POST #105: WHERE HAVE ALL THE HUMANISTS GONE?

I was originally going to write about the humanist tradition in art. You know. Giotto, Brueghel, the Social Realists of the Thirties, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks. But then, after perusing recent art magazines and going into a bunch of New York art galleries, I don’t know that there’s much humanism around. There’s a lot of minimalist, abstract painting: big, decorative canvasses that look good in loft apartments, as well as some large-scale public environmental art plus a good deal of Pop-ish, cartoon-derived stuff. There’s also a slew of larger-than-life, digitally modified photographs and paintings that look like photographs. Not much that could be defined as humanist but then, why should there be? To parody the old theater cliche: Humanism (especially in the form of social satire,) is what closes on Sunday. There’s no market for it.

When the rare occasions when figurative art does appear and images of people are used, the work is either incredibly angry and distorted or so sentimental and cliché  that I cringe – end up wishing the artist had stuck to colored squares. So, where have all the humanists gone, the ones who genuinely care about people? The same place as everywhere else in our society, replaced by cheap thrills and computer-driven technical tricks. To explain what’s going on, you have to look at the “art market” (and it is nothing more than a market.) Who buys art anyhow? . The “Common Man” spends his hard-earned dollars on 60” flat screen TVs. He doesn’t need ‘pitchas’ on the wall? And, if he does feel a desire for some real art, he can always pick up a giclee print for a coupla bucks at WalMart. Looks just like a genuine Van Gogh, down to the 3D brushstrokes.

Through most of the history of art, work was produced for the aristocracy and the church. They were sophisticated buyers, quite knowledgeable (and self promoting). Except for brief periods in the Netherlands during the 16^th and 17th centuries, the activities and feelings of ordinary people were rarely depicted until the mid-1800s, when they appeared as part of broader, socialist- based movements that extolled the Working Class and their everyday life. Humanism showed up in German Expressionism after World War I and during the Great Depression in the thirties. Remnants survived into the 1950s but got knocked out for good during the McCarthy political era where any art that sympathetically depicted  “real” people was suspected of ties to radicalism.

There’s no trace of humanism in the art world today, except for isolated throwbacks with leftover ideals and an out of date interest in the real (not electronic) world. Conspicuous consumption and meaningless art is expressive of the time we live in and is the order of the day. Even a die-hard humanist (like your blogger) finds herself moving away from reality and into the safety of dreams. 

POST #104: THE STATE OF ART

I finally got down to the Lower East Side to catch up with the latest art district in New York City. I’ve lived through Greenwich Village (my teens and twenties), Soho (my thirties), Chelsea (my forties), Noho etc. in more recent decades. The area is supposedly the last bastion of affordable gallery and studio space in Manhattan proper although gentrification appears to have won another battle. In addition, an  ever-expanding Chinatown has taken over large chunks of the area and while certainly  clean and respectable, lacks the colorful grunginess I once loved.

Anyhow, I was told to check out the new epicenter of the New York Art world, my old stomping ground, the Lower East Side. I was informed I wouldn’t recognize it. Truthfully, I didn’t, and I didn’t much like what had taken its place. It was as if all the life had been sucked out of the area; the buildings are mostly the same but the old zest isn’t there. Even the art scene is surprisingly lifeless. The once-crowded streets are now largely empty, even of cars (no reasonably-priced places to park) and the jumble of tacky businesses that gave the area its character is gone.  We saw only a few fabric outlets, (a reason for past visits); the antique (junque) stores on Allen Street have disappeared as have the flophouses on the Bowery and their haunted clientele. Only a handful of restaurant equipment stores that once lined the street remain. No more “outlets’ that sell discount bags and name-brand clothing. With few exceptions, gone are the ethnic food stores and restaurants. Even the lively signage that once characterized the area has been cleaned up, with only a few “ghosts” from the past still around. It was obvious, ethnic cleansing of a cultural sort has taken place. I never thought I’d live to say this but the Lower East Side has become “boring” and I still have the photos I took fifty years ago to prove it.

Since the purpose of the trip was not to revisit old haunts but to check out the latest in the New York art scene, I am sad to report that that too was a disappointment. The only reasonably interesting work was at the New Museum on the Bowery. And most of that wasn’t new but done around 25 years ago. The museum featured a multi-floor exhibit by a Chicago/LA eccentric accumulator, Jim Shaw who specializes in collecting amateur art from thrift shops plus some oversized cartoon-y installations of his. On the ground floor was a room full of extremely “anxious” paintings by another Chicago artist (whose name I forget) that dates from the ‘70s. Is this the “New” museum’s idea of cutting edge? Isn’t there anything current they want to show? But, based on what we saw elsewhere in the neighborhood, probably not. The only exciting exhibit we came across was by an Aborigine artist from Australia. Talk of anxious-looking art, these win the prize. Thousands and thousands of tiny dots in radiating patterns, but at least well done and original. We went to a dozen galleries and frankly, I don’t even remember what we saw.

