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.

same sex marriage

Joe Biden said he thought it was programs like “Will and Grace” that evolved public thinking about gay marriage, and he was just being factual. Public thinking about anything is largely determined by dramatic art, and seeing gay people acknowledged and respected on TV is enough to turn survey polls upside down. It’s just too bad there’s so many violent cop shows. See previous post.

florida

Bill Cosby said it’s not about race, it’s about guns, and I think that’s closer but it isn’t fundamental. The reason for all the guns and the screwy laws is the deadly paranoia everyone soaks up four or five hours a night in cop shows. It’s about art. The writers and actors call themselves artists but the sole criteria for good they are is how many trucks get sold, and that is biblically a bad idea.

the naked and the sane

Sir Kenneth Clark wrote a lot about the nude in art – a couple of big books, and hosted a series about the nude through history on educational TV. Seems the body hasn’t changed since the beginning but its presentation varies widely, and since the denominator stays the same we gain a little insight into how different cultures thought about themselves and everything else. As an example, in modern times Hugh Hefner became famous and rich depicting the female nude in the form of retouched photos. Almost anyone can see these photographs reveal much more about Hef and his readership than about women, humanity at large, or the world around them.

The reason, by the way, for not wearing clothes is because clothing indicates period and rank, and art sometimes aims for something more universal. Beyond that the nude makes an excellent subject because we grew up in families, see each other and have mirrors – we all know the subject well. In some periods the nude demurs and looks away, and everyone expects this. Economic change occurs, society changes, and then one day a nude looks directly out of the picture and into the eyes of the viewer, causing quite a scandal. This assertion of personality on the part of the nude person eventually changes the way people see themselves, as does the character and dignity of the whole presentation. Art is the mental mirror of any culture and the unchanging nude human figure is its key.

Recent distortions in body image which the experts trace largely to advertising have caused both men and women to make fetishes of their own bodies, saving up their nickels to be surgically altered. It’s like an epidemic. Researchers have found skeletal people see themselves as fat, stout folks see themselves thinner, and lots of people obsess about some part or other -- it just seems unhealthy. And then there’s contemporary art.

Metaphoric and ironic are ways to avoid what’s actually there, and it isn’t always as clever as it is sort of sad. Consider the “Nude Show” at the Lexington Art League, a venerable and tax supported non-profit cultural asset to our community. As body images go, it’s all really kinda creepy. They did say in advance that they wouldn’t be interested in rational arms and legs sorts of images but that doesn’t keep the entire enterprise from having evolved into something deranged. This notion that thoughts are better than deeds, that process is more important than product, and that contemporary art is an honest expression of the culture which supports it could use a little distance, an objective assessment, a comparison with everyday reality. Remove the feeding tube of everybody’s money from these cultural charities with their presumption of knowing what's good for the rest of us, and art will begin to bend back toward a common sensibility, and will more truly represent who we are and how we see ourselves.

paleolithic me

Ever since that movie, “Cave of Dreams”, the painters from that Paleolithic era watch me while I work – a painter myself, you understand. They dress in leather and fur and are in person ripe in modern terms, but smell doesn’t come across – only their murmuring and shifting shapes, usually five or six, and just a few occasional comments. Sometimes one of them will nudge another and they all laugh at once – a deep rumbling. They also watch me while I cook. I explain that animals are raised and slaughtered to be cut up and repackaged in plastic skin and they’re vaguely interested. I tell them metal weeps from rock in a great fire and then it’s pounded into knifes, and pots, and sinks and stuff and they believe me but don’t care to know more. They won’t come around at all when I watch TV. They say it’s all about zombies and I become a zombie, too, when I watch it. I can’t argue.

What they want to know about is painting, and they comment to themselves when I change colors or add some new feature. I explain that the colors I use aren’t much different from what they used, ground from elements they had found themselves plus a few others more difficult to get to, and finished out better, which they concede. As a binder I use polymer plastic instead of fat from the cooking fire, but it does pretty much the same thing. They don’t care for the bridges and overpasses but they get excited when I paint animals. They laughed and pointed at the longhorn, so similar to the cattle they knew – they understood it was real. We are just alike – humans who see each other through their art across thirty thousand years.