Half and Half: In Honor of the Vernal Equinox

The Ineluctable Redolence Of It All: half dream, half waking world; that moment when if we turn left we see that dream and turn right we see that other, the waking world; when we can shuttle the best of each back and forth, bringing light to both, bringing ENlightenment to both.

Sometimes things are not what they seem. Never have been. I can't speak for the future, but it seems unlikely that this is going to change. Happens over and over again. The way things are is sometimes not the way things are.

But before we kick this around in the context of art, let's hit on some history. Not world history. Just you and me history. For most people it starts with their parents, who aren't telling them everything, or maybe anything, really, not what's going on, not what's what, you know, and then one day we come home from school and daddy isn't there anymore. And of course school is no different: they aren't telling you what's up there either. They're doing one thing and saying another. Sorry to state the obvious, really I am, but it has to be said. It just goes on and on. Workplace. Relationships. These days we get to watch it play out in Washington, live, on cable. And what are we supposed to do with this knowledge? What are we supposed to make of the deception, misdirection, obfuscation? Throw in the towel? Choose some Nietzschean worldview? Good luck!

In the art world the artist and art witness must contend with a double dose of deception. A layer cake of it really. Something Escher would devise, where you didn't know what was what, top or bottom or in-between. I have never had much use for Escher, as they say, nifty art, but for these purposes he is perfect. Anyway, a lot of people seem to like a headgame. I, for better or worse and probably the latter, am not one of them. I grew up with it in my kitchen before I could even think, but knew right off I didn't like it, and promised myself I wouldn't invite it, like some vampire, into my life ever again once I got away. For example, I had such an aversion to the mindgame that whenever I was being intentionally tested by someone, in the classroom, in a standardized test, or with just the riddle, where the idea was to trick me, I froze. A little voice would say: don't mess with me! I would back away. I still do. I've kept my promise too well.

So what of this with art? The coming and going of it. Where to start?

Do we know what art is (ha! or just what we like)? An excellent question! This answer is no. We don't. We think we do. And more importantly, we think we know what isn't(negative!), and that not only includes what isn't art but what isn't good art. But again, we can't know and that is the truth. We don't know what art is just like we don't know what god is, or what love is(there is that old question of whether we love or just think we love, and is there a difference, which is not much different from I think therefore I am), or even, ultimately, what death is. We don't know. There is only what we believe, what we think we know, that we have to know, that we want to know, that it is a matter of ego, pride, zeal, and that's where the trouble starts.

So right away we're in a mess. All down hill from here. Someone makes something that raises the question of whether it is art and then whether it is good art. Are these good questions? Well, maybe, just maybe, they are not even to the point if we can reach some kind of agreement about what might be the thing we are trying to identify/qualify--that is, art.

More paradox? Absolutely!

Have I got anything to add? Beyond beware? Beyond beware that things are never what they seem?

I'm perfectly willing to concede that if not for my aversion to the proverbial mind-game I would not be in this fix in the first place. I would have accepted all of this a long time ago. I would have recognized that the truth, instead of being this thing somewhere in between, is actually an ideal, and therefore an extreme, an unattainable absolute presumably opposed by the equally unattainable absolute of pure lie. And because there is no pure truth, OUR truth IS, like everything else, somewhere in the middle! Somewhere in the sea of grey that is our lives.

For this incredible lack of awareness on my part I apologize. I was one of those really stupid and annoying and often destructive people running around forcing the issue(Life is a parade, so the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, shut up about it kid!). Everything shocked me. Shocked no more. The answer is not Nietzsche, of course, who was clearly a very disturbed individual(so how could his conclusions have been anything but). The answer is more along the lines of eyes wide open, the razor's edge, the straight and narrow, etc. The answer is that sometimes things are what they seem and sometimes they are not. In fact the only truth we may ever know is at best somewhere in between. At best can be a very good thing. And thus I revise my opening statement. We just have to pay attention, which is of course no small statement. It is everything.

Night and day. Truth and lies. Yes and No. Good and bad. Yin and Yang. Half and half. Life is a half a glass of water. That's it! Whether it is half full or half empty is entirely up to us. I have seen deaf kids with a yes so palpable it was blinding, and people who seemingly had it all that couldn't get out of bed in the morning.

