MINIMALISM THE BOOK

     dan flavin, untitled, 1971

Every year I give myself a Christmas present. Give myself a birthday present too. I've done this for so long I don't remember when it started or my reasoning. Whatever the reasoning, I agreed with it in the time I could remember it, so now that it's gone I'd just as well go on agreeing with it. I think the first reason is it just makes sense. I remember suggesting it to somebody a few years back groaning because he hoped somebody would give him something in particular for his birthday. I said give it to yourself. That way you're sure to get it. He was appalled at the thought of giving himself a present. I was appalled that he was appalled. It makes perfectly clear sense to me. For one thing, which is secondary, but very important, this way I am certain to get something I want. I suppose it came to me in childhood when year after year I never got anything for Christmas or birthday that I really wanted. Give myself a present and I get at least one thing I want.

This Christmas my present was a fairly recent publication of the art movement in New York beginning in the 1960s, MINIMALISM, edited by James Meyer, associate professor of contemporary art and criticism at Emory in Atlanta. I've looked through it for the copyright page with the date of publication on it. I've found quite a lot of notation 1980 to present. I don't know how to find when "present" is, what year. I found notation that Sol Lewitt died 2007, meaning the book was printed after that. That's close enough to give me an idea of when the book was made. I imagine Meyer worked several years on getting everything together toward publication. I'm very happy with it. It's all pictures. Beautiful prints by the publisher of art books, Phaidon. Each picture has a paragraph telling something about it. In the beginning is a preface, which looks like it might be interesting. I have a 1988 book on Minimalism by Kenneth Baker, a good book for reading and the collection of pictures.

This new one, 20 years later, has entirely different pictures. The newer one has Anne Truitt in it and lacks the earth work artists like Michael Heizer and Walter deMaria. Robert Smithson is represented in the newer book, but indoor pieces instead of his outdoor works, which the Baker book includes. The earlier book has different examples of Eva Hesse's work. As time goes by, I appreciate Eva Hesse's works more and more. This later book has Carl Andre examples galore. He has done quite a lot with blocks of wood 3' long and 1' by 1' arranged in different simple patterns. One standing by itself he titled Herm in 1976. Andre makes arrangements of bricks on the floor, and steel squares 1' by 1' he arranges on the floor in like 20 rows of 5, or 12 rows of 12. I've seen the set on the floor in the Museum of Modern Art. Museum goers are invited to walk on it. I've walked on it twice. It was no bigger deal than walking on any flat surface. But it was an interesting kind of zone feeling, feeling inside Carl Andre's prescribed zone that he articulated by these tiles on the floor.

     carl andre

Andre has used the floor probably more than anyone for arranging blocks of wood or bricks. Carl Andre seems like there is little to nothing to what he is doing, in that way like Cy Twombly making childlike scribblings. It's a new stretch of the mind to be able to step into a room in a museum and see some bricks arranged on the floor, and a few 3 foot long timbers arranged in a pattern. It really pushes the mind to say, I can do that. But I didn't. Carl Andre and nobody else did that. Therefore, it's unique because he did it and I didn't. Now, anyone that does it is following Andre. Neither of the two books on Minimalism---not meaning to imply there are only two, but the two I have---has much of Elsworth Kelly. I noticed neither of them has anything by Alexander Lieberman. Maybe Lieberman was thought more an abstractionist. 

I keep this new book of Minimalism beside my chair. Every time I have a few minutes I open and look inside, read a little, look at a lot of pictures of beautiful works of art. I like Abstract Expressionism an awful lot, and Pop too, but it's Minimalism that really speaks to me. I believe Minimalism might be my favorite period in 20th Century art. I like all the others, but something about the minimalist object appeals to me. The newer book has a good collection of Agnes Martin grids and Robert Mangold pencil lines on beautiful colors. And there's a great collection of Robert Ryman works, largely white. I've come to appreciate Ryman a great deal. This is a good Christmas present to myself, something I will look at again and again and probably read every word in it. And it didn't cost a great deal, which made it possible. Say it 's selfish to buy oneself a Christmas present? Maybe so. But so is everything else we do. Like once I caught on that everything is a sin, I was set free. It can't be avoided, so it's no big deal. 

