INTERDISCIPLINARY PRODUCTION
From ART FOR HUMANS WIKI
Robert Redford saved my holiday weekend
The documentary portrait of Alice Neel is playing right now in the background. I watched *Jeremiah Johnson* on AMC last night. In the mashup, the terrorists tried to blow up planes. I researched Robespierre, the original terrorist, the one no Super Class prince or slave would ever want you to associate with the Islamists. Democratic terrorism in its nascent phase was a bloody and effective campaign. On the one hand is suicide, and on the other, homicide, as a social modifier, or equalizer, in the extreme. One loves death, the other loves art, and the difference is as murky as crime and punishment, and this inspires a connection to the cinematic. I'm thinking of Scorcese's *The Departed.* In the nexus of these orbiting spheres is the portrait.
We are always wondering who that other person is. The portraitist tells us with paint. The documentarian shows us with edited clips. The political animal illustrates his vision of the other with blood and execution.
I am in the process of a deep systems analysis of cultural education. The medium of education is in a state of war. Some valuable points on the grid include nodes, such as the neo-Robber Barons (like Gates, Buffett, DeVos, Broad and others) who are applying huge sums of money to reshaping "public" education in America and abroad. Another node is the supplanting of art by management, the corporate social message, or the obliterating faculties of Marxian philosophy. For a long time I've been arguing for and demonstrating or producing dimensional art education in many formats, which are complementary. Throughout that time others - from a long list of disciplines other than visual art fabrication - have proposed models for educating vision. They one after another fail.
One cannot education a human without art. One creates a moron - to use Drucker's derogatory term for the computer - if one attempts to teach a task independent of context and content (a story of value). Unfortunately, Drucker's moron is not really a computer. It is a consumer. A corporate golem. An organization man.
So, on one side is Drucker, Marx, Carnegie, Gates, Buchloh, and so on. On the other side is Alice Neel. Or my old friend Janet Lippincott. Just now I was saddened to discover Janet passed away in 2007. Shortly after I first moving to Santa Fe in 1986 or -7, about this time of year, I met Janet at Babe's, which was the name of the bar across from El Farol's at the corner of Camino Monte Sol and Canyon Road. Janet was one of a few dozen colorful local characters who soon were to become my mentors, my circle and the formative figures of my young after-Notre Dame life. She was born a Yankee to a notable family, served on Ike's staff in the Second World War, chose a painter's life and moved West, really, never to return, as far as I know. She was both confrontational and very kind with me. I remember her friendship, her buying me sandwiches, but I mostly remember her sort of shuffling and painterly-sloppy rush into the bar for a drink, some company, maybe a little food - and her paintings. I visited her place on Upper Canyon several times, and the cats, many feral, but the grand studio, the hacienda, combined, were tremendous. The property had been appraised in the millions, of course, but she held on to it with much strength. Janet was no lightweight. I often heard her, in her sputtery way, tell of being blown up in the Battle of Britain, and falling through several floors to land in a bathtub. That's how she hurt her back. Her paintings don't really tell that story. They're abstract, but more than that, they're dimensional. After I got to know her, she told me she was having great difficulty working on larger canvasses. Nevertheless, Janet kept painting. I loved her. There weren't many women who lasted in the Babe's circle. Janet was one tough enough to do it. She insisted she enjoyed men. I'm looking at the images on the Karen Ruhlen Gallery website, and Janet's CV. Her work and my first mentor's (Don Vogl) share many features. The figures are painted with skill and style. The scope of experimentation is impressive. Formal placement is expert. The elements are relative, and sensitively (but not overly) placed. Janet's (and Don's) artworks are the outcomes of daily practice, and a lifetime commitment.
Since we are all American, the backdrop is always war and money. The expression is freedom, and its defeat, then survival, and on and on until that day - if it is to come - when tyranny will reign unhindered, again.
I spoke with Shane about the end-of-the-semester critique in Glenn's class at Cooper Union, and Glenn about Shane's critique, about dimensional art, and the educational environment for it. The crew in its early stages is Tricky3. The conversation was informal, and very technical, and as always led to some address of the political and economic, and their infiltration of art, which focuses on human life and its sustainability. The political concerns itself with power, especially power-over. The economic focuses on extracting comfort and minimizing risk. Neither should be permitted any influence over the artist, which is why both are used to dominate art.
Returning to the originating node introduced above, concerning the use of media, FOX and Time-Warner are engaged in a market-share war at the moment, dimensionally, across the social topology, as Drucker saw it from his bloody (in the English sense of the word) window. Gates is a player here. The enemy is Google. The losers are the American people, though the damage doesn't pertain only to us. Influence is the issue, and managing the message and cornering the markets. I also caught a C-Span program, a Senate panel hosted by Rockefeller, concerned with the education of children, reducing their obesity and putting a band-aid on the 45 hours weekly the average kid spends in front of a monitor, playing a game, or being otherwise managed by parents too busy surviving to take care of their kids. It would be a joke, if it weren't so evil.