I'm often amused by expressions like "fools rush in where angels fear to tread." We can keep peeling them like an onion. The idea of the razor's edge pretty much suggests that that temptation is everywhere, on all sides, but that by walking that paper thin line, which can't help but be cutting, we can do this thing that is not always what it seems. The temptations are huge of course. The power and the glory of art is huge. Immortality. Importance. The temptation to inflate, to compare, to judge, to aggrandize, to compete; to take this wonderful gift and exploit it for power and glory and primacy and superiority and exclusivity over others, over our brothers and sisters in this world; to take this wonderful gift with the power to heal and enlighten and share pleasure and joy and knowledge and feeling and hope and good, and then corrupt it for the purpose of achieving what I believe in Australia they call the plight of the tall poppy. The temptation is huge, but these things are worth nothing. Nothing. Certainly not our first and greatest gift, our life, our self, our soul. They are illusions, sand castles on the water's edge, gone in an instant. In the end all we have is our tall glass of water, and what we do with it makes all the difference.

Of course we are all fools. Fools rushing in. Fools for love. Fools for friends. Fools for family. Fools for politics. Fools for art...

When it comes to art, we are in the extreme. Most people don't even go there. Some people may have it on their walls somewhere, by mistake, but for the most part it is ultimately a painfully acquired taste. We like something we call a work of art that we have experienced. It says it feels what we feel. How we feel. It sees what we see. How we see. It thinks what we think. How we think. There is the first trap. Narcissism. Need. Want. We WANT to connect, and more, to be connected to. We make associations to keep us from being alone. We gather them around us like teddy bears to make us feel safe. And then we begin.

We relate and we are not alone. Art takes us some place. It reassures us. If we make it, then we search for answers, the grail, paradise, perfection, or peace. Which of these can it possibly bring us? Illusions. Illusions that comfort us. Illusions which put us to sleep, like blinders. Or is art just a mark left by where someone has been, like the yellow snow my dog leaves around the yard in winter. That is where it takes us. The mark. Is that all? Is that enough? Why wouldn't it be enough? Van Gogh was here. Frida Kahlo was here. Kiki Smith was here. And then we can tell ourselves "I've been there!" or "I like that place" or "I know that place" or "I hate that place" or "I want to go there!" or something like that.

Is that ok? Is that a reasonable truth? It would seem so. Why ask for more? Why make it about anything more, have to be anything more, or about something else? Can we know this much about art? This small truth? Maybe, but I don't think so.There are phenomena/concepts unknown to us by design--phenomena/concepts we invented that need to remain independent of the control of anyone or any group in the name of knowing, power, or anything else--and we just have to keep them that way, and any frustration we might feel is a small price to pay for the power and freedom these phenomena/concepts, like art, give every living, breathing individual on the planet.

ABOUT Tuttle and Jensen; Through the Looking Glass and Back Again

I was thinking about Bill Jensen(above:LUOHAN/PERSONA; 2005-2006; Oil on linen; 28" x 23"), and something I had written about him almost fifteen years ago for Provincetown Arts (you can find it at artdealmagazine.com). It still largely applies. Actually it applies to a lot of things, but most of all it makes me remember how I feel about painting.

And then it made me think about Richard Tuttle. I only wrote about him once, really, about thirty years ago, and it wasn't much(I first wrote about Jensen for Arts in '81). I tried, foolishly, to go there, and I haven't tried since. Tuttle is a bear. So is Jensen, but he gives you more to work with. Tuttle doesn't, by intention. I get a chuckle thinking about the people who try to write about him. Tuttle does too, I'm sure. It is such a trap.

The word "about" is appropriate. Tuttle expressed disdain for the whole notion. "About" is circling around the cave instead of going in. About is a lot of what we get in this world. After all, who wants to go into the cave? Who wants to face the bear? I've always had a bit of the fool about me. A bit of the naive. I happily rushed in where angels(????) fear to tread. I went into Tuttle's cave, a few times, I just never wrote ABOUT it. I didn't want to write ABOUT it, and if I couldn't write it, I wasn't going to write at all.

So why write ABOUT Jensen and not Tuttle? Jensen is a painter. I was just writing ABOUT myself. And so here is what I was thinking this morning. Tuttle is always referred to as something of an enigma. Why? Well, duh! Whatever it is he does, as an artist, is that which cannot otherwise be realized. It is why he seems so inarticulate when it comes to his work. If he could really talk about it, he has failed. And he is very clear about this. He was clear about it thirty years ago.