Next we’ll try Brooklyn. Maybe there’s something worthwhile there. One of my sons has an artist friend called Chico MacMurtie who bought an abandoned church in Red Hook where he builds life-size performing robots. They recently played at his wedding.

Now, that sounds interesting!

POST #103: TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL: the artists’ dilemma

I recently (by sheer accident) invented a new printing process. It looks like drypoint but doesn’t need a $5,000 press or special plates and tools or paper. All you need is an inexpensive laser printer, a digital camera and a computer.  Here I was, just playing around with the printer and I got something that knocked my socks off, literally took my breathe away. I feel like such a total fraud but the results look like the moody cityscapes done by WPA printmakers in the 1930s. If I put them in nice frames they look like real prints and are so exquisite anyone who sees them wants to buy one (unlike my paintings that need nerves of steel and 12 foot high walls.) I recently showed a few of them to a well-known printmaker and she ordered me to copyright my process. When I hesitated, saying “I don’t do copyright,” she said, “well, at least write about it. Stake a claim.” So that’s what I’m doing. The process is cheap and simple and when you put a mat over the print and stick it into a faux-fancy frame, it looks like something you just bought at Swann Gallery for a coupla grand.

I have mixed feelings about artists hiding their methods. Secrecy about one’s work is kind of a leftover from the Medieval guilds where techniques and materials were passed down from generation to generation. I truly believe that it’s not the technique but the artistry that ultimately matters. Picasso once did a series of paintings on clear plastic panels so the camera could watch him from behind. I could look at that film forever and still not be Picasso. 

While we’re on the subject of artists hiding their methods, let me tell you about Mark Rothko. I adore Rothko (one of the few of that era I do admire) and was always curious about his methods, his materials. A few years ago, I read a definitive biography of his life, 500 pages. Named everyone he ever slept with but not a word about how he worked. Did he prestretch canvas?  Underpaint? Mix his paints with varnish? Not a single word. I was telling someone who knew Rothko personally and he explained that Rothko was notoriously secretive about his methods, never even allowing his assistants to be in the studio when he worked. I can’t understand why. His work came from a spiritual place inside him, not from how he mixed his paint.

But let’s go back to my original dilemma. Should I stake a claim or let my technique go out into the universe? I have a friend who taught printmaking for many years at a major art school. During that time she came up with a monoprint method that kept the original painting intact while creating a reverse print, something that never happens in a traditional monoprint. She never wrote about her discovery, let alone applied for a copyright, just taught it to hundreds of students who then took it with them to workshops throughout the country. It eventually turned up in a printmaking text as someone else’s idea.

What should I do?

POST #102: DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN’T BUY

Many years ago, I had a professor, Hans Richter, who had been a famous German avant-garde filmmaker, one of the founders of the Dada movement during World War I. He had just finished a surrealist movie called “Dreams That Money Can Buy” featuring all his New York refugee buddies including Max Ernst and Piet Mondrian. I saw it again recently and it was no where near as interesting as the first time around, mainly because his techniques were subsequently copied by everybody from TV advertisers to Madonna, and are now ‘old hat.’

But the topic of Dreams has intrigued me and I’ve gone back to a little notebook I once kept near my bed where I wrote down dreams. Like everyone else I know, I find it almost impossible to recall them, even the exciting ones that leave you shaking. I once asked my husband, a Clinical Psychologist, how I could remember them and he suggested the notebook. Unfortunately, by the time I managed to get awake enough to locate the book and find a pencil, the dream had evaporated, never to be remembered. I did, however, manage to write a few dreams down, but re-reading them today was not a pleasant experience. Some of the dreams I wrote down were unintelligible but most of them dealt with the ghosts of the past and the loss of people I loved: my husband, my parents, my closest friend. They all seem to take place in a gray zone, ostensibly that time between sunset and darkness in a time of year I hate: cold, late fall, before the snow arrives

In most of the dreams, I’m usually in a familiar place, either downtown Stamford or in New York City where I grew up. In the first dream I recorded, I am on a street corner on West Main Street in Stamford, a run-down part of town, I am searching for my husband, worried about him, trying to bring him home. (He was actually very sick at the time). I find him standing alone at a bus stop in the darkness, waiting for a bus (a metaphor for the ship that takes us out of this life?) and I try to persuade him to come home. “I have to go” he protests but I pull him into a nearby bar, one of those grim, dimly-lit places where shadowy figures hang out. That’s all I remember. The dream took place perhaps forty years ago but reading about it now, even after all this time, makes me cry.

