PUNK ART

the foot of somebody's bed

 

Went to the library earlier today to put up title tags for each art object on the walls. I have a hard time finding a word to call my works. I don't like to call them works. They're about play. It's like saying somebody works a banjo. It can be said in slang, like "Peco Watson can really work that banjer." But that means he puts the banjo to work, gets out of it everything it's got in it. He does it playing the banjo. A work of art makes sense in that I've heard it all my life. When art becomes work, the spirit goes out of it. So I don't like to use the word work about art. People on a stage playing pretend is called a play. Play is taken. I like the French, objets d'art, literally objects of art, or to Anglicize it, art objects. I feel like the French version says it even better than art object. But this aint France. We talk American here. I take art objects to be second best, which is good enough when the French is not an option.

 

bang a gong

 

 

Putting up the final touches to the exhibition, I read over a kind of artist's statement I'd written for the occasion. I taped it to a wall to be seen upon entering the room, titled PUNK ART. Two pages of fairly large print told what I meant by punk art, spelled out my guidelines; simplicity, use items I already have, fun.  I did not want to explain, rather give a sense of what is behind the pieces to give the viewers insight to help them see each one the unit it is. I wanted to get it across without saying it that there is nothing to "understand," the things simply are what you see. If asked what one made of nine circles was about, I could only answer they were cornhole board holes. Around here, people know what that means. It's not what it sounds like, but the word is still funny. One of those things like the high school being the Trojans. It's so obviously funny it ceases to be funny immediately. A new kid at school makes a joke about Trojans and nobody laughs, like we're over it, dude, it was funny when we were six.

 

line

 

 

I know a lot of the people who will see the show and won't know most of them. The ones I don't know will be of the same culture as the ones I do know, so I wrote to everyone I know, in my mind, which would also cover everyone I don't know. I was attempting to assist the people of my world seeing for the first time something along the lines of Dadaism. In the room, putting up the tags, I was thinking how curious it is that Dada happened a hundred years ago this year. Upon realizing that, I felt good about what I was doing. I mean by Punk a centennial expression of the Dada spirit. The Dadaists in Zurich, Switzerland, draft-dodgers from WWI, threw open a door to a whole new understanding of art. The Twentieth Century renascence of anti-art, called the Modern, followed. The period  was characterized by an evolving series of movements from Impressionism to Conceptualism.

 

hanging line

 

The century progressed by dissecting art, itself, a step at a time, eliminating form, color, name, design.  The progressive movements went out in Conceptualism, where the art was found in the human mind, conception. So everybody is an artist, like now with cellphone video cameras.  Sly Stone in my head singing, "Everybody is a Sta-ar." In America, less people know about art than science.  I cannot anticipate that anyone has an interest in anything to do with art except for occasional curiosity. That's cool, I have no problem with it. Yes, I do have a problem with it. Makes it kind of lonesome to have a passion about something of interest to so few others. It was my choice. I find it a fun exercise to translate what I'm doing to people who live in my world, Alleghany County, in a way they get it without being told. Some people hold the artist apart from other people. Not me. For myself, as artist, I want the people around me to know that I am just a Joe, like them, no big deal. I continue to play in my adult life making useless items for no reason but the fun in it, same reason somebody else picks a guitar. 

    

masks

all objects by tj worthington

 

 

*

 

 

                                                                                      

GOING TO ROMANIA IN MY MIND

constantin brancusi

It has been a two-week film festival at my house of Romanian films. Found six. Today's was a documentary of the Ceausescu years, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu. I've known little to nothing about Romania. It was behind the Iron Curtain where the only news we heard of Soviet satellites was propaganda. I remember the name Ceausescu equated in my mind like Tito of (then) Yugoslavia, a tyrant dictator. Before seeing this film, I questioned self what I knew about Ceausescu, and all I could find was tyrant dictator overthrown for I did not know what reasons. Four films made in Romania gave me a sense of the culture, what the people look like, clothes, styles, the cities, the landscape, the architecture, the cars. The second film in my at home festival, The Way I Spent The End of The World, followed a family, kids in school, working people, Bucharest, showed a life of paranoia under Ceausescu, and the jubilation when he fell. Another, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, concerned a girl in college getting an illegal abortion in a hotel room, accompanied by her roommate in the dorm, her friend. I sometimes consult the Atlas during foreign films to get a sense of place. First clue to location was the desk clerk in a hotel saying they were full, people from Bucharest. It was not Bucharest. Later, I heard in a conversation at a dinner table, "Here in Roman." Went to the Atlas, looked up Roman, Romania, in the index. Found it. Went to the map of Romania and found Roman. It is north of Bucharest on a highway that looks like it follows a long valley, something like the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, between two rows of mountains. The Danube flows through Romania. 

