ART: Ynez Johnston Retro View

"A Fantasy Voyage"

I loved this charming Klee-Picasso näif woman artist when I saw her work in 2010 at a modest exhibit at Valley College. Since then she had a large exhibit at the Mingei Museum in San Diego, wish I’d seen that too.

 I see maps, buildings jumbled together, in a graphic illustrator-artist style that looks very 1950’s to me.  I also love the synthetic expression of the influence the places and artists she has made.  What joy she must take in traveling the the great world.  It’s an overwhelming cacophony; the memories, experiences, sought out with great vigor and attention.  “...This is her characteristically obsessive approach to composition, which makes even modest-sized works seem to hold a small and mysterious universe. Yes, she exoticizes, but she also exalts. Some early work, such as “Tomb of the Rajah,” are architectural and detailed in their neat stacking of buildings.” - Scarlet Cheng in Visual Artsource Online. 

“...This is her characteristically obsessive approach to composition, which makes even modest-sized works seem to hold a small and mysterious universe. Yes, she exoticizes, but she also exalts. Some early work, such as “Tomb of the Rajah,” are architectural and detailed in their neat stacking of buildings.” - Scarlet Cheng in Visual Artsource Online. 

ART: French Plein-Air Landscapes from the MET

Exhibition: The Path of Nature, Metropolitan Museum of Art: French Paintings From the Wheelock Whitney Collection, 1785-1850. 

A group of mostly oil-on-paper landscape paintings made en plein air in Italy, these works were mostly intended as studies for large paintings.  But the have, as Holland Cotter states in his NYT Review, what John Constable called “ ‘sparkle with repose’.”

And how they validate for me my love of the landscape genre.  And how marvelous the lighting, and revealing, considering that most of them were made before Impressionism’s boom begins.  They have the softness of The Barbizon School to my eye.  Delightful, fresh masterful painting.  Not famous, but as least now viewed, always really really exceptional.

ART: Agnes Denes, Conceptual Land Artist

Agnes Denes, "Wheatfield", installation in New York NY

perfect structures, exquisite forms 

manifesting the Divine

confirm my being within all being,

bequeathing me sentient life and conscious awareness

Tree Mountain: Drawing and Installation Photograph

“A huge manmade mountain measuring 420 meters long, 270 meters wide, 38 meters high and elliptical in shape was planted with eleven thousand trees by eleven thousand people from all over the world at the Pinziö gravel pits near Ylöjärvi, Finland, as part of a massive earthwork and land reclamation project by environmental artist Agnes Denes. The project was officially announced by the Finnish government at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro on Earth Environment Day, June 5, l992, as Finland's contribution to help alleviate the world's ecological stress. Sponsored by the United Nations Environment Program and the Finnish Ministry of the Environment, Tree Mountain is protected land to be maintained for four centuries, eventually creating a virgin forest. The trees are planted in an intricate mathematical pattern derived from a combination of the golden section and the pineapple/sunflower system designed by the artist. Even though infinitely more complex, it is reminiscent of ancient earth patterns.... conceived in 1982, affirms humanity's commitment to the future well being of ecological, social and cultural life on the planet. It is designed to unite the human intellect with the majesty of nature.”

ART/ESSAY: The Current Art Market Bubble

The scholar Johanna Drucker has dubbed this “complicit aesthetics.” - best example I can come up with is Takashi Murakami - maybe we really do need high/low cultural categories: you know who’s a serious artist that way. Don’t you? 

Art as an Asset Class - the commodity party
 Conversations in the media have centered on market, museums and galleries focusing on proven contemporary artists, marketing, exhibiting  and curating them in a way that is creating a circularity of closure, an art bubble.

Proliferating art fairs, expansion of galleries globally, artists with large production-style studios cranking out work, the gigantism factor: all of it worrisome because it results in some vapid, mediocre exhibition (Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times, 6-22-12) and Georgina Adams, editor of The Art Newspaper, (Financial Times, 1-2-13) writes about the possibility of art market and values imploding when over-production dilutes the “brand” of a Kiefer, Wool, Richter. 