The reality is if you are circling around Tuttle's cave(above:"20 Pearls:3 Blacks", 2004; acrylic on museum board and archival foam core with brad ;19 7/8" x 18"), you don't and can't know what's going on. You could apply this to anything and everything, but it is completely true with his work. I once said about Jensen either you go or you don't go, but at least something sticks. Some redolence, some residue. With Tuttle almost nothing sticks, and that is what gets people--that's what intrigues them, because although they may never go, but they are attracted to that kind of hard to get.

The thing with Tuttle is that you can't know, at least not the way people like to know. Tuttle doesn't know, and that is the point. If he knew he wouldn't have done it. It is the wanting to know, or the appreciation that comes from everything we don't know. The wow of it--the surpise--if nothing else both of these artists paint for that, they would just be happy to be surprised. If he "knew" it, well, then it was already "been there, done that." He was always interested in what he didn't know. It was the one thing we shared. He wasn't an artist to be good at it. He was an artist to hunt. You could say art was the paddle and canoe he used to move through the water, forgive me, the water that is life, and then maybe art is just the wake. Still, if it is the wake, you couldn't separate it from the canoe and paddle, or from him for that matter.


There are people who apply the experience of abstract painting to Joyce, you know, just read it, don't try to understand it, stop asking questions, just go, and let the experience of reading him wash over you. Then what you get is IT, and when you read it again, it might be different, but that is still it. Tuttle is the same. You go in the cave. What you get is IT. No about. Just it.

There are a lot of us who just can't be sustained by that. It is not enough. For the rest of us it is everything. The language of everything. Jensen goes there with paint like a landscape painter; he brings painting to the mystery while Tuttle just is the mystery. Tuttle gives us something more like the White Rabbit's fare. A tough pill to swallow; one... makes you larger, one... makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you...

What seems strange about Tuttle isn't strange at all, but we have been so trained to think in a certain way about not just art, but everything, that it looks that way. Of course thirty years later he doesn't seem so strange. Still, Tuttle is our modern day Thoreau. He's gone his own way, lights his own way, while we've followed the highway signs like lemmings, and made all the wrong turns over and over again. Jensen gives us postcards, maps, snaps shots from that some place else, almost like a dream, so that maybe we can dream our way there. With Tuttle we can be damn sure it's not going to be that pretty. Damn sure. No. Instead, instead he gives us example.

TO BE OR NOT...Part 2; No Questions Asked

Hamlet made a mistake. He should have run away with Ophelia. Or just made the most of it. He was a disaster. He was a prince, so much was expected of him. But he should have suffered the slings and arrows along with everyone else, and been happy that "bee" didn't get in HIS ear. He made things worse, pure and simple, and if he had had more presence of mind than just to ask to be or not to be, he would have realized that he was already asking the wrong question. The real question was: when did I choose to become a victim, because it was his "outrage" that was really self-pity, and from there he was just on one long slide. Be lucky you're not a prince, of course. Get a life. Live it. Be. No questions asked.

Be. Bee. B. Hamlet didn't die, at least not in the beginning. His dad died. His father, uncle, mother, they had their issues. That is their business. Leave it alone. We get in a bind. We get in the middle. Life puts us there. We are at a crossroads. A big one. But if we're asking to be or not to be it really is too late. It is really a question of how we see ourselves and life. What we expect of ourselves and life. If we have been set up, maybe to be a prince, maybe we went to Harvard or Yale and a lot was expected of us. Little Princes. Maybe we really had a different dream, and maybe we needed to prove that our dream was worthwhile by achieving success, and getting the approval. Well, get ready. Very few artists ever seem satisfied with what they get. It's like money. We always want more. Satisfaction, of course, is a dirty word in most art circles. Losers are satisfied. And how strange is that? We're never supposed to be satisfied. That is so bourgeois. And then there is the asking questions thing. SOOOOO the right thing to do. You know, it's always: the questions are what count, not the answers. But really. Questions are like trying to untie the Gordian Knot. The reality is stop asking questions! Shut up! Just watch the movie! Just whip out your sword and chop the GD Knot in half. Quit being such a prince!

And then you can just BE. Afterall, the world doesn't have to be all Paper/Plastic. Just grab your food and go!

WHAT'S AN ARTIST TO DO? KEEP DREAMING!