constantin brancusi

I've learned from studying the Atlas, Romania is bordered on the north by Ukraine, on the west by Hungary and Serbia, on the south by Bulgaria, and on the east by the Black Sea and Moldova. I know nothing of Romania's history. Just now went to amazon and bought a history that had some good reviews and a good price, a hundred pictures with the text. Just what I want. The Autobiography of Ceausescu by documentary film showed me a great deal about Romania and the people, just by what I saw. It was composed of newsreel footage for television from Ceausescu's beginnings to his end. Some b&w, some color. Film footage of big Party gatherings, speeches, rallying people to his support, Ceausescu was a politician doing it well. I saw Khrushchev visit, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Nixon, Ford, Carter, He  went to North Korea, the subject of a big celebration. In London he rode in the carriage with the Queen in a parade, waving. He was good at waving. He did it automatically in a way that looked like it was meant personally for anyone seeing it. He had a male charisma about him. Maybe what one would call a man's man. Men liked him. Or gave the appearance of it. He was a believer in Marx and Lenin. He studied while he ruled. I liked about the documentary of nothing but newsreel clips, no commentary, many of them with no sound. The ones with sound provided translation in subtitles. Mostly, it was in silence. Three hours. I saw it in three viewings. Came out of it with a sense for his period of Romania's history. And by the end, I had no more idea of why he was reviled as a tyrant than I did at the beginning. All the footage was State controlled. 

constantin brancusi

At the end of the documentary, his overthrow had something to do with what they called a "genocide at Timisoara," a large city in the western part of the country near Hungary and Serbia. I may want to google that. I looked it up. Turns out it was just as he said at the end when he was detained. He was accused of a massacre of thousands, 4,500 at Timisoara. Turns out it was exaggerated by the people of the rebellion for the press. Ceausescu said it was not like that, it was much less. Turns out, after the fog of misinformation cleared, it was a hundred. It was the crackdown on rebellion that got him executed. I knew there was a dark side to these bright side newsreel films, and appreciated that the makers of the film gave no hint of judgment. And it is apt as an autobiography as all of it was self-serving, adoring the great leader. He appeared to me to be a good leader. As age crept up on him, his walking was less firm, and his demeanor was only partially present. His mind was still sharp, but he was fading. Seems like he would have saved the country and himself a good measure of grief to turn his power over to someone else. But power was the thrill. It had a hook. Outliving a role of immense power, being a once-was, seeing your significance fade into irrelevance while you're living, is not easy to live with. I have the impression he hung on tight in his drifty years to the power his out of bounds ego could not let go. He outlived his significance and caused rebellion by the opposition. I'm looking forward now to the history of Romania. I've read a history of the Ottoman Empire, so I have the little I remember from it to make the first step. I've wondered about Romania for so long I don't remember when the curiosity began. 

constantin brancusi

I only knew of Romania that 20th Century sculptor, Constantin Brancusi went to Paris from Romania. I have a big picture book of his works. The text was written by his closest friends, husband and wife, Romanian, living in the apartment above him in Paris. I will read the text. Dadaists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco went to Zurich, Switzerland, draft dodgers during WW1. French playwright, Eugene Ionesco, was Romanian, writing in Paris in French. Historian, philosopher, Mircea Eliade, was born in Bucharest. These are not insignificant people in the chopping-block moment that cut off the progression of European art as it was evolving--the birth of the Modern, and the art that sprang from it. Eliade is one of the great minds of the 20th Century. Brancusi is the soul of the Modern. I've wondered for a long time without pursuing the question what it is about Romania that contributed so directly to the birth of the modern. The Absurd came out of the Balkans, too. WW1 was kicked off in the Balkans. Seems some powerful energy was tapped into something. The Balkans being behind the Iron Curtain so long as Yugoslavia, disappeared from my attention, having no idea about the Balkan nationalities. Then the Balkan wars, and now the different countries have their own identities again. The Soviet period brought progress for a time, while at the same time diminished the spirit of the population, put people into depression from suppressed anger and the impotence of frustrated initiative. I've learned from the film festival that Romania is pronounced with the accent on the i, the third syllable, Roman-ee-a, like Carolina has the accent on third syllable. I'm enjoying getting to know a country and its culture, how people live there. I knew nothing at all about Romania, except tyrant dictator, and didn't even know that.    

*

A WORLD OF BOXES

kazimir malevich

Talking with different friends yesterday, three, I brought up the subject of the box for some thoughts on the matter. Everyone I talked with said something to the effect of, Who needs a box? These were people who don't have an art expression, though take an interest. It continues in the front of my head that since 1970 we've been in the Post-Modern time, a time in which anything goes. I personally see the Post-Modern period a composite of what was learned through the Modern Period, a kind of universal Dada period. In 1915 a small group of draft-dodging artists from around Europe met in Zurich, Switzerland. They set out to discover art as if none had ever been made before. They acted as something of a cleaver on a chopping block, severed everything that went before and started fresh without reference to the past. They experimented with chance, with nonsense, with the new machine age.  Everything they did was then outside the box. Happening then was Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism. The dozen or so Dadaists in Zurich created a new -ism, totally outside the box, Dadaism. In a period of about 6 months they deconstructed art down to conceptualism. By the end of WW1, they had practiced their art vision outside the boxes, and introduced a new box to Europe and the rest of the world, the box that is not a box, the anti-box. From the end of WW1 to 1969 the world of front-runner artists all over the earth repeated the Dada process of deconstructing art, peeling away superficial layers a step at a time by way of a series of -isms. Surrealism started up in Paris post-Dada, explored interior territory until WW2, after which abstract expressionism in New York came forward. Then minimalism, and Pop, which became an -ism too, and a quick run of new -isms every year unto conceptualism, which revealed the core of what we call art, conception.

