Congress should take up poetry!

It isn't my idea. Last Sunday, Bill Keller, editor of the NY Times, suggested just that in a wonderful editorial. Read "I Yield My Time to the Gentleman From Stratford-Upon-Avon."

Keller says, "Poetry is no substitute for courage or competence, but properly applied, it is a challenge to self-certainty, which we currently have in excess. Poetry serves as a spur to creative thinking, a rebuke to dogma and habit, an antidote to the current fashion for pledge signing."

I have known a few poets in my time, met quite a few more, and heard many read their work. I've never known a poet who wasn't both thoughtful and attentive. Unlike some other kinds of writers, poets tend to be good listeners. I'm sure there are among them some narcissists, but I'm guessing the percentage is far lower than among other kinds of artists; certainly lower than among that class of people who choose to enter politics. 

There is angry poetry, but humility is a far more common quality.

Keller quotes these familiar lines from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” by William Carlos Williams:

 It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                     yet men die miserably every day
                                           for lack
of what is found there.

Keller also asked David Orr, the poetry columnist for the Times Book Review, to provide a reading list for Congress. Here is that link: "Bedside Table Suggestions for Congress."

If you go to the Times website to read any of this and do a search of the topic you will find that lots of people have added their own suggestions for a Congressional reading list. Why not send a few suggestions to your representatives, hey? (Can you see Jim Sensenbrenner picking up a volume of poetry when he goes to bed tonight?) 

Here's mine, by Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton:

Like You

Like you I

Love love, life, the sweet smell

of things, the sky-blue

landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up

and I laugh through eyes

that have known the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful

and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don’t end in me

but in the unanimous blood

of those who struggle for life,

love

little things,

landscape and bread,

the poetry of everyone.

Who has a big idea?

Is there an Einstein living today, someone who thinks so big that everyone takes notice? So big that it changes the way everyone thinks?

If there were such a person, would we be paying attention?

We've all heard the old conundrum, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear, does it make any sound?" What if a tree falls in the city? All around the tree there is a cacophony of noisy activities, traffic, construction, conversation, etc. Will anyone notice?

In the New York Times, Neal Gabler has written a provocative and engaging essay about the death of the big idea. He cites many examples of famous thinkers from time gone by, like Einstein, Reinhold Niebuhr, Betty Friedan, Marshall McLuhan, William F. Buckley, Jr. Marie Curie, and George Washington Carver. But he opines that the voices and ideas of any such thinkers alive and speaking out today are drowned out by the deluge of information to which everyone is constantly subjected. He further suggests that social media, with its emphasis on short bursts of mostly trivial information, is particularly culpable.

It's a good essay, worth reading: The Elusive Big Idea.

Gabler makes only one reference to big ideas in art. He doesn't mention a single artist, though. He says, "An artist friend of mine recently lamented that he felt the art world was adrift because there were no longer great critics like Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg to provide theories of art that could fructify the art and energize it." I find it sad but telling that the people who wrote theories about art get credit for having had big ideas instead of the artists themselves. But then, so much of Modernism was about the words/ideas as much as the art itself. I think it may be even more true of contemporary art.

Which artists had the big artistic ideas, on a par with the great thinkers who affected the culture? Giotto? Velazquez? Manet? Cezanne? Warhol? Was Pollock's success really so dependent upon the intercession of Rosenberg and Greenberg?

How about photography? The medium itself probably changed the way we see the world more than any single practitioner. In fact, until I retired from teaching last May, I kept a poster version of this famous image on my classroom wall because I consider it (or whichever was the first one taken from space) to be the most influential photograph ever taken. Further, the image of the earth from space, that tiny blue sphere in a universe of black, may be the most important image ever made precisely because of the big idea it represents: the earth is fragile and its resources finite. It is no accident that the image graced the original cover of the Whole Earth Catalog or that the first Earth Day was organized shortly after its first publication.

Does art still have the power to affect how we see the world? Or is everyone too busy uploading images to facebook and you-tube of their pet or their latest meal from their cell phone cameras to see anything else?

Hey, I have an idea: anyone want to see pictures of my adorable new granddaughter? Just go to my album on Facebook.