They are the rule. Artists who work in isolation, in oblivion, without support, without feedback, without real hope. In the current climate, during wartime, it is even worse. We have a Republican White House that has stolen all messages of hope, and culture, and humanity, and made everything about fear. Art is nowhere in the mind of our government.

I have said many times that art did not come over on the Mayflower. They were hard times, severe times, times about order and survival. Dreamers not welcome. Of course. When there is a job to do, dreaming gets in the way.

Needless to say, dreaming is essential to art. Call it musing. It is older than history. Musing, dreaming, meant tapping into some greater consciousness. You got me. Dreamer. The kid sitting by the window in school. And when there were no windows and I was sitting right in front of the algebra teacher and looking right at her, yes, I was somewhere else, far away.

What is it about dreaming? We know what Einstein said about imagination--that it's more important than knowledge(but then what did HE know?). We know what Freud and Jung said about the conscious and unconscious mind--that our awareness was limited--that we are no more than 10 to 50 percent conscious(inotherwords--half conscious at BEST!). We know that it is somewhere we go alone, by definition. Somewhere vast. We might share dreams, but they start inside us, and if we do share them, it means that they were already there.

To artists struggling in isolation, despair, I say, keep dreaming, and keep doing the thing you love, if only for a few hours a week. Don't let go of your dream.

Because here is the question: when we have a lifetime of work that keeps piling up, and no chance to share it, show it, let people come to it and contemplate it, enjoy it, benefit from it, celebrate it, get it, eat it, just look at it, listen to it, take it in, respond to it, share in it, experience it, maybe even admire it; well, how do we go on?

I have a friend showing his work in a church right now, and he is thrilled. Would he rather be at the Whitney, well, that would be hard to resist, but he is sharing what he does with his friends and neighbors, and well, you can't beat that.

But back to dreaming, because that is what the artist has to look forward to. Dreaming and working. And not dreams of success, or recognition, or grandeur or fame. Not dreams of glory. Those are hard dreams to resist, especially when you feel like you've done something special. No, it is the dream of life, of love, of family, of space, of color, of light, of stars, of mystery, of connection, of flying, of water, of fire, of peace, of the garden, of the streams and rivers, of the clouds and birds, of the beyond.

Dreams are a part of life, make no mistake. It is precisely the absence of dreams that makes the world we have to face these days on the news and in newspapers so grim and mean. We count on dreams. Not just our own. We count on the dreams of others, of children, to imagine a richer, sweeter, more harmonious, more thoughtful, more conscious world.

So artists have no choice but to take heart in their dreams, and their lives, and their work. To take heart in being an artist, being able to be an artist, that that is its own reward. To allow their dreams, and their lives, and their to flourish. To dream, and to become. To dream and to become their dreams.

And how do you do that? Reality check. You support yourself like everyone else. You don't look for appreciation, you appreciate it yourself. You don't look for recognition, you recognize yourself. Like everyone else. If being an artist is its own reward, than appreciate and recognize that you have been well rewarded. That you are lucky. That you are living your dream. Don't expect any more reward than that. This should all be pretty obvious, but it isn't. Somehow from the getgo fame, recognition, glory, success, are built into the definition of artist, and we all bought it. Again, it has nothing to do with excellence, it has to do with getting ahead, because all that stuff has never been a measure of excellence, even though we are being told it is. History tells us otherwise. History tells us that art happens in all kinds of strange places. Forget "outsider," whoever coined that one should be tarred and feathered. And put in a museum.

Reality check: support yourself. Believe in yourself. If you can do that, maybe you won't have to choose door number three. Maybe you can live to a ripe old age and die sitting in your garden in a straw hat. Now there's a dream!

TO BE OR NOT...

My ten year old got it right off. REAL. To be or not to be REAL. Is it nobler to accept what is unacceptable or better to act the outrage we feel and fight it to the death to correct, change, or end it? Are there alternatives? Is this a fork in the road, a left or a right, or are there other ways to go? Of course that depends. Depends on the limits of the inquiry. Do we only have two choices, paper or plastic, and we have to choose one. Are we boxed in?

And if we are boxed in what do we do? Hamlet didn't do so well, did he. He ended up choosing door number two. What would a Christian do? A Buddhist? An Muslim? Is this the light bulb joke? Is this some kind of joke? Is this the absurdity of life joke? What would the Existentialist do?