 

kazimir malevich

 

One of the better known conceptualist moments was a postcard a "conceptualist" sent around to art dealers in NY and patrons announcing a show at a particular address, a particular time. When the people arrived, it was a locked empty space with nothing going on. The postcard, itself, was the art. I've seen what the Dadaists did in Zurich in half a year repeated universally in half a century, the Modern period. This Post-Modern time started its first cycle in a Dadaist manner where anything goes; realism, abstraction, projection, video, exploring everything. The Post-Modern is a new time of thinking outside the box, but this time with reference to the past, the Modern period. Everybody was too busy watching television and fighting wars to notice that the Modern period, Dada to conceptualism, was the greatest renascence the world has ever seen. Preceding it were the renascence of the classical period of Greece and Rome, and the Renaissance, renascence with an Italian name. The next renascence the Modern period. It was the beginning of a new expansion of mind for collective humanity. Renascences past brought us into Reason. The renascence that was the modern period is bringing us into Intuition. It shows in the evolution of art. It's a long slow process. We still have a world of people who have not caught up with the cosmology of evolution, and even what would be a surprising number, if known, of people who have not yet caught up with the cosmology of round earth. We humans come in all levels of development. I've never argued with someone who believes flat earth. I figure that's their place and their vision. I don't know how to convince someone who does not understand planets and orbits that the earth is indeed round, and I don't believe it matters in everyday life whether someone believes the earth is flat or round. It matters for launching satellites. I believe round earth initially because I was told as a little kid in school it's a fact, like it's fact that George Washington was first president. Get it right for the test. My neighbor Tom would say of the moon-landing propaganda that no man can walk on the moon. The Bible sez the moon is just a light. No man can stand on a light.

 

kazimir malevich

 

Remembering the time he told me his teacher in school said the world was round like a baseball. Little man Tom said, "I aint never seen no mountains on narry baseball." This house used to be the Air Bellows School, it happened in the space I live in, in the space where this is being written. These walls were there. Tom believed he understood baseball, played it when he was a kid. I had to respect his integrity as himself and not let it show that I was tickled. Immediately I saw a baseball magnified to the size of the earth. The mountains would be a hundred miles high. Even the smooth part would be a plain of great high mountains and deep, deep valleys. A ball bearing the size of a baseball magnified to the size of the earth would have huge mountains and vast valleys. His mind really was from another cosmology. He did not need to be converted and I didn't need to be telling him he was wrong, when he was going by experience and I was going by believing what I was taught. He would be disappointed that I was so ignorant to take what somebody else told me without questioning it by way of my own experience. The sun goes across the sky, caint y'see? College boy thinks he knows all about it and didn't even know what a chainsaw was, except for a movie that warped my mind so bad it probably changed my DNA. Jesus brought a new cosmology, love is all there is, summary of the gospels by John Lennon. This cosmology was a little slow taking hold. Finally, all these millennia later, a pope is reintroducing the old cosmology that never went anywhere, as if it were new in a world that never heard of it. This cosmology goes back before gravity. A couple thousand years later, it's outside the box. I continue to wonder what the box is. It comes to me over and over that Western Civ is the box. It is the box that civilization is transcending now. In Asia, Africa and the Middle East, they are transcending their own boxes. My new piece, BIG SUR, is only outside the box pre-Dada. From 1915 on, it's very much inside the box.

 

kazimir malevich

 

Again, I see the box so vast as not to be a box. In conversation with Tom's preacher brother, Millard, who was hard-shell unto stasis, after years of knowing him, I said one day, "If everything is a sin, then I'm free, it doesn't matter what I do when I can only sin." "No, it's not like that." It was quite a time knowing those men from two cosmologies back. I had a difficult time where talking was concerned, because I'm from round earth and understand evolution is the ongoing process of creation. Never use the E-word, it's as bad as the C-word, Communism, the A-word, Atheism, and the F-word. These language restrictions were pre-political correctness. I might make a case for the old restrictions due to limited education, but political correctness is adhered to with the same vehemence in the "educated" middle class. Who needs censorship when we have a population so eager to self-edit? Concerning my own interior boxes, television has so minimal a place in my world as to have no place at all. To go outside my box I could start watching television. That's not even worth an experiment for laughs. I like to tap in periodically for a review of what the people around me are believing this moment and to see what it is they're smiling about all the time. This could be outside my box too, smiling all the time. I could sit in front of a tv with a Bud, a bag of barbeque flavored potato chips and a big smile on my face. Good time for a selfie. Click. Self as Ken doll in environment. Call it art. Instead of doing it, I write it and that is my art expression outside the box. But it's not really. Just sparkles flickering in the universe of the image-ination. Lenny Kaye on the guitar. Keith Jarrett on the keyboard. Go Rimbaud and go Johnny go and do the Watusi. How was that sentence for outside the box? You didn't see it coming. What did it have to do with anything? An outside the box joke, a game I learned from the donkeys, I get a kick outta you.  

