagonistic artists. So this news is a propos. The Antagonist Movement with its roots in the East Village has invited me up to the Niagara Club for a one night group show on Thursday, September 6. I have accepted, and eagerly look forward to my first show in New York where I’ll show five or six works.

Here is the Niagara info:
112 Ave A at the corner of 7th St. East Village NYC
The gallery is downstairs past the bar.
Tele: 212-420-9517

Show opens at 9 PM. All artwork hangs for the duration of the night until closing time at 2 AM.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE ANTAGONIST ART MOVEMENT:

The Antagonist Movement creates venues around New York City.
1. Thursday night. One night showcases with live music.
2. Two month shows bases around a theme.
3. Public Access show. Tuesday nights on MNN 67 or RCN 110 at 11pm. The show covers the art shows. It’s called Antagovision.
4. Writer’s night. The first Sunday of every month.
5. Films. AAM has four films coming out, including two documentaries on the art shows. One narrative featuring punk rock icons from the lower east side, and a documentary that covers female bands in the mid 90s. All of the films have been selected and won a verity of film festivals. To find out more about the release date contact Troma.
6. Fanzines and books. AAM has published a fanzine called Psycho Moto Zine and a book called “Somewhere Between a Punch and A Hand Shake.” Both feature AAM artists and writers.
7. Clothing line. Each year we feature new artists in the designs. All the money goes back into our projects.
8. Over seas art shows. Showing in Berlin October 18th to 26th.
9. Street art. Street Gallery. Sticker Art.
10. In the future AAM plans two books, more clothing lines, and another documentary on the art show in Berlin.

AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM

2008-03-01T19:02:00.000-05:00

Well, August 8, 2007, was a fine day in the life of this particular painter. The American Visionary Museum in Baltimore, MD purchased some of my art in postcard form. It’s not that big a deal, yet, but it’s a great start. Shows promise of things to come, perhaps. I’ll write up the full story in the near, but right now I’ve got to head out to buy some crab meat for the crab dressing cassarole I sling together for events like this awesome pig roast some rocker friends and their roller derby girls are hosting this afternoon.

But check out the museum. It’s on the map. And now, in some small way, so am I.

THE ARTOMATIC MANIAC

2008-03-01T18:53:00.001-05:00

Artist preparing wall space at Artomatic

Originally published April 8, 2007

WITH ONLY THREE AYS left until the hanging deadline, I began painting my 2007 Artomatic nearly 180 square foot of space along two walls of a small room I share with an artist named Paula Bruening in the Old Patent Office at 2121 Crystal Drive in Arlington. The view from Room 6A43 (Sixth floor, Aisle A, Room 43) spans eastward toward the control tower at Reagan National.

For covering the old existing beige paint, I chose a signature charcoal graystone with a rough texture, and will trim it out in black before I actually hang my work on Wednesday. My wife charged into action today to keep me company and run the occasional errand. Her help was invaluable, and both our bodies are aching tonight for our efforts

Since this is my first Artomatic, and knowing the event will run for five weeks, I am somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the project, not my own small exhibit so much, but given the enormous number of participants, reckoning with the sheer variety of creative content should surely be a learning experience. I shall be snapping pictures, shooting video, and soaking it all up, so that the next Artomatic won’t catch me short of inspiration.

The most unfortunate aspect of this wonderful and challenging extravaganza is that it opens on the same weekend as the annual two-day 52 O Street Open Studios, again, my first time particpating in the latter event, as well. This of course, encourages intrigue and exasperation with regards to which work should stay in studio and which should go to wheeling off to Arlington. Tough choices must be made.