     frank stella



  

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SUGISBALL THE MOVIE

the least interesting in a cast of uninteresting characters

Yesterday's film was made in Estonia, Sugisball. It has an umlaut over the u, for whatever that tells someone who knows the language. I had seen some tourist photographs of the old part of Tallinn, the Estonian capital located directly south of Helsinki, across the Gulf of Finland that runs from the Baltic Sea to St Petersburg. What I saw of Tallinn in the film suggested Tirane, Albania, or Belgrade in what is now Serbia, in Soviet times Yugoslavia. I thought of Romanian films I'd seen of Ceaosescu times in Bucharest. I thought of my train ride behind the Iron Curtain in 1971, from Trieste through Belgrade and Sofia into Greece through Thessaloniki. Big high-rise apartment buildings made of concrete, all of them exactly alike, everywhere around Belgrade. It looked like hundreds of them. Evidently that's where everybody lives who is not a party official, and probably some of them from the lower rungs of the party ladder. I suppose my friend Lucas Carpenter, whose mother came from the Ukraine, sees these concrete high-rises all over Kiev approaching the airport by plane, visiting the relatives of his mother's family.



I specifically recall approaching Belgrade by train, seeing rows and rows of these apartment buildings made of concrete, all exactly alike. They were interesting architecturally because they were devoid of aesthetic consideration. It was disheartening to see so many people living like that. I remember someone I knew who lived in New York City several years ago, John Jones, originally from Thomasville, Georgia. He said of all the new high-rise apartment buildings going up in New York back in the Sixties, "tomorrow's slums." And they indeed became that. I think of the suburbs of American cities that have apartment complexes in a great network of streets, all buildings the same color, the same architecture exactly. They look like computer chips from the air. I think of it as Soviet housing. Like flying low over New Jersey on the way into a New York airport makes me feel sad for people living in a seemingly endless, to the horizon, complex of houses and streets, driveways and cars under a New York City flight path. I marvel that at least some of those people live in such places by choice.



The movie, Sugisball (Autumn Ball), released in 2007, evidently takes place in Soviet times. Those concrete high-rise apartment buildings looked so depressing I couldn't help but think of Albania. In places like the train station in Tirane, gypsies wash their clothes in the public toilets. Tallinn in Estonia looked that kind of depressed, to my eye. I went into the movie with a curiosity to see how Estonians live in this time, expecting a culture somewhat Scandinavian, but it was not at all. It was Soviet despair everywhere you looked. The people in the story were under the deadening boot heel of the Soviet period. The characters were all twenty-somethings, people who evidently all lived in one of the apartment buildings. They were Eastern Europeans under Soviet control more than they were Scandinavian. To think of Estonia as Scandinavian is as far off the beam as thinking Morocco European.



The Estonian characters all seemed like people who in this country would be called dorks, nerdy people who don't quite get it, whatever it is. I'm meaning the actors themselves as well as the roles they were playing. Absence of sophistication in film making, I couldn't decide if it was by intent or not. It held my interest for two hours trying to figure out what was going on, right up to the end. The summary that is printed on the envelope for the disc from netflix calls it a "collection of lost souls who  bleakly face the future while reaching blindly for some form of connection." That states what I saw very well. Evidently it is a vision and a comment on contemporary life in Tallinn. Director's name is Veiko Ounpuu. What I saw of the Estonian people, the thread that ran through all the characters, was their spirit shut down by police state government. Corporate police state will be the same as Soviet police state or Maoist police state. Americans don't know that yet.