Shane Ferro on Blouin ArtInfo points out that up-and-comer status seekers count coup not only with purchases of the top echelon of artists, but by dealing with a top gallery, who directs their purchases to a few artists, re-inforcing a circle of lucrative results for artist and dealer both.  

The critical media have far less clout than they’re given credit for, since most serious aestheticians and writers deplore the particularity of the market, and the narrow, serial nature of most contemporary artists’ oeuvre.  But journalists do marvel in their coverage at the high sums being collected by the “gang”, thus supporting the bubble.  It’s lots easier to mutter about $75 million for that? than it is to take time to read a thoughtful critical piece which might or might not help direct attention to worthy artists.  

It’s not cheap to make art today, and it’s terribly risky too.  The artist in the garret is a dream: the gallery system is an avatar of the techno-marketing reality of today, and prices must reflect that. 

ART: Peter Sacks Paintings

"Visitation II", detail

Peter Sacks is a published poet and professor at a prestige Eastern university.  He began painting a few years ago and his work was received with quantum approval speed.  It’s utterly beautiful and compositionally pure.  Continuing in the shoes of Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, and text-using artists, he covers his canvasses with hand-typed transcriptions of books, old clothing and fabrics from French flea markets, and other materials.  

The allusions are easy and deep at once, and texturally gratifying and embracing.  Sacks is from South Africa, and grieved over the damage apartheid did to all the human souls enmeshed in its matrices.  

Here’s the quandary for me: I wouldn’t have done this because though I have wanted to, I thought it was a vein tapped out.  I’ve seen work something like this a lot.  Not as good, prettier, less polished, whatever - what a shame I didn’t try it.  

How important it is to attend to that first little pique-ing seed of interest and curiosity, of liking, of attraction.  Wherein may lie the real you, that gets squashed way fast and surely by the critical policing self.

FILM: Gasland

 Gasland takes a folksy, low-key, Will Rogers (aw shucks never met a man I didn’t like) tone.  Fox narrates his investigative road trip strumming a banjo, sometimes wearing a sinister-looking black respirator. The open naïf tone is beguiling indeed, and disturbing. Images of water flaming as it runs from a faucet, gas bubbling up in a seep, a wildlife stream kill evidently caused by a chemical spill. The hard-scrabble American farm workers interviewed have had their lives ruined by a fracking accident - breathtaking destruction.  

I think the film feels like it was made by a young person, influenced by Michael Moore documentaries.  Unlike Moore, Fox never becomes a irritating noodge.

The best scenes in the film are the musing quiet reflections Fox makes as he surveys the beautiful quiet stream behind his family home, wondering if it’s fresh and vulnerable state will be sustained.   They’re sensitive, beautiful, and ache with loss.  

Issues arise:  Gasland doesn’t attempt a balanced perspective.  That’s for us to attempt.  No doubt the fracking issue will be resolved with more galling environmental compromise decisions, all delaying the speed we reach the Tipping Point of ecological disaster.

I do feel more informed.  My consciousness is further raised.   I do think that current energy policy, “all of the above, in some combination”,  really is the only direction.  May it be tempered with care about  beautiful America as much as growing our consumer lifestyle.

II.  Background

Major legislation passed in 2005, The Air and Clean Water Act, lulled Americans’ concerns about land and water pollution.  Great, we’ve preseved our water.  What the citizenry didn’t understand, however, was that there was a little-noticed “Halliburton Loophole”  which exempted gas and oil drilling from the act.  Gas and oil companies are not required to disclose the chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process, as toxic as they are.  

As Americans appetite for energy grows,  the use of “fracking” natural gas extraction techniques seems to be the magic answer to our energy problems.  It is, potentially, one of the most destructive of the “all of the above” energy-production industrial processes.  

Consider the map above: when the the shale formation and river drainage system maps are overlaid, one understands the magnitude of risk that fracking presents to poisoned water and land.  