Is it real to be noble and let what is and has been be? The Buddhist would say so. It is not faking it to accept that this is life. There is not only no shame in suffering life's slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, there is indeed honor in it. Of course one person's outrage...so on and so forth. We are each tested in our own way on this. We all have our own Achille's heel, and we all have our own price. Only we can know what those are.

Artists, of course, have also struggled with these choices. How to be an artist? It is potentially a long and painful ride. Many artists, many famous and successful artists, have made the most literal interpretation. The obvious one. The question that Shakespeare wasn't actually asking. Not really. They decided to actually not be. To end it. To die. To kill themselves. To cease to exist. What about this? Did any of this have to do with the fact that they were artists?

Why have so many artists ended their lives? Is there one thing in particular? For the longest time I was naive about this. I have always been so grateful to be an artist that it never occurred to me that any of these people found their lives so unbearable that they couldn't go on. I just didn't know. I knew the work. I respected their privacy.

How many artists have been satisfied with their work and what came of it. That is the thing. We make things, and if we make something good we want something good to come of it. But of course this just doesn't happen. We are lucky to make things, and if we make something very good, we are very lucky, and if something very good comes of that, well then, that is beyond what can be expected. We must then consider ourselves very fortunate. But over and over we find that even this is not enough for some artists. And what of this pain? Can an artist just be happy to be able to be, to be an artist, to be alive, and able to translate, express, celebrate that experience, or is it our ineluctable nature to want more?

And more will be forthcoming...

Hello.

Hello. How are you? Let's see, where do we start? There are so many levels and facets to all of this. There is no beginning, just a beginning. You need to know that I respect you. That I will honor you, and be straight with you. That is first. I understand that. I expect no less. Have I been worthy thus far? Well, you're going to decide that, and probably you already have. Maybe you're already gone. I can't blame you. I haven't always been at my best, and sometimes that has been for all the world to see. Sometimes my best will never be known. Whatever witness I may have had has not stepped forward. My best has been anonymous, which is perhaps as it should be. Must be. In this I am like you. Can we agree on this? Can we start from there?

Painting Scared

It happened the other day. I'm embarrassed to say it had been a while. I got scared. I was painting and I got scared. My blood started to rush, my heart began to pump, and my brow got wet. I was scared. I had forgotten how it felt.

A couple days later I mentioned it to a painter friend and he said, yeah, when you think you've got a big one on the line. I agreed, but it was more than that. In fact, I don't think that was it at all. Unless you call the big one the unknown. That was what it was. I was someplace that wasn't safe, and maybe it was like the hunt, but not fishing, more like big game, in the dark, something that could actually hurt you. That was how it felt. And I remembered, that was how I felt painting as a young man, and that was the feeling that guided me. I always wanted to feel the adrenaline. I was maybe even addicted to that feeling. It was risk, danger, speed, the unknown. That was what painting had always felt like. I would throw myself into it and stay as close to the edge as possible, and risk falling off every second.

I remember hearing painters say that getting good at what or how you were painting was the kiss of death, and well, frankly, I believed them. It leads to a kind of sleep. Getting comfortable was the equivalent, and we all know what that means; we take things for granted, the blood stops flowing, we stop being scared.

So here is my New Year's resolution. I'm going to start painting scared again. I promise.

Or what? OK, maybe my friend had it right. Maybe it is because you have a big one on the line and your adrenaline starts to pump through the roof. Maybe it is because you don't want to lose it, screw it up, maybe this is the big one: so you hold on, and that's when it gets scary. Because you can't control the big ones, and they are going to drag you straight to hell. The big ones are the Moby Dicks, of course. They get you every time. The ones you land, well, they are the exceptions, unless of course you are out of your mind, and most of our best and brightest were, well, nothing short...

There is that other possibility still/again; that you’re really scared because you’re out on thin ice, over your head, however you want to put it. I like that. Biting off more than you can chew and then having to chew like crazy. Chew like you are out of your mind!

Visions of Grandeur/Globalization; The Multinational Incorporation and Dehumanization of Art

The old MoMA was like a good book. You and Flaubert. You and Cormac McCarthy. You and Jane Austin. You could wander in. Visit a few old friends. You and Matisse. You and de Kooning. You and Picasso. You could go in to see just one painting and leave. You could have lunch in the garden and even read a book. And you always ran into a few of your other friends who also wandered in for the afternoon.