Possibly the film's intent was to show how dorky people become under a political system much like the one the republicans will have us in America live with. I have to confess that throughout this film I was seeing America in the future after republicans have the FEMA concentration camps full to overflowing, and "we the people" are afraid to say anything against the government for fear of arrest and indefinite detention, now that the Patriot Act makes it ok to "detain" American citizens without charge or sentence, "indefinitely." Every time I see a film of Soviet times, I see the future of America, though without health care, especially in the Romanian film, The Death of Mr Lazarescu. Evidently in Soviet Bucharest it was as much a social taboo to have a drink as it is in America today among Baptists. Mr Lazarescu liked a little drink every day. He had what appeared to be a heart attack. Managed to get to a hospital. Too busy there. They took him to another. The doctor won't treat him because he drinks. They take him to another, and another. Finally, he dies in a waiting room. And that was with health care. Police state without health care? We're in deep shit.



I don't mean to throw off on the film too much. The city scenes at night were film photography at its very best. Beautiful city scenes using the lights and the night. The lights at night are more interesting than the despair in daylight. I recall one scene that is worth seeing the movie again to see. The point of view is sitting in the middle of the back seat on a public transportation bus, looking up the aisle with empty seats on both sides. The bus, or trolley, is two cars joined by a swivel in the floor that makes one long bus instead of two that bends in the middle. The lights are off inside the bus. The wide angle camera sees the city lights through the windows on both sides, like we'd see it sitting in that spot. It was beautiful seeing the city lights through all the windows along both sides. Then the lights inside the bus came on that looked like green fluorescent, and we rode awhile seeing only the interior with no passengers. It was among the most beautiful moments I've seen on film. It brought to mind the unforgettable final scene in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, The Unconsoled. I came away from the film feeling a degree of sorrow for the Estonian people with the suffocating years of Soviet occupation in their recent history. It's the same feeling I get from other films I've seen from behind Soviet lines.



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POEM BY EDWARD FIELD

        agnes martin, stars


                           ANT


      An ant walks on the window screen

      Looking for a hole big enough to get through.


      He walks for what must seem miles

      looking at the endless holes. He goes back and forth


      convinced that one of the holes

      must be bigger than the others


      but the screen is new

      and all the holes are the same size.

                          
                                 ---Edward Field





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THE HIGHLANDERS BLUEGRASS THE FRONT PORCH

     the highlanders

     scott freeman, fiddle; jimmy zeh, banjo

     jimmy zeh, banjo; marvin cockerham, bass; willard gayheart, guitar

     scott freeman, fiddle; jimmy zeh, banjo

       bobby patterson, mandolin; scott freeman, fiddle



The Fiddle and Plow show happening at Willard Gayheart's Front Porch Gallery, Woodlawn, Virginia, featured tonight the Highlanders, a Galax bluegrass band of almost 40 years. Willard plays guitar and sings with the band. When the World's Fair took place in Knoxville, Tennessee, back in the 80s, the Highlanders played there for a week. Buddy Pendleton was their fiddler. Pendleton recorded an album playing fiddle with Larry Richardson & the Blue Ridge Boys, a classic mountain bluegrass album recorded in 1965, http://www.oldbluerecords.com/. Buddy was a youngun then. He had a great career started as a fiddler with Bill Monroe for awhile and then the Greenbriar Boys, a New York City folk revival old-time band. From there he returned home and worked to retirement at the Floyd, Virginia, post office. He's a frail, honest, thin, seemingly weightless man now with gray hair. Oh, but he can play a fiddle. He played at Fiddle and Plow a year or more ago. I spoke with him a few minutes before the show, asking permission to make video of him playing, and wondered what this frail little guy would do with a fiddle. It didn't take long to find out. Once he started playing, I knew this was a master.

