art's part -- the organic root

A terrible event has happened, terrible enough to overcome the calloused threshold of our attention. For a flashbulb moment we see the landscape we inhabit. With that sudden objectivity it should be possible to see much of what we call entertainment in this culture is simply psychotic, and should only appeal to psychopaths. It’s being made by perfectly sane artist-professionals who have hired out to sell stuff, and they lie about reality to stimulate artificial needs. Inevitably total immersion commercialism is dragging the entire society down to a lowest denominator lizard mentality. The collateral effect is to make our common daily experience kinda creepy and weird, and that’s being nice.

I wouldn’t claim special knowledge, but don’t tell me art doesn’t profoundly affect the everyday. Yes, what you look at, choose to look at, shapes the world you live in and it doesn’t matter which old book you find it in. Our present-day direction doesn’t disagree. Independent artists, many currently employed in other areas, offer personal interventions to this price-is-right stampede toward degradation but so far society has pretty much ignored them. Art on the wall is more potent in the long run than flickering view screens, and if the artist has more to say than just give me money it will seem like fresh air every time you look at it.

Picasso's economy

Once in Los Angeles I saw a Picasso painting -- a woman’s head, as placid and monumental as a Greek statue, and up close it was made with a single line and maybe a thimble full of sepia on a white ground. No mistakes, no restarts, not the slightest stray mark anywhere. It was like seeing a tight rope walker poised above a waterfall, the matador kissing the bull on the forehead frozen forever there on a museum wall. Chinese court painters of a thousand years ago would have been knocked out if they’d had a chance to see it. It’s the one piece I remember after all day looking at art.

art and automobiles -- the next big thing

For decades cars in the US were bought and sold in terms of style with sensational new models unveiled each fall. Mechanically the same configuration lasted about seventy five years -- front engine/rear drive, drum brakes, leaf springs in back. The ignition system changed once or twice but mostly the American automobile remained the same bedsprings with wheels sporting re-sculpted sheet metal every year. The dashboard clock never worked more than a couple of weeks, door handles were made of pot metal and eventually broke off, the seat covers started to fray in the first year and the windows rattled after they’d been rolled up and down a few times. They were sold to consumers by offering stylish new models every year -- two tone paint jobs, towering tail fins and lots of chrome but underneath the same dangerous poorly built chassis rolled on for decades. Mechanical failures became chronic somewhere short of a hundred thousand miles and it became practical as well as cool to trade for a new one. Then the Japanese offered an alternative by building efficient, durable, safer cars that were homely and dependable. Soon car making everywhere started becoming more rational, more responsible, and began to display a little dignity, while everyday citizens got better milage and paid for fewer repairs. The next big thing, it turns out, had us on a treadmill all those years and was really holding us back by just pretending to be new.

nuts in shells -- seasonal musings

So, what good are shells to the consumption of nuts? I’m pretty sure no nuts need to be sold in shells because it’s so easy to get them out and all that wasted space and all. I bought roasted peanuts in the shell figuring the squirrels would like the salt but when I got home I started eating them myself. In a bowl shelled peanuts don’t hold my interest. Oh, I might eat a couple but mostly I’ll ignore them. Crushing the dimpled husk and sorting out the nut, on the other hand, soon leaves consciousness altogether and starts happening on its own. Even more compulsive is prying apart bivalve pistachios and yet they’re even less interesting than peanuts in a bowl with the shells removed.

This time of year down at the store there are open bins of walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds in their shells, representing a lot of work for every nut and an occasional finger mashing if you use a hammer. So much easier, you’d think, just to grab a handful of machine-sorted nutmeats and gobble all that goodness. We want life easy, right? Convenience rules our lives and insulates us from toil and strain yet nuts seem better when we break them open ourselves. Just an observation is all.

If the same math could be applied to art requiring some level of participation from the viewer, say a recounting of relevant experiences in an effort to find common ground with the artist, it might be key to drawing maximum enjoyment from a work of art. Of course it would always be easier to watch TV, but without the engagement and effort on the part of the viewer, it might be not as satisfying.

who guards the gates of eden?

The greatest most implacable foe of humanity sits beside us all the time. It’s boredom and boredom is relentless. You can’t escape it – it’s built in. Without it we couldn’t live here at all, but this major element of our life experience is difficult to control. It comes in handy but can get out of hand. The clanging bell next to your head is quite distracting, but after an hour or so you won’t seem to mind. Early in the day the stockyards have a most pungent odor which disappears by lunchtime. Our perceptual apparatus is geared so that if it doesn’t bite us, fondle us, or feed us, whatever it is begins to fade into the wallpaper.