 

kazimir malevich himself

 

 

*

 

   

A POEM BY LUCAS CARPENTER

          NODADATHING

          Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich



          Nothing helps.

          Nothing matters.

          Nothing remains.

          Nothing lasts.

          (Nothing more,

          Nothing less.)

          Nothing is free.

          Nothing is simple.

          Nothing is impossible.

          Nothing works.

          (Nothing ventured,

          Nothing gained.)

          Nothing happened.

          Nothing doing.

          Nothing for me.

          You?



                     --- Lucas Carpenter

          from his book  of poemsThe Way Things Go

kurt schwitters

*

CYCLES AND THE WIDENING GYRE

yayoi kusama

 

Today, the winter solstice was a still day of light fog with about fifty yard visibility. Trees in the foreground were dark and wet, and the trees faded into the fog with distance. The foreground had a white background like a watercolor. Light breeze rang the windchimes in sequences of four and five different notes every time. A good day to be at home with no schedule and nothing pressing. A good day to stare out the window in silence with empty mind and see familiar landscape as watercolor. A good day for a long winter's nap. A good day to ride a dugout canoe through a swamp in Botswana with author Laurens van der Post in his 1958 account of searching for the Bushmen, THE LOST WORLD OF THE KALAHARI. I'd read this several years ago, probably around 40. A few weeks ago I saw the documentary film, THE JOURNEY OF MAN, tracing DNA back to the original people on earth. It went back to the Bush people of the southern part of Africa, who are living in the Kalahari desert in this time because people all around them want to kill them. They're little and they're different, so kill them, the mind we like to believe we rise above in civilization, but never do. Sometimes I feel like this is the very mind that guides civilization. However, that's serving a temptation to take something incomprehensively complex, simplify it into a word or two and pat myself on the back for saying something erudite. I returned to van der Post after learning the Bush people of the Kalahari are the original humans we all come from. They have lived in the southern part of Africa for something like 200,000 years. What we call civilization goes back less than 10,000 years.

 

yayoi kusama

 

I've recently learned a word for my view of the world. The word is, apocaloptimist, someone whose vision of the near future is waxing worse and worse, and whose vision of the distant future is that everything will work out just right. We're in a difficult time in civilization, perhaps the most difficult ever, and perhaps the greatest renascence since classical times. Making sculpture of human forms changed from standing straight up with arms straight down to sitting, lying down, standing in varieties of postures, walking, running, realistic in the classic sense. In the 20th Century, we left reproductions of existing objects and human forms for more interior representations of mind. In the Dada period, 1916, Zurich, Switzerland, a handful of draft dodging artists from Romania, Germany, France, Norway, ran the course of 20th Century art in six months. Simultaneously, in Paris, Marcel Duchamp was working in the same spirit. The cycle repeated from then to 1969 or 70. A new cycle has begun in what we call the Post Modern. First cycle happened in Zurich for half a year. Second cycle covered the globe in half a century. Third cycle may last half a millennium, 500 years. The progression I see is raising of consciousness by way of Dada during WW1, Surrealism between WW1 and WW2, and abstraction from WW2 to 1969, when the avatar of the Age left the body. The Modern period. The Post Modern period began doing Dada again. That's breaking it down in broad sweeps, the best I can do for brevity. This span of Dada all over the globe may last fifty or more years, then Surrealism and Expressionism maybe a few hundred years, then the same period of time with abstraction in all its varieties. Then time to run the cycle again, a spiral that started in one place in one time, cycles that grow bigger and bigger to take in all of humanity over a period of at least 500 years, each cycle an advancement by way of what was learned from the cycle before.

 

 

yayoi kusama

 

As we have looked back on Greece and Rome as the foundation of art through the 19th Century, the future will be looking back to the 20th Century as the foundation time when collective human consciousness took a leap without knowing it. It will take a few more centuries for that leap in consciousness to reach all the people around the globe. This does not exclude the learnings from the Classical period or the Renaissance. They will continue and feel as far away conceptually as Egyptian renderings of people with straight arms and straight legs. I was fascinated to see my first Egyptian sculpture of a life-sized human head. No lines on the face. No furrowed brow. Smooth African round face. The classical age of reason, the breakthrough of the forebrain in the time of the Christ in Jerusalem, made sculptures showing furrowed brows, deeply lined faces, the torment of thought. In a way, that period was the introduction of rational thought to collective humanity. It takes awhile for it to get around. We can see in the progression of 20th Century art leaving the physical reality of the body, or what Marcel Duchamp called "the retinal," for an art of mind reality. Perhaps this is leading to the next big cycle of the spiritual. If abstraction and readymades are art expressions of mind, I'm wondering how art of the spiritual would manifest. Perhaps what I'm calling "mind" is the spiritual, and mind came with the classical. It's getting down to defining mind and spirit, which I can't get into at this moment. I don't even know that there is a line. I'd be more inclined to say they fade into each other the way light and dark do at sunrise and sunset.