Buddy wasn't with them tonight, so Scott Freeman played fiddle in Buddy's absence. I was hoping Buddy would show up, but he didn't. Scott played a beautiful fiddle. Musically, Buddy wasn't missed, but I would like to see him and hear him play fiddle again. His fiddling has an airy quality about it. By airy, I suppose I mean like an apple tree pruned such that birds can fly through it. I put up several videos of Pendleton on YouTube, which I was very happy to do, to make his fiddle playing available to whoever might chance upon it or find it by looking for it, whoever sees it. Buddy Pendleton is too great a fiddler to overlook. I don't mean to imply Scott's fiddle wasn't up to Pendleton's. Scott is so close, it doesn't matter if one is better than the other. I like to hear both of them play a fiddle. I don't know if it communicates a sound to say Scott's fiddle playing has a full bodied sound. He bears down on the strings and makes them work. Visually, I see Scott's manner of fiddling in VanGogh's and Edvard Munch's paintings of women. I can't explain it. It's a subjective feeling. Where Pendleton's fiddle might be of the air, Scott's is of the earth. He uses his bow to dig the notes out of the strings, he takes charge of the strings. Again, I'm not saying one is better than the other. It's different styles of playing a fiddle.

Willard was the lead singer for the band, and such a good singer Willard is. There is quite a number of songs of Willard singing on YouTube. Write his name in the search box and everything with him on it will come up. Willard's singing is good mountain singing. By "good" I mean like Sara Carter was good at mountain singing. Willard is that kind of good at delivering a song. He doesn't dramatize the song with his voice, he delivers the words and lets the words tell the story. He keeps ego out of his singing, out of his guitar playing, out of his performance, in the mountain way. I and several others see Willard as the best kept secret in SW Virginia. Willard doesn't know how good he is. He doesn't promote himself. Scott Freeman married Willard's daughter, Jill. Scott and Willard have been musical parnters ever since; first with Skeeter & the Skidmarks, then Alternate Roots, then Skeeter & the Skidmarks redux. Willard and Scott make a great duo. Willard also plays duo with Bobby Patterson.

Bobby Patterson is a good singer too. He plays mandolin with the Highlanders. He plays guitar and banjo when he and Willard play together. Bobby Patterson is best known, for me anyway, on the album June Apple with Tommy Jarrell on fiddle, Kyle Creed, banjo, Audine Lineberry, bass, and Bobby Patterson rhythm guitar. He was young then, playing with the old fellers, the masters. Audine Lineberry played bass with Whit Sizemore's band, the Shady Mountain Ramblers. She sang Ruby the way it was meant to be sung. I personally hold Bobby Patterson as the most important man in SW Virginia, for what he has done for the music of Grayson County, in particular. He has a small label and a recording studio. He recorded local old-time bands and some bluegrass. He recorded the Shady Mountain Ramblers, Whitetop Mountain Band, Otis Burris, Art Wooten, a mess of others and made collections from the Galax fiddlers convention every year for cd. He started with LPs, then cassettes, then CDs. Bobby is a great musician and a noble man. 

Everyone in the band I could say is a noble man. Noble is a word not used any more, and that's a good thing. Now it is free of connotation, and it's meaning can be what I mean without sentiment mixed in. I mean they are noble in that they, each one, is who he is. Each one has worked hard all his life, has raised a family and made music on weekends. They are, every one, what we call here in the mountains good people. Give them a chance to make music and they're happy. Jimmy Zeh came to Galax from West Virginia. Willard came to Galax from a little township 10 miles outside Hazard, Kentucky. Scott is from MtAiry, lives in Woodlawn, Marvin Cockerham from Meadows of Dan. Bobby Patterson has lived at Galax all his life. Willard lives in Woodlawn. Bobby Patterson's Heritage Shoppe and Heritage Records is right there by Willard's framing shop.

From the moment the band started they played straight ahead mountain bluegrass and they never let up. Scott's fiddle came forward from time to time and raged for us. I think it might have been Katy Hill he cut loose on. I wasn't prepared with the camera when he started up, I missed the beginning, so I used the time to get still shots, wishing I'd got that fiddle on video. Then I always tell myself it is not at all necessary to have it all on video. It is not necessary at all. Enjoy it raw, straight from the fiddle to my ear. It gets to be like a Warhol fixation to want to record everything. I do it to archive this moment in time in the evolution of mountain music. I believe it needs doing. Nobody else is doing it. Then it's mine to do. I get to do things like this because I don't do it for money. I don't care about copyrights. I just want to share this mountain music with anyone around the world who wants to hear it.

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