The artistic life

I read The Writing Life by Annie Dillard a while ago. I dog-eared a particularly poignant passage thinking it applies equally well to other art forms as it does to writing. When I googled the passage I found that the beginning is often quoted, but that the quoters usually trail off before the end of the first paragraph. Which is a shame because the second provides a counterpoint that contrasts profoundly with the first. Without it her observations are unbalanced.

I guess the reluctance to include the second paragraph is understandable. The beginning has a sunny attitude, while the end becomes a bit nihilistic. Art, like life, isn’t always sunny. I can relate to both moods. In the first version below I’ve taken liberties with her text to generalize it. Her original version follows that in case you want to see how little I had to alter.

"Creating a work of art is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as an artist is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild abandon; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even express anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if it is demonstrably false.

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days' triviality. A shoe salesman – who is doing others' tasks, who must answer to two or three bosses, who must do his job their way, and must put himself in their hands, at their place, during their hours – is nevertheless working usefully. Further, if the shoe salesman fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him. Your work of art, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your work; everyone needs shoes more. There are many paintings, sculptures, and prints already – worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent work of art on which to gag the world?"

I believe the answer to the dramatic rhetorical question that concludes the passage is found in the first paragraph. Of course, some artists are not unlike shoe salesmen, but for those to whom Dillard refers, for whom art is exhilarating rather than commercial, not to pursue one’s calling would be the metaphysical equivalent of shooting oneself.

The original text from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard:

"Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false.

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days' triviality. A shoe salesman--who is doing others' tasks, who must answer to two or three bosses, who must do his job their way, and must put himself in their hands, at their place, during their hours--is nevertheless working usefully. Further, if the shoe salesman fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him. Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already -- worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. If you believed Paradise Lost to be excellent, would you buy it? Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?"

Gallery 2622 opening August 5

Blooms, from the Icon Series

I will be showing selections of my work from two projects, the Icon Series of triptychs and the Reverie Series of photomontages.

The exhibit will be held at Gallery 2622, which, not coincidentally, is located at 2622 North 76th Street in Wauwatosa. The exhibit runs August 5 - 28, 2011.

The opening reception is August 5, 5 - 9 pm.

Artist Statement 

I believe that we live in a world that is fundamentally different than that of previous generations. The land is stressed, the natural processes that sustain life are stressed, and as a result the human species is stressed. Our unavoidable and often unconscious task is to adapt to these unresolved circumstances. My work tries to make sense of the paradoxes inherent in this human condition.

The pieces in this exhibit are drawn from two series.  Each series deals with particular formal considerations as well as subject and meaningful content.  While my work often involves very specific formal structures, form is driven by content, expression and an overall conceptual framework.   

Tower, from the Icon Series

The Icon Series uses the triptych, a recognizable formal structure with historical/cultural resonance, to emphasize iconic themes. The form places a central figure within a context that either magnifies its iconic stature and symbolic meaning or creates an unexpected juxtaposition. The central figure in these constructions is often elevated to iconic status despite its being an otherwise ordinary subject. It is rarely a subject that would be perceived as iconic and therefore it subverts or inverts the accepted definition of an icon. My intention is to invite the viewer to think about the subject and its relationship to its context in a newly symbolic way. Using multiple images emphasizes that our experience of the world is relational and conditional rather than singular and fixed. 

Burn

The images in the Reverie Series are subjective landscapes. They are less about a particular place and more of a meditation or emotional experience. Each is a montage created from multiple photographs. Like the realities I perceive, the facts are blurred: the image is removed from actuality to some dimly seen place between memory and desire, where the landscape is subjective and the intersecting spirits of nature and humanity are suggested.

The meanings are often ambiguous, but they refer to the tensions and narratives of living in an environment that is increasingly compromised or redeemed by our own actions. I am not a dispassionate observer and although the landscape I experience may be beautiful, it is never pristine. This work has been informed by author Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature,” in which he asserts that nothing on earth is left untouched by human influences, and other ideas of contemporary environmentalists.