 

yayoi kusama

 

This brings to mind the next book from the past I want to reread. Not all books from the past do I want to reread, very few. This one I just now picked off the shelf. AN ART OF OUR OWN: The Spiritual In Twentieth Century Art, by Roger Lipsey, 1988. Looking at the table of contents makes me salivate mentally. He walks from Cezanne through the Modern period, chapters on Kandinsky, Brancusi, Matisse, Noguchi. Lipsey previously wrote a biography of Ananda Coomeraswamy, a philosopher of Indian art. Lipsey's vision of art is through a western eye that has learned to see through the eastern eye. He is a scholar whose eyes see both ways. I am comfortable with his approach to the spiritual through the eastern vision. Eastern spiritual engages experience. I remember enjoying Lipsey's prose and insights. I didn't always feel like his interpretations accorded with my understanding of the subject, but that means nothing. He was teaching me. I wasn't teaching him. It's mine to take what I learn from him and weave with my own understanding. Lipsey pulled the whole of 20th Century art together as the dismantling of form, color, name, design, all the way to conception, 1969. I remember reading the 500 page book with the same fascination as a Patrick White novel, another one I'd like to dip into again. I could happily spend what time I have left in this body rereading books I have loved along the way. Another favorite is a biography of artist Giacometti by James Lord. One I must read the first time is the text with a big book of Brancusi's work, written by his closest friends, other Romanian artists living in Paris. And Stanley Weintraub's biography of Whistler. Now I get a logjam in my head and have to do like a dog, shake my head, flop my ears, throw pointless thinking off like water off my hair. Back to the Kalahari of Southern Africa for now. This is what I love about reading, that it takes me to places, times, people, understandings far beyond my own, whatever my own may be. I feel like I'm creeping up on a time to dive back into Lipsey's beautiful book and illustrate it with google images. A review of the Modern to look forward to with the same anticipation as for a cup of Ethiopian coffee.

 

yayoi kusama

 

 

*

    

IZO THE MOVIE

from izo

I have just now seen the wildest Japanese samurai slasher film of my life. I don't even try to "get it," just let it flow by like the river. I sit on the bank and watch the flow. It's full of different ideas about dying, varieties of ways of going into death. Izo is a demon in the spirit world (within) and a man of flesh who never dies, though is killed over and over by ghosts of people he'd killed in the past. They all curse him. One swears to curse him forever even if her curses send her to hell. He's killed over and over by people who hate him, dies an agonizing death and is back at it, covered in blood, slashing everybody around him, even people that just happen to be nearby. It came to the place where Izo, the demon, was death itself, an evil form of death. "I am not a human." When he showed up, people died. He went anywhere in time, medieval times, conrempoary times. Like he slashed an urban crowd of corporate suits. "Let Izo pass. Clear the way." "If you want to live, clear the way." Izo kills anyone, everyone. "I'm like a bird flying to a far-off island."

 

 

The film is interspersed at regular intervals with moments of a man picking an acoustic guitar and singing a song relating abstractly to the story, if it can be called a story. It's a Brechtian device, a song sung as an aside from time to time in the story, like Broadway, but not. The song is as much a Dadaist poem as the film. This film goes all over the place, "Buddha is merciful." Izo's issue with religionists is no different from anybody else. He kills indiscriminately. For him, it's like the way children play. Get killed, get up and you're somebody else or you just came back to life. Your choice. Izo gets shot down by multiple bullets or sword thrusts, gets up and carries on slashing. "You're still alive? Damned monster!" A man's last words. Nobody survives an encounter with Izo. "We can't stop him. I'm telling you he's nothingness." Death in human form. It brings to mind the tv series a few years ago, A Thousand Ways To Die. This film is a thousand ways to die by samurai sword. What's crazy about this film for me is that it is not cheezy, not a cheap thriller. It has depth and range that includes Japanese history, WW2 film footage, a collage of high-speed of b&w war images. "Damn you! You're going against karma, ghost!" I take that to mean he interrupts someone's karma and takes them out of their time. It's a new form of Godzilla running loose. The top dog general leading the effort to find a way to kill Izo is played by Kitano Takashi, another Japanese artist director of now.