I think what people really hate about the new MoMA is the loss of intimacy and touch that is so much of what art means to us. The personal relationship with the work. It's not MoMA anymore, or even DADA, but the STATE. State of siege. It's not a good book. It's the airport. It might as well have moving sidewalks. It's the IMAX! It's the multinational incorporation of art. The international mallification of art. You're worse than cattle being prodded along; you're a bug on the windshield of the big multinational corporate art jet! Get on board or get out of the way! Whatever!

About fifteen years ago I wrote a big spread for the Christian Science Monitor on a Sol LeWitt show at the Addison at Andover that I had personally worked on to research the feature, and I ended it by asking if among other things LeWitt wasn't the father of careerism. I was getting at something but I didn't quite know what it was. This is what it was. Of course I doubt LeWitt can be held personally responsible, but his whole corporate approach to working inspired a younger generation of MFAs that might as well be MBAs.

I'm not going to go into how we got here. A lot of tributaries have fed this river. Expensive graduate schools that by the nature of economics demand strategies of a large scale. Contemporary art institutes urging on visions of grandeur. I personally experienced this over twenty-five years ago with an ambitious young curator at PS1 wanting me to be his discovery. Naturally I resisted. He was one of the first of this breed. He was really a young entrepreneur. PS1, by the way, may not have been that intimate in scale then, but it was in touch. It had touch. That made it intimate. But of course money and power are the big factors. People always wonder why I prefer galleries to museums and art centers. Scale. Intimacy. They are small money and power. Things can happen there. Institutions are ruthless, of course, and we have to accept that, I have to accept that, me and my bad attitude--busted. But look what happened when Marcia Tucker showed Richard Tuttle at the Whitney in 1965. She was fired by the board of directors. Galleries don't have boards! The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has more money invested in their front steps than the entire Boston gallery scene has combined. They need the Sol LeWitts. The Richard Serras. Artists on their scale. Forget some ratty Van Gogh painting his heart out in a garage somewhere. Not going to happen? Well, who knows? Art finds a way. Happy art-making.

Rauschenberg vs. Klein: HAPPENING Head to Head

The Pompidou Center in Paris set up an interesting juxtaposition. Yves Klein is long dead(1962)so we can only guess how he would have felt about it. Rauschenberg on the other hand, must have been amused if he made the trip. It wasn't subtle.

Historically speaking, Rauschenberg has nothing to worry about. He's a supernova in his own lifetime, a heavy hitter, a HEAVY weight. Yves Klein is not in his class. Still, "comparing and contrasting" the two, as we are invited to do by the French art establishment, was inevitable. Impossible to avoid. So pull out your score cards and let us begin!



Rauschenberg looked great. I mean GREAT. Beautiful work, beautiful installation. Rock solid. If not all the pieces we've come to know and love, most of them were there. By Job he looked like the master! Rauschenberg 1, Klein 0

Next door, however, Klein immediately took the advantage. SURPRISE? He was given the nicer space. Larger rooms, more beautiful and better flowing space, and windows, which let the space breathe. Rauschenberg's space felt like a closet. So chalk one up for the Frenchman. Klein 1, Rauschenberg 1

The thing about Rauschenberg looking great was a double-edged sword, unfortunately. The work looked too museum worthy despite its whole "happening" history. It certainly seemed "happening" in its day, but now it looked more calculating, like he knew exactly what he was doing. Klein, on the other hand, looked positively breezy; alive; daring; even hit or miss. But his hits looked fresh from the market, even today. Score a big one for Klein! What a surprise!

Most of this work is from the Fifties and early Sixties. I won't talk about what that means. Museums( the Louvre is close by) have a way of looking like mausoleums. Rauschenberg ended up looking like Rembrandt, not like anything we might find in one of the ICAs of the world. We might learn from him the way we would learn from Poussin. Maybe even down on our knees in front of the master. Now maybe it was the installation, the lighting, but the work looked that old and yellowed. Is that bad? It felt that way. Again, I was surprised and disappointed. I remember going to the Johns show at the old MoMA and feeling like the light had gone out of the work, work I loved. These guys had been heroes of mine as a teen in the Sixties. But not Klein. He seemed like some kind of showman/charlatan, giving his peers a bad name.

I have to add quickly that the taste question is another surprise. You figure the Frenchman is the one who is going to get bogged down in such bloody good taste. NO! Rauschenberg is the surprisingly tasteful one, it is just so hard to see past his rebellious nature. The work looks downright ugly most of the time, but the taste quotient is through the roof. Everything is so tastefully considered(too?) it is a wonder he could find the time to do what he did. The taste is furious! Fast as a cake walk. NOTHING is left to chance. Everything is immaculately considered. Calculated. Made to get him past or around or even up with de Kooning, Rothko, and Pollock.