 The process can cause gas bearing layers....[to connect]... with water bearing layers....this technique breaks the geological barriers that have protected fresh water aquifers and the surface for millennia.... those very large volumes of fracking fluids left underground will move and are already moving and contaminating aquifers and surface waters. (information from Gasland’s  website).

Do fracking operators have any option to restore the underground geological structure they’ve damaged?  I remember the subsidence issue in Long Beach as a child. Pumping the harbor area caused it to sink about 29 feet, and the subsidence “bowl” was 20 miles wide. The problem was alleviated by pumping water back into the area, and enabled oil drilling to continue.  

The subsidence caused compression, so I worry that fracking will crack the layers below the earth, causing aquifers to drain, collapse, and violent compressions of the substrate.

It appears from the film that individuals who have polluted water experiences have no recourse except to hire a lawyer. Proving cause/correlation is their burden.  Public agencies do not generally have agency or license to investigate and/or prosecute.  This seems a grave injustice, and also very environmentally short-sighted. 

Once their property is polluted, they sell cheaply to the gas company - if they’ll buy - (fracking empties the gas supply rapidly) and move on, from their family farm or small town to whatever hardscrabble life they can find.  Or they stay, supported by jerry-rigged water storage systems or by purchasing fresh water directly.  

Fracking also releases methane, which if not recovered during the process, but is released into the atmosphere, adds significantly to the  consequences of  global warming.   

Sad, so sad. I don’t think we even need all the gas ourselves. The new pipeline terminates in New Orleans, suggesting shipping possibilities to supply overseas demand.  China, for instance, relies on coal.  Selling them gas might help our balance of payments.  The payoffs, the sacrifices.  They are lamentable.

How long do we really have?  The beautiful world is so ruined.

PLAY: Other Desert Cities, by Jon Robin Baitz

A show-biz/political family’s Christmas holiday in Palm Springs during the 1960’s.  Wry, comical, sad, the play sets up a liberal-conservative duel between conservative parents and liberal children - how can anyone talk about politics anymore when these divides exist between generations and siblings?  I had to see this play.  The answer is, they all loved each other more than the families I’m involved with do.

The play received mixed reviews, but I liked it, although it felt a bit like a TV sitcom and looked like one too. At the end of the play, we discover that the parents, these paragons of Republican virtue, faked a suicide to shield their son from prosecution for a crime he’d committed.  It was quite astonishing and unexpected.  Did they do so to protect their own high profile careers, or for the sake of their son?  Both, a most ambigious life choice.

The problem with going to the Taper Forum is that it’s hard to hear - in the round theatres were all the democratic fashion some years ago, but they have a terrible problem of relation to the audience, which frontal stage/auditoriums manage to overcome somewhat.

FILM: Zero Dark Thirty

Is it fiction!  It’s based on true facts! Is it a documentary?   No, it’s not all based on facts. It’s art.  The torture scenes - who knows? It’s an advocate for the use of torture? No, it’s a provocative inquiry. It’s a procedural?  Yes, but it’s ..."a unique kind of motion picture: the reported film”. (press notes quoted by Kenneth Turan). It’s gripping important entertainment.  

The film fills a deep fly on the wall curiosity.  Where was the scene in which Obama ordered the hit? How did they get the rest of the women and children out?

The storyline is grindingly propelled forward by the dedication of the CIA and Maya, the main character, to capture Bin Laden.  It’s tense and engrossing, naturalistic and yet heightened.  Maya is an amalgam of several real persons, supposedly.  Here she is written marble. However,  Jessica Chastain’s luminous face and expressions are revealing of a refined, elegant, and steel-boned woman. She  does a soldier’s duty, even as she shoves snacks into her mouth while deeply focussed on her work. She remains consummately professional.  No tell all, no talk shows.  

I’d like to think she/they are still working to stabilize North Africa and the Middle East as we speak.

After Secretary of State Clinton’s testimony yesterday about the raid in Libya, concerns about combatting terrorist activity and Al Quaeda make the film even more timely. The nightmare is not over.

“Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein has denied that waterboarding helped in this case. This is a movie that claims to be faithfully based on facts, but the filmmakers can't have it both ways....There's an emotional detachment to the film that undercuts its potency. Zero Dark Thirty is more technically proficient than emotionally involving.” - Claudia Puig review

“.Movies must move, and this one just lies there like a stack of paper from a classified government filing cabinet...The conceit of the movie is that it was one woman with a driving passion—and a young, inexperienced field operative to boot—who practically single-handedly discovered the evidence and masterminded the plan that led to bin Laden’s assassination. We know nothing about Maya, and Ms. Chastain’s stoic, textbook approach to the role does nothing to illuminate or enlighten.” - Rex Reed

“...This is the work of a commanding filmmaker who is willing, as well as able, to confront a full spectrum of moral ambiguity. It is also, ... the subject of ...controversy... in which the film's sternest critics see it as factually flawed and an apology for torture.

..."Zero Dark Thirty" does not apologize for torture, any more than it denounces it. What it does in the course of telling a seminal story of our time is what contemporary films so rarely do, serve as brilliant provocation. - Joel Morgenstern, WSJ

ESSAY: Desecrations

ghost trees cut and burned in Australia - they were important markers of a songline and sacred to the indigenous peoples of Australia“

...the tree was alive and well; it was just fantastically rare. So rare, in fact, that it warranted its own scientific name: Picea sitchensis 'Aurea.' Picea sitchensis is the Latin name for the Sitka spruce, and Aurea is Latin for "golden" or "gleaming like gold," but it can also mean "beautiful" or "splendid." Sixteen stories tall and more than twenty feet around, the golden spruce was unique in the botanical world.” (from the book).

The rare yellow tree was destroyed by a maddened environmentalist who took its life in a illogical statement about conservation to his fellow passengers on earth. 

ESSAY: Conceptual Art Exhibit at The Brooklyn Museum

FILM: Les Misérables

The title is the description of those viewing it, perhaps.  Was this a good film?  It’s an OK film.  It’s very literal:  extreme close up shots of the actors as the sing during the take, so we see their nostrils and bulging eyeballs. A scene in which the heroes are drenched with sewage, so only the whites of their eyes are visible. I wanted to laugh but it was too sad.

Hugh Jackman does a remarkable job of playing Jean Valjean.  The storyline was so abbreviated it was hard to understand why Javert was so raveningly bent on apprehending this one man. Helpful here to recollect The Reign of Terror and the cruel justice administered by Robespierre, which Javert represented.  He was a slumboy himself, and resented Valjean’s strength and moral enlightenment.  

The issues of mercy vs. justice, of sacrifice and repentance make a serviceable but obscured scaffold to tell the story of the injustices and sufferings of the French underclass as the country struggles to create a society that truly embodies its motto.

I see operas, I am tolerant of bombastic and awkward narratives.  It was helpful to me remind myself that this was popular music, voices not classically trained, nor intended to be so. 

The opera’s ending, with the death of Valjean after all his sacrifices, reminds us that present freedoms are paid for with past blood and treasure given.  I really don’t see why he couldn’t have lived to see his grandchildren.  And Fantine, played by Anne Hathaway, disappears so quickly from the movie. Russell Crowe, at his best a wooden actor, is a wooden soldier here.  His character commits suicide because he cannot accept mercy;  to do so would be to admit his wrongful life of judgment and enforcement. Of course, it’s the death of monarchical systems, too.  

The music and lyrics are all lush and expressive, urgent and fervent songs about feelings.  

I think the book might be worth reading; a more interesting moral exposition.