LOUD SIGNATURES

2008-03-01T18:47:00.001-05:00

Artist and wife, Sue Hedrick, in front of work at Artomatic

Originally published on April 15, 2007

AS THE MOUNTING PRESSURE of two upcoming events (Open Studios and Artomatic) eases, I thought I’d offer up an example of a work-in-progress. Inspired by daily world events, this picture is presently called “Loud Signatures.” Remember, I rarely begin a painting with a specific concept in mind, but by a limited series of choices paint what is set before me as refracted against a congealing consciousness compelling me to represent the competing forces of my symbolic vocabulary. The internal logic of a finished picture, if any, is influenced by those random choices and the whimsy of each competitive brush stroke itself.

Okay, I’ve taken down the work in progress, replacing it with these fine people standing in front of some wickedly jolly painting at the Artomatic ‘07 event.

ANNOUNCING ARTOMATIC '07

2008-03-01T18:38:00.001-05:00

String Theory - Gabriel Thy - 40"x30" acrylic on canvas

IT'S FINALLY HAPPENING! Artomatic 2007 has been announced. I will be there next Saturday as one of the first registrants to pick prime real estate in this, my first Artomatic show. Two floors (the 6th and 8th floor) in the Old Patent Office Building in Crystal City—each floor is 45,000 sq. ft. and one has around 130 offices still walled in while the other one has been gutted. I hear it’s a nifty location and quite easy to navigate to either by car, bus, subway or even Virginia rail.

There are some spectacular views of the city from all the outer walls. The other cool thing about this location is that thousands and thousands of people both work and live right around this area.

Artomatic is a month-long multimedia arts event that draws together visual artists, musicians and performers and brings their work to the community without charge. Originally conceived as a way to break down the geographical and social segmentation of the Washington arts scene, to bring art directly to the public and to build cohesion among artists, the city’s ongoing development in recent years has diffused the arts community by breaking up pockets of artist studios. Unfortunately, local artists are frequently overshadowed by national blockbuster shows and federal landmarks, thus Artomatic provides a forum for all of our area’s artists to convene, perform and exhibit, strengthening the visibility, cohesion, and marketplace of Washington’s arts community.

Artomatic began in 1999 in the historic Manhattan Laundry building. A dozen or so artists originally toured the empty building and within a month, three hundred and fifty artists had cleaned, lit, painted and colonized the 100,000 square feet. Over 20,000 visitors attended the first Artomatic over 6 weeks. From there, it grew organically, as buildings were made available to Artomatic by community developers. Music and performance of all kinds were added.

In 2000, 665 artists exhibited and 200 performed at the old Hechinger’s building; more than 1000 artists and performers took part in 2002 at the Southwest Waterfront and even more in 2004 at the old Capitol Children’s Museum in Northeast. The number of visitors has also more than doubled to over 40,000.

Stay tuned…

BEFORE 52 O STREET STUDIOS

2008-03-01T18:29:00.000-05:00

The Wheeling Wailing Wall

In a flash of good luck, I found my current home at 52 O Street on the gritty heels of a rather short and aborted adventure in Wheeling, WV, where the only project I managed to complete (well, nearly) was an earnest locally-inspired 11′ x 80′ mural I call the Wheeling Wailing Wall along the 2nd floor corridor wall of a rock and roll club called Yesterday’s Draughthouse & Stage.

I look forward to returning to Wheeling next weekend for the wedding of two young friends, and convening another sweet stare at the Wall. Then there’s a hint of some secret aim to negotiate my return to finish it, and tackle a few other pending projects on the ore rusted bank of the once mighty Ohio River that are still calling my name. The haggard old city is begging my photographic eye.

THE INTERVIEW

2008-03-01T18:11:00.003-05:00

Originally published on March 8, 2007

52 O STREET ARTIST extraordinaire Stevens Jay Carter, pictured above, was here today to interview this ruffian for his newsletter. As usual, I was wordy. Emotional. Nervous. Relaxed. Characteristically trapped in oscillation between a strident confidence and that unflattering corrosive excitability I exhibit when shown the least amount of attention. It’s times like this when I feel that the caricaturing aloofness that certain historical artists have postured might serve me better, or suffice in certain awkward situations, ah, a touch of the Steppenwolf…

After all, I liken myself to an open wound, but nature, being its own cruel taskmaster, demands obedience even from its inquisitive slaves, as Jackson Pollack observed in his statement that he himself was nature, so you would pay huge odds on the bet that aloofness in my mouth would ever sustain itself.