Now Klein looked pretty damned good. Not at first, mind you. Still in the glow of Rauschenberg he looked shallow. Flat. One-dimensional. The same over and over again. Even slick. But then something happened I could not get around. Something I couldn't dismiss to preserve my old hero.



There is a famous picture of Klein that the Pompidou Center used to advertise the exhibition. They put it on posters, cards, and books. It shows him flying out the window with the sidewalk waiting for him. It it positively glorious. Icarus. His head is held high and thrusting forward, arms spread like wings to his sides, back arched and body behind him like a bird. It is the picture of the artist. The individual. The fool. The hero. The artist. Everything that it means. It is wonderful!




That thing I couldn't get around was that in Klein's paintings, almost prints, made by rolling naked women(yes, so FRENCH!) in his signature blue paint(IKB) and then on blank canvas, things did happen! Real accidents, visual mysteries that you couldn't put a finger on, just experience. These were REAL happening paintings. Yes, Klein was a conceptual artist, one of the first of his age, and not a painter, per se, but these paintings are paintings precisely because they are light as a feather. With a whimsical detachment that frees them. Almost like the sort of thing that kids make with spin art. Crap shoots. The kinds of things people find too easy to dismiss. Too just beautiful. But they got me. They flew through the air. THEY SOARED! Surrendering to them was an experience that slapped me in the face like a biting winter wind. And it woke me up! With a smile. I needed that! But maybe that's not art.

Maybe Rauschenberg wins for art. Maybe he IS the master. And maybe Klein was just a life thing. Too caught up in his blue freedom to carve out his place in art history. But give me life everytime!

Andre and Smith: Americans in Paris

What to make of these two out in front of the Louvre. David Smith and Carl Andre. Sr. and Jr. The Modernist leading the way to Minimalist. Smith taking up the torch of European Modernism(read Picasso), and Andre, what, the dead end, the killer, the cold hard last stop, the bridge too far. Ironically Andre looked the more comfortable of the two. Hiding in the grass. Snake in the grass. Cool. Elegant. Safe. Coiled. Invulnerable. Smith much more human, of course. How could he not be? Bold. And again, ironically, looking more American. A little awkward. Ill-fitting suit. A little showy. So the pioneer American sculptor looking a little out of place. As it should be. Andre, the preppie from Andover, very smart. Very smart. Too smart for his own good, thus he painted himself into a corner with his “floor tiles,” and really left himself nowhere to go. Really jumped with both feet fast and hard, claiming the turf for himself, but unlike LeWitt, unable to reinvent himself. More the sculptor, less the conceptualist. It is the old issue of “brand” and “branding” that gets so many artists in trouble. Establish the brand and you’ve got it made. Establish the brand and unleash the curse. The beginning end the end. Stella had a second act. Pretty amazing.



David Smith, of course, like Pollock, clearly transcended and repaid his debt to Picasso. The spring board that turned swan dive in both cases. Both, however, enjoyed unfolding and evolving bodies of work. They did not just happen. Abstract Expressions was the “happening.” The ing was important. Andre’s work, like Intelligent Design, just happened. Didn't evolve like Smith. Made it more godlike and not Darwinian. More arrogant. More elite, and thus less approachable. Another reason Smith suffers a more human appearance by contrast. Andre’s grey flannelled cool from on high. Smith’s jaunty free spirit/maverick out alone in the universe, facing the elements on Bolton Landing.

Although they made unlikely companions, their association was fruitful. Americans in Paris. Old School and newer Old School. A thousand light years from Delacroix. They always say artists from different periods, from the past, would recognize their equals. I don’t necessarily agree. Issues of form can be transcendant, but other qualities may not be so sympathetic, and may not travel so well. Greatness as a transcendent force smacks of a kind of clubby elitism. Who decides? Delacroix was so “hot” and pushed the Romantic discourse so far left. Hard to deny something pretty great there. Andre is so classical, so right, so conservative really. I don't think he'll make it. Smith is out on his own. Out in space. Classical and Romantic at once. Maybe somewhere in between, maybe outside the discourse. Greatness in his bones. A free man in Paris.