I Guess My Pink Hair Don't Cover Up My Red Neck

In the introduction to her conversation with Coco Fusco, Suzi Gablik states that it is the nature of the White intelligentsia to label multiculturalism a threat and to demean it with the term "political correctness".  On page 322, Fusco mentions that her education is what provides her the tools to enter into this discourse, and I think that access to even basic education is a far more important race issue than what a lot of the rest of the interview talks about. I find that intellectuals are more likely to be classist than racist (not that that is not often the same thing), but I am white so I may be wrong. I tend to find that intellectuals error on the side of being PC to the point of denying open discourse. We can look at this week's firing of Juan Williams from NPR radio as an example. Williams admitted a bias against Muslims. He did not admit to or condone any sort of giving in to that bias, he just stated that it existed.  For this he was fired. (He did later accept a 2 million dollar contract with FOX news, which may actually be a hate crime.) Regardless, I think the fact that the persecuted PC's refuse to admit their own biases, that even us liberals may have them, is ridiculous. I don't know anyone, of any race, gender, class, or sexual orientation that is wholly unbiased. The trick is to try to know your bias, understand where it stems from and see if you can deconstruct it once you have that understanding, not to just pretend like it isn't there. Let me be clear, politically I am the textbook bleeding heart liberal. I want healthcare and food stamps not fences and drones, but that does not mean that if I plumb the depths of that bleeding heart, that I do not find bias. I don't like that bias, but it does belong to me. I think that non-objectivity is vital to art, and that to pretend to be a totally evolved artist with no room for improvement is a joke.

This is why I loved Ron Graff's presentation. Honestly, a lot of his paintings I liked, but wasn't ecstatic over, but as a philosopher, he is right up my alley. I think I would be more interested in his work if it was more controversial, but I appreciate that he is painting primarily for himself. He has a type of unapologetic demeanor, tempered with self deprecation and a combination of talent and work ethic, that as an artist, I can only hope to one day emulate. I was a little worried about his suicide references, but on the other hand, they were pretty funny. Personally, I like to paint because I like to paint, not because I think it will save the polar bears. If I want to save the polar bears I'll vote, recycle and buy a motherfucking tote bag.

I think Danto's opening statement in his interview with Gablik, about how philosophy is trying to undermine the power of art was pretty spot on. I think that Gablik doesn't really like art, she likes politics and intellectualism and she likes believing she's right. I've been to those fundraisers where the night devolves from art auction to a bunch of winos sitting around the fire in Patagonia fleece singing Kumbaya. Maybe Gablik was there. She is so worried about the coming ecocatastraphe, that she totally dismisses Danto's mention of genocidal cultures. I feel that our species propensity for genocide and ecological destruction really bring to bear the question whether or not or demise is something to mourn. I feel like Danto's stance is that the good things we do may counteract that, and art may be one of those things. Art also relays understanding, which in all things is the first step to action. Or at least it should be.

Sorry. Suzi Gablik has officially gotten on my nerves.

***Above is a painting I did of zombie kittens eating a severed leg. This will not stop global warming, I promise.

Who's that Jung kid over there? Id don't know.

Sorry about the bad pun, I just couldn't resist. Down to business.

This week's readings spent a some effort tracking the development of ego and selfishness in art and society. I think they matched up well with Dan Powell's work because, whether or not he intends to, there was a significant lack of ego in his work. What I found most interesting about this was that is was not only in his sweeping landscapes, but in his quirky vignettes as well. Photography is art form in which I find it easiest to "refocus our attention away from ourselves and onto the world..." The camera's form requests that we do just that. I find that even when I do a self portrait photographically, I feel like it is less a picture of me and more a documentation of my passing through or witnessing something. I felt like Dan's works were somewhat opposite but complimentary to that sentiment in that he did a lot of psychological self portrait-ing in pictures of garbage tacked to a wall that he scribbled on (I saw that positively). I personally relate to Dan's wanderlust and dumpster fetishism.