But, while they may relate to urgent topical issues, the images are not didactic; they are experiential, symbolic and emotional. My central intent in this work is to express feelings I experience when confronting a particular landscape at a certain time and—paradoxically—to find the universal in the specific place and the eternal in the moment.  

This is work that has not been shown in one place before. Examples from both series can be viewed on my website.

Glass Facade, the Reverie Series

Keeping Quiet

I read Pablo Neruda's remarkable collection of poems, Extravagaria, in its entirety when I was in college. While the sense of Neruda's stature as a poet has never faded, the individual poems, the words themselves, certainly have succumbed to my failing memory.

I was reminded of it last Sunday in a service on Buddhism when the poem below was read. I am grateful. I just pulled my bilingual copy of Extravagaria off my bookshelf and wiped off the dust. Time to revisit the master. 

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
 

for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

And in the original Spanish, should you be able to enjoy it that way: 

A callarse

Ahora contaremos doce
y nos quedamos todos quietos.

Por una vez sobre la tierra
no hablemos en ningun idioma,
por un segundo detengamonos,
no movamos tanto los brazos.

Seria un minuto fragante,
sin prisa, sin locomotoras,
todos estariamos juntos
en una inquietud instantanea.

Los pescadores del mar frio
no harian danio a las ballenas
y el trabajador de la sal
miraria sus manos rotas.

Los que preparan guerras verdes,
guerras de gas, guerras de fuego,
victorias sin sobrevivientes,
se pondrian un traje puro
y andarian con sus hermanos
por la sombra, sin hacer nada.

No se confunda lo que quiero
con la inaccion definitiva:
la vida es solo lo que se hace,
no quiero nada con la muerte.

Si no pudimos ser unanimes
moviendo tanto nuestras vidas,
tal vez no hacer nada una vez,
tal vez un gran silencio pueda
interrumpir esta tristeza,
este no entendernos jamas
y amenazarnos con la muerte,
tal vez la tierra nos ensenie
cuando todo parece muerto
y luego todo estaba vivo.

Ahora contare hasta doce
y tu te callas y me voy.

 

Things on Strings at MARN

If you didn't catch the opening of "Things on Strings" at the Milwaukee Artists Resource Network gallery, stop by and check it out from now through August 13. As usual at MARN, there was a lively crowd ogling the diverse collection of sculptures, which, as the title suggests, were all hanging from the ceiling.

I didn't have my camera along (what was I thinking?!), but fortunately my friend Frank Juarez was there and has posted on his flickr site a set that he took: Things on Strings.

Frank missed my favorite piece. Three cups were placed on the floor, a tea cup, a coffee cup, and a plastic cup. Above each was suspended the frozen contents of that particular cup: tea, coffee, and some colorless liquid that might have been soda. By the time I got there the three cups were about two-thirds full again and the frozen remains had shrunk to small balls of ice. There was a steady drip from each that continued to fill the cups. Whimsical and clever. The ephemeral quality that provides conceptual depth to this piece makes me wonder what will remain for subsequent viewings or if you "had to be there" for the opening.

"Things on Strings" was conceived by Becky Tesch, who participated in the MARN mentor program this past year. She worked as a curatorial protégé with Mark Lawson, who is gallery director at MIAD.

Art is life and death

"This is the heart of the matter - art, truly, is not a commercial proposition. This is not "idealism." This is the truth. Art is life and death, nothing less. When it is less than that, it isn't art. Money is only one form of value, often acting merely as representative for more profound ones. True art patrons know this - therefore, they look to patronize art that clues us in on our fundamental humanity and core values. Artists are not entertainers. We're not fantasists. Richard Tuttle said only art can show the truth of our existence. I don't disagree. Ad Reinhardt called art commerce and art as entertainment a "suicide burlesque." That phrase crossed my mind more than once last Friday, strolling the fair. A carnival of the frivolous. I don't have the time. None of us really do."

That is a quote, which I found provocative, from Titus O'Brien. I got it from a blog about ArtChicago by Paul Klein. To see the rest of his post, click here. I think it's interesting that Klein considers Fred Stonehouse a Chicago artist even though he lives in Milwaukee.