In dangerous times this boredom mechanism is a lifesaver. You won’t have time to smell the flowers when wolves are in pursuit and the critical things to think about and to be aware of at just that moment don’t want the company. When times are more comfortable boredom doesn’t retire to some back pasture, but instead turns on us and makes us miserable. It takes the joy out of the merry-go-round, reduces music to a thumping din, and drains all the interest out of the ball scores, the scenery, a partner’s conversation. Much of modern life involves various strategies to keep boredom at bay.

Some folks jump from airplanes, climb mountains, or drive too fast. They say they want to feel “alive”. The natural tendency when bored is to turn all the knobs up to nine, to dazzle the eyes with laser shows, and to burn the mouth when dining. Tolerance sets in and we’ve been increasing the dose, searching for more and more stimulation. Finally entertainment is reduced to violence and gore, popular music merges with porn, and tawdry sensation replaces art -- just nod if any of this sounds familiar.

There are common and traditional folk remedies for dealing with boredom and owning and living with original art is probably the most potent. A worthy work of art is capable of capturing your attention and awareness each time your eyes wander in its direction. Once that begins to happen you start to notice other stuff, drifting clouds, flowers in fence rows, nuances of thought and feeling. Art defeats boredom – that’s its job.

rehab tech from the fifteenth century

I’m a rehab technician of the fifteenth century. My specialty is realignment and recalibration of the sensory apparatus. My tools are a flat surface and colors and designs capable of engaging the machinery of recognition and gaining access to the sacred halls of memory. There I knock scale off the lenses, deflate and diminish distortions and errors, and rebalance inside and outside cognitive pressures. It involves techniques developed during the Renaissance to convert medieval thought processes, modes of perception, and notions of reality into modern rationalism. In a major leap forward for civilization painters of that era persuaded their viewers to reinterpret everything they saw in logical terms. It worked very well. Europeans dominated the world for several centuries and their advantage was Aristotle’s cause and effect reality depicted for the masses in visual terms and applied to engineering, chemistry, and commerce.

Painting as a technology has been superseded and its former potency trivialized but the machinery still works. Dusty and piled with centuries of patrician vanity and tawdry commercialism visual art passes the time these days pandering to the cultural tribalism of dynamic wealth, its chariot of mental reconfiguration under canvas out in the barn. Let’s get it out, jerk back that tarp, and find out if it has a role in times such as these. Some things we know already. Whereas everything we possess and enjoy seems to fade and diminish with time and familiarity, art instead becomes more potent and more real the more it’s seen. Find a favorite painting in a museum in some large city. Visit it every few years and spend some time looking. Just the second or third time becomes like seeing an old friend and this painting will have more to say each time thereafter. Lots of people who have done it themselves will tell you that. Living with art day to day is obviously even better.

Still we don’t face the same situation as the Europeans of the middle ages. Ours is an age dissolving in binary code as individual selves meld into cloud consciousness and universal connection. Maybe painting could help with that too. The presence of art pries the attention span back out to a level where sunsets, bird song, the smell of home-cooked all begin to enter consciousness again. The individual self emerges and the coercive consensus of the crowd begins to evaporate like morning mist. Original art in the living room is like owning a long-term technical device which changes the person inside instead of just constantly upgrading the peripherals. “Art is a lie which helps you see the truth,” -- this was Picasso’s little joke and it also happens to be true.

vision's ninety percent

Vision, the faculty you’re using at the moment, is a complex process. Ten percent is light through the eye and the rest is on file, ready with comparisons and associations to tell us what we’re seeing. The blank new-born stare sees everything but understands nothing – just two black dots, probably mommy’s eyes. Everything else is learned by biting, twisting, and pulling until we find out what’s in our crib, and we go on catalogueing all we come across until we grow up and understand everything. That’s how come what we see is heavily conditioned by where we’ve been and what we’ve seen before.

Art really isn’t about what you see. Art is about how you see it. Art operates in the back ninety percent, moving the furniture, polishing the mirrors. All those dusty, taken for granted old visions we hardly pay attention to any more – the different colors of cars in traffic, clouds in the sky, the worn spots on our favorite chair can all fade to grey and begin to disappear if we’re not careful. Familiarity isn’t the only enemy. Modern media chases our desensitized perceptual apparatus right back into our skulls with laser light shows and mind-blowing special effects, so that day to day life becomes a dim lit corridor through endless weeks of salacious advertisements and brutalizing entertainment.

Art is the antidote, the vitamins for our modern deficiencies, the home cooking in our franchised food existence. Original artwork already stands in contrast to a perfect world produced by robots, and its organic genesis makes it chocked full of nutrients inkjet printers can’t help but leave out. Owning a piece or two of original art and seeing them on the way out to work can make the idea of getting home seem better, and make the idea of owning a couple more, maybe from the same artist – maybe something completely different, seem more of a possibility.