What’s interesting at this point is the impact dreams are having on my latest paintings. I’ve always been able to dig into my subconscious and “abstract” the visual world, but the latest pieces are more surreal. They are based mainly on drawings I did in NYC many years ago from my daughter’s 11^th floor window. While everything looks familiar, it’s familiar the way it is in a dream: gray and moody, re-arranged, transformed from life into art. I think Professor Richter would have liked them.

POST #101: SKETCHING AWAY

My genius neighbor, Fred, belongs to a group called the “Humanists and Free Thinkers of Fairfield County” (an oxymoron?) He has been trying to get me to one of their monthly meetings at the Silver Star Diner in Norwalk for many years and I finally agreed to join him. He said the speaker was going to be Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist from Yale. I had never heard of him but Fred assured me he was highly respected as an outstanding debunker of medical mythology and author of a blog called:  Science-based Medicine. Dr. Novella turned out to be a fascinating speaker with a huge range of knowledge. He spoke about GMOs and the anti GMO movement, challenging the pseudo-science that has grown up against their use. I knew nothing about GMOs when I went in, and not much more going out, but I think I did learned something about the way pseudo-science works. …and I did some good drawings.

There were at least sixty people in the room: academics, scientists, teachers, writers, artists, ex-hippies, all ages, levels of accomplishments. The questions were intelligent and I found the evening much more enjoyable than I expected. Dr. Novella debunked the so-called “scientific” opposition to GMOs, showing how unscientific it was and, much to my surprise, the traditionally distrustful of the establishment audience agreed with him.  When the “establishment” (i.e. Monsanto) is doing good – even if their motive is the bottom line, you have to give them credit.

As I always do at meetings, I sat and drew; this time on paper plates the kitchen thoughtfully gave me.  I drew the speaker, the audience. Nobody noticed or cared. As is always the case, always always, the first couple of drawings were awful, stiff, overworked. I crumpled them up and threw them away. Then, I got on a roll: four good sketches in a row, but then, the bottom of the bell curve; I was tired. Nothing worked. These last ones also got discarded. It’s like it takes a while to warm up, then the drawings just flow,  but after a while, I’m tired, run out of steam and they become stiff or overworked. Time to quit. While the images are theoretically portraits, they really aren’t. I’m not trying to get a likeness of an individual; I’m trying to create a human being that talks to you. Remember my story of the Renaissance sculptor, Donatello, who was said to have screamed at one of his incredibly lifelike pieces, “Talk! Damn you! Talk!”

Well, that’s what I do with my paper plates. I tell them: “Talk to me or I’ll throw you out!”

POST #100: WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER GIVE UP!

A few days ago, I attended a Labor Day party at the home of a new friend, a theatrical agent who over the years has represented some ‘big-name’ clients including Mickey Rooney and Dorothy Lamour. She was showing me her wall of photographs, past and current clients, and one of them was her “dear friend”, Misty Rowe. Who could forget a name like Misty Rowe?

About 20 years ago when I was teaching art history at the new Stamford campus of the University of Connecticut, the person in charge of Student Affairs was concerned about the lack of cultural activities on campus. She put out a request for faculty to come up with events to keep them around after class. I, although I can’t for the life of me remember why, volunteered to put on a cabaret in the main atrium at 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, hopefully catching the commuting students before they left for home. I enlisted my lawyer friend, Glenn, to be Master of Ceremonies and perform his magic act. He had once owned a cabaret in the West Thirties in Manhattan and had started out as a street magician. Perfect! I put out the word that I wanted “acts” for my cabaret and a number of interested parties immediately contacted me: a puppeteer, a modern dance troupe and a TV actress named Misty Rowe, a gorgeous-looking former “Hee Haw Honey” who wanted to try out her new stand-up comedy act.  I made up a flyer and sent it out.

On the day of the cabaret, Glenn (in a proper MC tuxedo) and I set out chairs and put out snacks for the students, few of whom appeared. Just as we were about to give up hope for an audience, twenty or so Russian immigrants from a nearby Senior Housing project came in, led by their English instructor who saw the cabaret as a perfect way for her class to improve their non-existent command of the English language. “Vere’s da food?” their spokesman (the one who spoke English) inquired immediately upon entering the hall. Not a good sign.