let's bowl

The film strikes me as a long Japanese Dadaist poem by Takahachi Shinkichi. In many ways it brings to mind a stage event I saw years ago at Spoleto by Terayama of Tokyo, Directions For Servants. Terayama was the Robert Wilson of Japan. It was the most incredible stage event I'd ever witnessed, for me a seven in a five-star rating. Not that I've seen a lot. This film has that quality of the Japanese avant garde through the 20th century into the Post-modern. It could be used in film schools as a raw example of the post-modern. "The name of illness is a singer. The doctor is the audience. The nurse is a poet." It has the kind of creepiness of mind that I see in David Lynch films. Lynch has an awfully creepy edge that is chilling, like Willem Dafoe's character in Wild At Heart, especially the scene where his mouth is in Laura Durn's face with breath you know is from hell telling her, "Say fuck me. Say fuck me." over and over.  Miike Takashi is the director, the one whose mind's eye created this vision of death. IZO is the title. I saw two characters show up in a scene who played roles in a Kitano Takashi film, Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman. I've seen a few other Miike Takashi films. One I recall, Hara-Kiri: the Death of a Samurai, was a truly fine film. 13 Assassins was one of the great samurai films. Good samurai story beautifully told. This one, Izo, strikes me as a visual Japanese Dadaist poem. It's a poem about death.

 

"Human history is made from blood. Human history is no more than an unsated chain of bloodshed. You must realize that a new age arrives out of the blood of massacre, and nowhere else." That's a hard saying, but who can deny it? History, itself, bears it out. This is why history amounts to dates of wars and names of generals. Another quotation about Izo, "How can he be so resilient, that damned 'contradiction'?" I need to see this again for the Dada of it, for the visual poem that it is, to be able to see from the beginning what I'd discovered about it by the end. The slasher overkill makes me hesitate ever to see it again, but it has so many levels of interesting, I want to take it apart and piece together the sections of thread running through the collage depiction of beginning, middle and end. It flowed like a poem about death, a tradition that goes way back in time. It brings to mind Black Orpheus, a truly beautiful film about death. IZO is not beautiful in the conventional way of looking at it. As a post-modern theatrical experience, I am fascinated every minute, a film I put on pause to get up and let Caterpillar out or in the door. I believe I'll have to see it again tomorrow. It took until way into it to get some drift of what was going on. Got it right away this was a ghost, but it took a large part of the film finding what the film itself was, and when I fell into the flow of it and saw what Miike was doing, I started feeling I got it by the end. But then it was over. Now I want to see it, knowing from the start what's going on and be able to see the whole thing with the appreciation I developed seeing it the first time. IZO is a film I'd have to see probably five times before feeling satisfaction I got it. The paradox of beauty and death.

miike takashi

*

LOOKING AT 20th CENTURY ART

            francis picabia

Rain all day yesterday, all day today and all day tomorrow. It is a soft rain, a little more than sprinkles, but not much. Mid July, the time of year when the fresh green leaves of spring begin to age, lose their lustre, have holes eaten in them by bugs, some turning yellow randomly here and there. The green is vibrant after a couple days of rain and before that a week of moderate heat. The leaves have seemed thicker than usual this year. Now they are seeming to keep the green of vibrant spring on into July. The white rhododendron are blooming now. They are the ones that grow in the woods and have pointed leaves. The pink rhododendron grow on the edge of woods, liking more sunlight, having a rounded tip on the leaves. In the old days, rhododendron was called laurel. The white flowers were called pink. The pink flowers were called purple. That's actually more accurate than what we call them today. The white flowers are actually pink. The pink flowers have a purple to them. Mountain laurel were called ivy in the old days when rhododendron were called laurel. The rhododendron are a large part of the beauty of the mountains in June and July when the green world is at its zenith. After them, the mountain laurel bloom.


I'd so much rather live in a place where rhododendron and mountain laurel bloom all around where I live in the mountain than in a place with 8-lane highways lined on both sides by corporate fast food and shopping center signs. I prefer my quiet location to anyplace in a city. I'd rather make less money living here, rather have less opportunities, and rather do without a career. Whenever I went to a city in the past, like New York, Houston, Kansas City, I check out the modern art museum. I've been to the Mint in Charlotte half a dozen times and keep going back to see their American collection again. It may not be the greatest collection of American art ever, but it is a good collection and I like to walk through it seeing the representative images from the range of American painters. The art museums are my only interests in cities. I used to go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York until it started costing so much to get in I couldn't justify it. All my urban travel is over. I'm not flying anywhere because I am not submitting to police state voluntarily, certainly not paying for the abuse. I stay at home ant see the MoMA website online, look at the paintings of Rothko, Newman, Rivers, Dali, Warhol, on and on, Anselm Kiefer, Brice Marden, Frank Stella.