I was glad that Carolyn Merchant, in her opening statement did not lump all of humanity into an evil doing paradigm, but specifically chose to criticize the actions of "Western industrial capitalism since the seventeenth century as it developed in North America and Europe." I think all too often in the interviews with Suzi Gablik, there is a sort of artificial long view which seems to imply that the values and crises of the Industrial Revolution, or even the 1970's cultural revolution (they don't call them the "Me Generation" for nothing),  began somewhere around 10,000 years ago, or just about the time that we humans put plow to field. I think it is folly to assume that people have so long viewed the world through the same glasses, and pretty ego centric to boot. I also think the sentiment of relief about Bush and Quayle leaving office is pretty frickin' hilarious in hindsight, although it is a dark cloud of humor that does not bode well for any kind of cultural shift. I do agree with her idea that some people aver nature because they want total control, but I do not find a satifactory solution to explain why so many people are duped into thinking that they have any meaningful control whatsoever. I certainly did not find solace in many a crappy job that paid for many a crappy apartment, regardless of whether or not said job and apartment hand central air conditioning (admittedly they usually did not). I feel that there is some great hustle going on where we try to sell a way of life, and even the people who don't get it still buy it. Again, I am glad that in this interview neither Merchant or Gablik is calling for people to drop everything and go back to the land. Art, when made without that huge ego, is the best type of in control, and the best way to let go of control at the same time.

I think this kind of relates to James Hillman and what brought him to lose faith in the usefulness of therapy, despite, as he states, the fact that he is so good at it. It seems to me that for many decades therapy's role was to attempt to realign those who felt that lack of control with the general direction of society. It encouraged small, personal victories and gave the impression that the patient was learning to take control. This is a pretty big leap from lobotomies and electroshock, which in effect did the opposite. Those methods punished the patient for not being able to wield control. The individual would be sacrificed for the good of the whole. One of the down falls of both this and more modern therapy, is that in someways you are still living primarily with the trauma, and not as a healed person (But I think I'd rather have some shrink pick an emotional scab once a week than live forever in drooly lala land.) But this again is one of those things that makes art so wonderful. We all need to process, to interpret our lives. Making art lets us do that and move on.

***This is a picture I took. It kinda reminded me of my version of Dan Powell's landscapes- bleak and documenting human footprints.  I think while we're on the subject of psychology, there must be some sort of connection we can draw between people's willingness to shell out hundreds of dollars to spend hours waiting in line to have a near death experience and the decline of our civilization.

Saturday Evening Post Apocalypse, or Social Conscience is the Black Beret of the Early 21st Century

Hilton Kramer is an asshole. I guess that's why it was so hard for me to admit that I agreed with him on several points. That's the danger of living a life out in left field; sometimes you go so far left you end up on the right again. I do find his moralizing repugnant, especially when he feels free to make a big loophole for Picasso (who, according to Jonathon Richmond and the Modern Lovers, was never called an asshole). I also don't really love a lot of the art that Kramer so staunchly defends;  I love some of the reasons why he loves it, but that's not necessarily something to be proud of.

Art can be challenging, often time the sole purpose of a piece is to challenge the audience. As the audience, the challenge can be frustrating. I feel like Hilton Kramer is the type of person who would've perhaps preferred a more static discipline. Sometimes I find myself wanting that as well. I sit around and study art history, memorizing thousands of slides, only to find there are other centuries and other regions that I haven't even begun to contemplate. That sense of accomplishment is so fleeting. And trying to synthesize different art traditions is like trying to synthesize entirely different cultures. Our world politicos are often trying to do that, with minimal, violent success. The other option is to ignore or belittle those artistic traditions, which Kramer has made a career of.

Ever increasingly, more information that does not directly relate to ones own personal experience becomes available to the masses. This means that artists and plumbers alike must begin to make decisions about what to do with that information. Kramer postulates that liberals in general and artists in particular react with a certain amount of guilt. This is why they can't be the great ego centric artistes of the 20th century, they are too busy losing sleep over starving children in Africa, instead of losing it with coke whores in Soho. Suzi Gablik disagrees with him, she believes that we live in a world where people are inherently selfish and turn a blind eye to strife. I think they're both right. Aids babies and coke whores for everyone.

Satish Kumar, on the other hand has a little more faith in humanity. In fact, he simply has more faith. Kumar champions the idea that humanity exists spiritually as a kind of collective, and that that collective directly relates to the world (nature) itself. I like Kumar's educational ethos he has cultivated with the Small School, and I appreciate his moral code in a very agnostic way.