Glenn, I must say, did his best. The puppeteer turned out to be a schizophrenic who was working out her split personality issues with the puppets; the dance troupe was having a terrible time with the space, totally unsuited to their work, and our “Ace in the Hole,” the extravagantly named Misty Rowe was totally unintelligible to her non-English speaking audience.

I have to say, Glenn and I thought she was wonderful. Her claim to fame was as a “Hee Haw Honey” on an extremely popular TV comedy in the late 1960s, early seventies, Hee Haw, a spoof of rural life populated by well known country stereotypes featured scantily clad beauties in “farmer’s daughter” cut-offs and short skirts. The show was bawdy and stupid but lasted on local television for almost 20 years. Misty’s stand-up act consisted mostly of her hilarious adventures as a Hee Haw Honey. There was one particularly funny shtick that has stuck with me about how when she went to bed with a man and took off the padded corselets the Honeys' wore, the poor guy didn’t know whether to go after the “bustier” or her. Needless to say, the Russians didn’t understand a word, didn’t laugh at any of her jokes and sat in stony silence waiting for “da food”.

She apparently was devastated, quit trying to be a stand-up comic and is now touring (happily) in a musical comedy about the life of country singer, Patsy Kline that my friend manages. Her defeat at the hands of the Russians (she didn’t know that was why they didn’t laugh) still rankles, although I recently received a note from her thanking me for explaining after all these years that it was audience failure, not hers.

POST #99: HOW TO TRAIN AN ARTIST (or are we “untrainable”)

It’s ironic that as I close in on my 100^th post, I finally get around to the subject of art training. Maybe because there is no one way to do it given today’s hodge-podge higgledy-piggeldy art world. There’s so much hype that it’s hard to tell what’s good any more, or what’s real talent or innovation, or even who is or isn’t and artist. And with the advent of Photoshop, it’s a whole new ballgame! All you need is an idea and a computer.

I sifted through your replies, and as expected, they were all over the place. Some of you had conventional training (more or less as I did) others took a few courses along the way or had workshops with mentors.  Despite what many in the ‘art business’ would have you believe, there’s not a hell of a lot anyone can teach you. A neighbor of mine who studied art in college recently remarked that she wanted to learn how to paint in oil and I told her to come on over, I would teach her everything she needed to know in an hour.

The principles are few and easy, but then, it’s Malcolm Gladwell’s “ten thousand hours”. I can show her how to tone her canvas, how to under-paint, go from dark to light, thin to thick, glaze, scumble; but then she’s on her own. If you want to do work that’s realistic, you need to draw, learn shading, anatomical observation, perspective. If you want to be an abstractionist, you still need to learn to draw because that’s what abstraction is, a distillation of reality. After the first few sessions of learning the basics, you don’t need an art teacher other than for encouragement, trust me; you just need to put in the time.

But in the long run, it’s not the “how” but the “why” that matters and here’s where things get tough. Do you have anything original to say or does your work look like thousands of others, or, worse yet, your teacher’s? Technique is easy; originality is hard. For originality you need to be a fully developed human being, not just a craftsperson. You need to be familiar with history, politics, science, philosophy, literature. You need ideas of your own and out of that will grow art that is distinctively yours with a voice of its own. Otherwise you’re just a craftsperson which is ok so long as all you want to be is a craftsperson. My favorite artists, people like Picasso, Rothko, Max Ernst, Calder, Beckmann, Schwitters were all extremely cultured. If you read their writings you’ll amazed at their intelligence and the depth of their general knowledge.

But here’s what I do think you must study: Art History. It sharpens your critical eye, teaches you what is good. Hours spent looking at masterpieces; although you might never remember artists’ names or titles of their work; just looking at 1,000s of great works develops your eye, teaches you composition. I would often get my art history classes to break down a painting into the relationship of shapes, movement of the eye around the canvas, balance, focal point, etc. No matter what kind of art you produce or technique you use, this is basic information. I would often project a slide of a well-known masterpiece on the blackboard and demonstrate how the piece expressed the principles of design.

If you come by my studio, you’ll see that I’ve become a neoclassical potter, turning cheap paper plates into red and black-figure Kylixes. I can’t begin to tell you what fun I am having and THOSE NEGATIVE SPACES! Nobody used them like the Ancient Greeks and I have a lot to learn!