“...harmonic mush...The director is Tom Hooper, fresh from “The King’s Speech,” and you can’t help wondering if this shift into grandeur has confused his sense of scale. The camera soars on high, the orchestra bellows, and then, whenever somebody feels a song coming on, we are hustled in close, forsaking our bird’s-eye view for that of a consultant rhinologist.”  - Anthony Lane, The  New Yorker

“...We’re all familiar with the experience of seeing movies that cram ideas and themes down our throats. Les Misérables may represent the first movie to do so while also cramming us down the throats of its actors: plodding...four-square rhythms...sonic sludge...tuneless...bombastic...maudlin...gimmicky...Les Misérables is a long, windy, thematically repetitive musical; if you didn’t understand a plot point or get to hear quite enough of a favorite song, just sit tight and it’ll come back soon.” - Dana Stevens, Slate Magazine

“...It’s also gorgeously filmed, almost perfectly acted and one of the most emotionally devastating and gratifying movies I’ve ever seen.”  Joy Tipping, Dallas Morning News

ESSAY: Landscape Art, I Still Love it Best

Rockwell Kent, Whiteface Sunset, no date given

 I still want to paint the beautiful scenes and places I’ve been, the beautiful creatures I’ve seen.  They connect me to the godly spiritual world, the only sensibility I wish to hold.

ART: Astrid Preston, New Work

ESSAY: Dave Hickey Resigns

Tim Bavington, Heart Above Head #1, a painter championed by Hickey

His (Dave Hickey’s) ideas as an art critic are incompatible with the art world's absorption in theory. 

Dave Hickey, the Art Market's self-appointed hygienist, retires after diagnosing himself with accidie.

Dave Hickey an art critic and professor of art theory living in Santa Fe after mostly Las Vegas (because he is a gambler?) announced recently he would write no more art criticism.  My reaction to this was ho-hum:  another one of the boys just picking up their bat and ball and going home, soured and burned out when his critical perspective finally came up short.  You’re 74, so just retire already, without having to use that endless supply of cynicism to grease the exit skids.

Hickey fought his generation’s worthy battle against mediocrity and academicism. You’d think he was the only one out there explaining with great gusts of iconoclasm and Whitman-esque vigor, how unbecoming are the Emperor’s clothes.  Yet he sheltered within academia, playing the rogue outsider in the system.  

I think Hickey’s role was to keep punching the dynamic to prevent entropy.  But the horse he rode in on, the fusion of pop and high culture, really has needed to be shot. And he remained compromised, because he really was an elitist, trapped by a sort of ornery appreciative nature.

 For the most part, widening art to include pop and vernacular art was simply a strategy to attract viewers.  I’m not sure that pop culture was and is anything more than shallow superficial reactionary escapism.  That really isn’t what art is all about, is it?  So why seek it out?  Because social reality is so disheartening:  who wants to serve democracy when they can be served a Big Mac instead?

Suspiciousness is a fault of mine; these gritty battlers debunking the system that feeds them - and what other kind of system would better serve art? The dynamics of purging commodity systems of mediocrity are built into it for our amusement and hygiene.  Mustn’t get suckered by all those sales pitches.  We are even amused by those who bite our hands as we feed them, indeed, seem to require it to maintain focus and attention.

I like it that Hickey is concerned with beauty.  Likely he is concerned with original thinking, too, as long as it’s clear and vigorous.  The older I become, the less I can defend popular culture.  It’s a familiar arc, n’est pas?  I do apologize for that.  But I was beguiled by the market’s and Post-Modernism’s great assertion that high and low culture had fused.  

  I don’t think I want much hi-lo fusion, anyway.  It’s simply more democratic mediocrity, with the majority tyranny of taste ruling.

ESSAY: The Parrots Are Back

I hear the raucous squawking early.  I haven’t heard it for months.  Thought they were gone for good, but I’m glad they are back.  The parrots perched in an old palm tree in our front yard, off and on, all day long, most of last year.

How astonished I was to see them return!  A neighbor told me that they were orphans from the Busch Gardens Brewery Attraction that closed some years ago in the central San Fernando Valley.  

Well, being a bird watcher, I guess I have to love them all.

I didn’t take the photo - it’s by Ken Rudine, 2009, from a website about parrots that live on the Rio Grande in Texas.  Ours are a more beautiful iridescent green.