It was New York prices leaving my reach and insurmountable transportation issues that have put art in museums out of my reach. I am satisfied to look at art books. I have a 2vol 20th Century American art collection I love. I can sit and look at it with the same awe I feel walking in a museum. In the museum, though, it is the thing itself. I like that, but don't have access to it, so 2nd, 3rd, 4th best will have to do. I've known so many people along the way to throw off on museums as an art viewing experience. The worst was an old hippie I once knew who wanted to see paintings or sculpture one at a time in a "real" (whatever that is) setting or context. Where you going to do that? Corporate offices? I'm not a purist. I take my art as I can find it. I love walking along a wall seeing a black and white Franz Kline abstraction, a Warhol silkscreen, a Jasper Johns target, a David Hockney swimming pool, a Dan Flavin fluorescent tube. It gives me a major thrill to stand in front of a Kandinsky that he applied the paint to. My only motivation for wealth would be to have a collection of art that I love. I'd like a room with a Robert Mangold in it, an Ellsworth Kelly, a Cy Twombly, a Kenneth Noland. I could spend happy time in a room with paintings by these people on the walls.


I see my art the plebeian way instead of the privileged way. That's ok. When I look at a Rothko online, it has light behind it. That's how they look when I stand before them, like the light is coming from within. I like looking at art books and photography books. This is how I am able to see Francis Picabia's paintings that characterized Dada about as poignantly as the Sex Pistols characterized punk rock. Kurt Schwitters constructed the interior of his house as one of his works of dada constructions he called Merz (work); an American bomb took it out in a direct hit during WW2. I like knowing a little bit about van Gogh's life. I like having a two-volume set of his complete paintings to look at and marvel over. I love my Brancusi book with so many beautiful color photos of his works, pictures of his studio, text by his closest friends, who were also from Romania. I love my books of minimalist sculpture. My picture books are on a couple of shelves to my left within reach. Sometimes I pick one, sit back for awhile with it and enjoy the images as briefly or as long as I please. The Marcel Duchamp books are like the four corners of a foundation. I love about Duchamp that I can only feel what he's doing per piece; can't connect with it mentally. Like a joke, explaining one of his works kills it.


The Art of Zen by Stephen Addiss is my companion piece to the Duchamp books in the house. I can't help but imagine Duchamp a Zen master in a previous lifetime who came in this time a French artist to introduce to the western world the Zen understanding of art on a whole new level, new dimension. I have an idea Duchamp's vision will characterize 20th century art for future centuries, raising the consciousness bar for art to follow him. The Dadaists occurred in Zurich during the time of WW1--Zurich was loaded with draft dodgers from all over Europe, Lenin one. Lenin had an apartment in close proximity to Cabaret Voltaire, the Dada hangout, though he never attended. He had other things on his mind besides art--too bad for the Romanovs. I think of the Dada period something of a chopping block. It was like a cleaver came down and rent in two the progression of art into before and after. The beginning of the Modern period. They started as if there had been no art before. Dada was a burst of energy in the art world like WW1 was a burst of energy in the political world. Dada was the visual expression of the change in western civilization from before electricity to after electricity. Art took a giant leap in consciousness. Collective humanity has had consciousness raised collectively with the introduction of electricity.


The art of the 20th century illustrates the raising of our consciousness. Pierre Bonnard and Francis Picabia were painting at the same time. The conceptual leap from Bonnard to Picabia is considerable. I don't mean the painting from Picabia is better or lesser than what went before, but that was not a consideration. A new energy happened among the Dadaists in Zurich and simultaneously with Marcel Duchamp in Paris. I can't help but think they must have been tapped into some wave of energy that was raising our consciousness. It showed up in art first, because that's where consciousness visualizes. It was a renascence that began in that time. Going by the art alone, this renascence that was called the Modern period from 1915-1969, give or take however many years to suit particular interpretations, was the greatest such age in the evolution of civilization. The art of the period is dynamic, even exciting. Art characterized the modern all the way along. While the working people were discovering washers and dryers, Jackson Pollock was slinging paint, Jasper Johns painting flags, Alex Calder hanging mobiles, Carl Andre laying brick.


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THE NEWS IS DADA POETRY

          stanley whitney, first fire, 2009

In the bed awake for a few hours, comfortable enough to be able to lie there and and not get tired of what was running through my head. It came to me to write down phrases from the 5 minutes of news on the hour, no regard for subject, just words or phrases as I hear them. Again, no attention given to subject or meaning. Make a kind of Dada poem of it, the only progression being the order of the subjects. The first one came from BBC, the other from NPR. Same day, just 2 hours apart. Content radically different. It's a stretch of the imagination to make them seem like the same day. It's not a conscious attempt to make a kind of sense that tells a new story. It's a lot of news language with subjects removed, or sprinkled in by chance.

Writing down these phrases as I heard them, I was wanting to be as free of mental associations as possible, allowing words to be written as my ear hears them, not my mind. Keeping mind out of it is the purpose. It's not that it makes a poem or a work of art. It amounts to what we're left with after listening to 5 minutes of rapid-fire news clips, a head full of garbled news-speak. It's fun. Something to do when there's nothing to do. I do like, however, the way these gatherings of phrases do well representing the residue left in our heads. If I had to take a test at the end of the 5 minutes, I doubt I'd do well at all.