Face it. The Robber Barons, the Super Class, the Davos Man is the enemy of America. They're at war with us, and they're winning. Alice Neel was right to be crying as she approached death. Robert Redford's Sundance channel deserves a boost for pushing that content on the shitbox, the corporate-owned, monopolized and managed delivery system called TV. On FOX, Hannity is giving Sarah Palin, that semi-hot soccer-mom-looking corporate brownshirt, a smarmy rubdown. On a third of the rest of the stations are the cops and criminals. Another third of the programming is devoted to stupid, vicious actor-less "reality" shows. God, what a despicable, cynical and ugly mimetic clamp. Twenty to thirty minutes of every hour is given over to ads. The brief era of super-fine ad design is gone with the profits of Wall Street. Now it's only insurance, EXXON, dick medicine and foreign cars, plus the ceaseless pitch for the viewers attention by the networks. Even as they squeeze the medium of all local value.
The FCC must be empowered to arm and train agents. Corporate "Free Speech" (money) must be recognized for what it is: legalized crime against humanity. Which brings the analysis back to Robespierre. I think the program appeared on the History Channel, one of those props the Time Warners (all five of them) present to Senate panels as evidence of corporate social responsibility (CSR, in the management vernacular). Another gem I came across was the Queen's celebratory address of the Commonwealth Youth Forum, which is hardly related to my Ning, the US Commonwealth Party. How many times did I hear the stained words "creativity" and "innovation" over the weekend, as the managers of civilization and its interior analysts tried to sound positive at the end of this horrible decade of Super Class/Corporate global supremacy, and the un-televised carnage, the "collateral damage," the Greenspans and Bushes caused.
Alice Neel was right to weep. I was moved by the reflections of those who knew her, especially her sons. Given that this was my first Christmas as an orphan, I could identify with those men, once boys. In a portrait painter's life, there are many brushes to wash, and many paintings that don't turn out quite right.
I'm not sure yet what I mean by that statement, but hopefully the European Graduate School's doctoral course in Communications and Media will help me understand better what one can learn from an image of a person, an image cobbled together of moments and parts. One of the tasks I must accomplish in the next few weeks is an inventory of the effects of my parents' lives. For every thing absence is present. Moreover, no thing can fill the void of absence with its representation of presence. Such is the complicated reality of human hope, and loss. One is perhaps a smarter artist if he deals just with color, and not form. Color is about choice, and form is about the fact of surface, and the material life. Painters like Janet, and there aren't ever many, understand this, and as a practical matter, stand before the canvas and commence the effort. To have one's choices, one's life pass before one's inner eye while the hand applies the paint is harder than any philosopher will ever discern. And there's the rub.
Does anyone today recall the feverish concern of only a few weeks ago, as Tiger Woods' domestic life was depicted for all with a cable connection, modem or corporate paper to "see." What a portrait! Already, the Rise and Fall programming has reached the screen. Accenture, which used to employ my brother, had banished the golfer, and tied off the golden thread. The self-regulation of the pundits ("Should we be so concerned with Tiger's infidelities?") has faded and been replaced by the crazed hunt for another white woman or child. Terrorism trumps all - anything to avoid discussing the guillotine for Goldman Sachs or the health care debacle, or the millions of Americans suffering through a Depression 2.0 Christmas without prospects for 2010. Meanwhile, the banksters enjoy their bonuses, and the TARP bailouts are paid through usury.
Happy New Year, America! I plan to paint a picture. Will you pick up your muskets? Boycott banks, put the cable networks out of business, don't buy a thing not made in the USA, join a union and vote for democracy. Knock the top hat off Chase's head! Close Frist's hospitals, and put down the Kaiser!
A few Christmases past, my Uncle Bob was killing Chinese on Pork Chop Hill. They killed all his pals, Senator Byrd helped him get home for his dad's funeral and Bob commenced to making beautiful babies, who made beautiful babies, in a pool of insurance, oil and real estate. There Bob was, a couple of months ago, at his brother's side, keeping him company on his way to death's door, and victory. My brothers and I after the funeral, looked at Bob's trophy bayonet. I don't presume to understand any of it, really, but I don't have to - I can paint.
A final thought, from the state of mourning, probably unrelated. The women of today place quite a premium on a man who can shed tears. It's too bad they don't respect the man's willingness to fight in defense of freedom, his family and our collective future. It's easy to remember tears, and pretty easy to forget them, too. It's much harder to recall sacrifices made, but the failure to do so is harder still.
-PJM, December 28, 2009
Janet Lippincott at Karen Ruhlen Gallery [1]