This is one problem I am consistently running into when relating to some of the more social and ecologically conscious movements in art, and especially here in Eugene. There is this prevalent association of nature to spiritual, and I cannot help but associate the spiritual to religious. I am not a big fan of religion. And sorry to all the hippies out there: Buddhism is a real religion which is more than just getting "Zen" (read stoned) and playing with your Sharper Image rock garden, and Rastafari is a really misogynistic, scary Christian sub-sect. I digress. What is relevant to the greater conversation is that I am just as wary of Kramer's Saturday Evening Post Christian morality lesson as I am of every other kind of spiritualism. I see it as the snake devouring it's own tail. Fear is combatted with faith, faith breeds religion, religion (eventually, usually) inspires fear in the non compliant, who then attempt to subvert the system by instilling faith in a new paradigm, and these paradigms are very rarely based in logic and the well being of others that are unlike you. I feel like on its better days, the emerging artist movement in America is at least pretending to take those things into account.

Now on to Jack Ryan. Kramer would hate a lot of his work, Kumar might like it once the relevance was explained. I think Ryan was an appropriate choice for this weeks lecture. He has the sort of "traditional" skills exemplified by his drawings, and then he also has that social conscience that is so integral to art these days. I think we may have to begin to think of this type of social responsibility as another medium in the artist arsenal, just like paint and clay and humor and angst. It should be employed when it is the most relevant tool to the final outcome of a piece of work. I think if we try to didactically prescribe it's use, the way Gablik is sometimes in danger of doing, it will lose its poignancy and become a marginalized joke.

*** Speaking of  jokes: before I saw this a million times I was able to imagine living in the shitty town where this billboard was, and what it was like to be the kid that got up there and scribbled "to Slayer", the type of kid who probably scribbled "Slayer" on lots of stuff, and just how immediately important something like this was to them, and their community (especially to those it undermines). Is it funny? Yes. Is it socially relevant? Yes. Is it art? I hope so.

Back to Nature

Let me preface this entry with a bit of my own background on the matter of environmentalism. I grew up in Chicago and had never heard of compost until I was 21. Still though, I was a vegetarian for almost a decade, and attempted to connect with progressive movements whenever I could. My husband sat in trees to avoid them being logged. We lived in the middle of nowhere for a long time, in that back-to-the-land kinda way. I have lived in houses with people that devoted their lives to primitive skills education. I also lived in a house with an FBI informant responsible for sending a dozen people to jail for serious sentences for eco-activism, activism that he was originally a strong proponent of. One of the people he helped convict committed suicide after his capture. Another ex-roommate lost his mind in the miasma of extreme leftist politics. A lot of ruined lives, and the environment and socio-economic class structure is still fucked. What I am looking for now is compromise, and preferably compromise that I don't feel really guilty about.

That said, I couldn't really get my head around Rachel Dutton and Rob Olds motivations for this secondary, deeper severance of themselves from culture. They seem to be valuing their experience as part of Nature as the ultimate state of being, but I am not sure how it makes sense as a reaction to this sudden sense of impending doom. They felt that their scaled back existence as artists living rurally was not active enough in the face of the looming catastrophe, but I still get a hint that they feel a greater social obligation and I do not understand how learning tracking skills supports the greater society. It seems almost like a performance piece done without an audience.

I found Christopher Manes' interview, Making Art About Centipedes, much more aligned with my own beliefs. There should be a reintegrating of Man into a more egalitarian framework in relation to each other, other species and the environment, but we should also enjoy the time we have. Regardless of humanities presence, the climate shifts: it is its nature. But right now we do have it good and we should enjoy what we can, make the most of our thumbs and brains and maybe stop actively decimating nature for profit at every turn. It becomes a question of where to draw the line.

As for Colin Ives work, I found it very visually striking and quite often a nice commentary. (I thought the Clearing was especially accessible and poignant.) Unfortunately, I was dissatisfied with his response about reconciliation of the use of technology for project regarding environmentalism. I wanted him to have an answer that was not beholden to middleclasswhiteguilt, I wanted an out, and I was hoping he'd have one- especially because I liked his work so much. I am not sure if there will ever be a solution to this: a true compromise. The reality is if you're using iPods to project salmon on a sidewalk, there are a host of ecological and socio-economic implications, conversely I think the world is better for him having done that. I am glad at least to be having the discussion.

***Above is the work of my friend Joey Malone. He is a talented artist, curmudgeonly punk bastard, and total plant geek. I love him dearly. The drawing is of the tree more commonly known as chinkapin.