Iran...representatives...talks with negotiations in Istanbul

...last chance for diplomacy to work...willing to engage seriously

...new initiative to talks...two districts reported to come under fire

...one in one of the suburbs of Damascus

...that Kofi Annan wants to get in

...to remove one very major source of friction

...a day after failure to put a satellite into space

...Mr Ocampo...number of agents of the US Secret Service

...misconduct might...prostitutes...but Austria is objecting

...if Slovenia is successful in its bid

...BBC NEWS, 14 April, 2012.


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Secret Service...Mitt Romney...Obama

...broad themes of freedom

...stand up to the rights of hunters

...guns in the past...differences with NRA

...South Korean warships searching Yellow Sea

...two UN sanctions resolutions...agree on an appropriate response

...strengthened in 2009...Syria...a draft resolution

...some shelling by government troops today

...Chinese fishing boats in the South China Sea

...diplomatic talks between...Philippines authorities

...discovered at least eight...and confiscate the catch

...the shoal is well within its territory...centuries old map

...events are being held around the world today...an iceberg

...more than 1500 crew and passengers died...edutopia.org

...NPR NEWS, 14 April 2012.


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DADA AND A ZEN MONK

l'ange

I go about everywhere I go the observer, even like invisible, surprised people see me and talk to me. A few days ago I saw a film by Ingmar Bergman made in 1977, The Serpent's Egg. It was Berlin in 1923 when the Nazi's made their first push for power that failed, sending Hitler to prison to write Mein Kampf, the fascist scripture. There were a few times Bergman took the lead man, David Carradine, a Jew, therefore invisible, through a maze of shelves of dusty archives underground. It called Kafka to mind every time he went through that maze. It was the Kafka time. He was not far away. Somewhere I read long ago that in his time Kafka's writing was humorous, funny. Today it is our constant sorrow.

I find Kafka too depressing to read now, because his vision has become the way things are. He was part of the beginnings of the Absurd in 20th century theater and writing from Eastern Europe; Alfred Jarry from Romania, Tristan Tsara from Romania, Kafka in Czechoslovokia, sculptor Constantine Brancusi from Romania, later playwright Eugene Ionesco from Romania in Paris, crossing the channel Harold Pinter in London, crossing the ocean Edward Albee in New York. These are only a few. Jerzy Kosinski from Poland, Andrei Cordescu from Romania. At the beginning of the 20th century and end of the 19th century, Romania was the birthplace of a line of artistic thinking that characterized the 20th century in art of every variety.

Tristan Tsara, poet, and Marcel Janco, painter, went to Zurich during WW1 from Romania to get out of the war. They carried that energy that was stirring in and around Bucharest into the Dada way of thinking when they joined some artist draft dogers from Germany, Norway, France who became the Dadists, who together put the history of art on the chopping block, cut it with a cleaver at the present moment, 1915, rendering all that went before as if it never happened. A group of a dozen or so of them gathered around the Spiegelgasse caberet in Zurich.

In 6 months of rapid exploration they spanned the modern movement through conceptualism, where they found their satisfaction, some of them taking their findings with them to Paris after WW1. From there on, the avant garde artists of New York, Paris and Berlin went step by step through the same evolution as the Dadaists went through in Zurich, but over a period of half a century. It's kind of like they were shamans who performed rituals in the spiritual world that manifested in the material world. That was a highly charged time. Marcel Duchamp was in Paris breaking boundaries with every piece of art he made from before Nude Descending A Staircase that came to characterize the modern movement. Duchamp was surely tapped into that same energy in Paris the Dadaists found in Zurich.

By end of war, they all surfaced in Paris, and Paris was alight with artistic energy until the Nazi invasion. The European artists went to New York and one to Los Angeles. Duchamp continued in a New York apartment, few people knowing anything about him. Until the 1960s when abstract expresssionism was happening in New York, bringing the art world's energy across the sea and we figured at last in the world of modern art. The next generation discovered Duchamp. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and their generation of artists in New York, realized they had the Zen Master of 20th Century art living among them in a small apartment with a wife named Teeny. His art form at the time was taking a piece of rope one meter long, standing on a short stool, holding the rope at arm's length by one end and dropping it. The shape it took on the floor was his work of art for the day. The rest of the time he played chess.

I tend to see art everywhere I look. Today, visiting with someone I didn't know, old, twisted, bent, on the boundary between asleep and awake except when he's asleep, I saw the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the windows, perspectives, questioning how I would paint this room. Looking at his face and twisted fingers I studied how I would paint him, no hair, bald as a baby, bent like a baby, on the verge of sleep like a baby. He could be painted either to give off the aura of a saint or an old cripple of waning spirit, who could be a saint for all I know. I wanted to paint his picture up close, a portrait of the top of his head, hands like bent fists up by his face, eyes closed. Very powerful image. An old Zen monk. I felt like I was just a consciousness seeing him, no more than a consciousness. It was like my body was still out in the car or at home, and only my consciousness was there. It wasn't as empty as that sounds. There was a fullness in it. He, himself was reduced to his own consciousness by a body that doesn't work anymore. He was a full human being coming into his completion. 

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