My burden is the burden of connectivity. Scattered shards of reflective glass that were once cohesive members of a magnificent window pane are products of a disconnect. Torn asunder violently, clumps of dried blood and rotting flesh that once promoted a promising creature’s thoughtful passion stress our senses, again, absorbing the ultimate disconnect.

Augured by my driving need to connect, to gather, rather than to divide, even when a particular division may be in my own best interests, my own eager nature refuses to allow me to participate in a calculated aloofness beyond an initial shyness a new situation may temporarily impose.

Contrary impulses of course always inject themselves and inform this nature. Hence, the battle. The conflict. The anxiety. The curdling of the milk, and the long scream. But the interview seemed to go rather well, a success, despite any number of competing considerations.

As always, Mr. Carter was charming and professional. It should be interesting to see how he hammers the passionate if sometimes pedantic Gabriel Thy blather into presentable form.

DAY ONE

2008-03-01T15:59:00.001-05:00

WELCOME TO the Idiotsheet. This is where I shall post updates to my 52 O Street Studioscalendar, theorize on the state of my own work, and that of others, ponder the universe found on the brush, question the molecule at the end of a thought. Perhaps I’ll even wax poetic on some “dead to rights” topic which may or may not interest those of you prowling for art stuffs on the halfshell. Doesn’t matter. It’s just a blog. So relax, kick off your shoes, and take a stroll through the ragged imagination of one of 52 O Street’s more notorious blogs—the Idiotsheet.

Oh yes, props to John Woo for the photo. We’re standing in the Ratner Museum at 10001 Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda, MD. Moving left to right, that’s my lovely wife Sue Hedrick in red, the old ruffian himself protruding beyond his gears, and finally, the truly cultured and honorable Stevens Jay Carter. Enjoying the opening reception for Le Duet, the two man show featuring Stevens and Solomon Asfaw, we appear fist deep in red wine and the exquisite promise of another fine hour in the smarts of the Washington art scene.

The show runs through March 27, 2007.

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

2008-03-01T15:14:00.000-05:00

This past weekend I was back at the Wheeling Wailing Wall, not with brush and acrylics this time, but for a post-wedding reception party for my young friends—Justin and Laura—who were bethrothed that St. Patrick’s Day afternoon in a traditional Catholic ceremony at the St. James Chapel in McMechen.

It had snowed rather briskly the afternoon prior, as we barrelled forth from DC in the new Liberty Renegade, from Hagerstown beyond Frostsburg, but to my chagrin, all points westward toward Wheeling had only been dusted. Still, a somewhat edgy but safe trip.

As I stared down the cruel wall past the folks gathered to crank on the snarling four metal band celebrations, I realized I still carried a strong desire to finish this seminal work on the Wailing Wall, someday soon perhaps, should adequate funds ever materialize, but those young Turks—Chuck & Raj—will definitely have to step up to the plate if the future is to change. Measuring some 80′ x 11′ the mural wall is about 90% completed, a massive piece as she stands, but abruptly unfinished nevertheless.

And this, dear reader, was my first blog about art, as humble as it is, published on another blog service nearly a year ago. My recent frustration with that service has finally reached the boiling point, and today I have decided I am moving back to the service from which you read these words. I was sayed by the polished look of the other service, and without understanding what went wrong with that approach, I have abandoned aesthetics for functionality. Editing text, and keeping those edits in place, had become sheer madness. I know know when precisely things broke down, but something went terribly wrong, and who among us has time to struggle with a persnickety HTML editor.

So here I am, a few old posts to recall the foundation, then onward into the harrumphing world of serious art as a subject matter worthy of these crucial times.