ART: Autry Museum; Floral Beadwork & Masters of the American West Art Exhibit

On a grace-filled southern California winter's day, white branches of the sycamores triangulate our singularly blue skies. A remarkable and moving exhibit of women's artistry and patience calls me. And I want to see the Western paintings chosen for exhibit  - what's seen as exemplary, worthy of sale?

NATIVE AMERICAN FLORAL BEADWORK EXHIBITION

What happened to the culture of Native North Americans during encūentro is similar to that of other societies whose patrimonies held rich worlds of unique beauty and identity.

octopus beaded bag

European missionaries and traders introduced glass beads, fabric dyes, yarns, craft and art techniques, and Christianity throughout the world. Indigenous products began to be manufactured for trade and collection, the designs modified and interpreted to suit occidental, colonial tastes.  The authentic cultural product was just too strange and uncomfortable, too powerful evidence of the exploitation and domination taking place. 

And yet the beauty remains, the humanity manifest, immanent.

online photo

So we have Chinese and Japanese export ceramics, Indonesian and Indian textiles, African ivory figurines, Hawai'ian quilts, Samoan-style tattoos. 

Native Americans already beaded with shells, porcupine quills, seeds, and bones, mostly with geometric and abstract symbols that were deeply connected to their religious practices.  

Now their beadwork designs began to use trade beads and include secular European floral motifs. But the Native Americans combined them with their own cosmological symbols.  Frequently a cross that symbolizes the cardinal directions is worked into the overall design, for instance.

photo from Cree art reference website, Birmingham Museum

This is a Cree head-covering designed for wear by women attending Christian churches. The sides would limit peripheral vision and conceal much of the face and hair, like a nun's coif, the similar purpose. In the center of each rose winding around the face appears the cardinal directions symbol, retained and integrated into the design.  It's one of the most moving objects in the exhibit, symbolic of how  Native Americans at once submitted and sustained their culture even as their world was destroyed.

photo retained from online search

Even more evocative is the collection of moccasins.  A large group fills one wall, decorated soft foot coverings.  In most of them, one can see the shapes of toes and arches retained by supple buckskin.  Sometimes one is slightly larger than its mate, revealing the anatomical disparity of foot size or the preferred lead walking foot.

Where do those feet tread now?  I hope they may be wind spirits, that I can put my face up to them and tell them that we venerate them in our tragically compromised fashion.  


WESTERN ARTISTS YEARLY SALE EXHIBITION

George Carlson, Witness of Time

Contemporary western genre art to be seen here, mostly cowboy and Indian portraits and historical action narratives.  I want to like them, and do, but it's the landscapes that I will love unequivocally. 

The paintings are beautifully well-executed, unabashedly realist, detailed, lovely warm-toned images, leaving me impressed by the painters' mastery of technique. So what's not to like?  They are attractive, innocent. It's not about liking. So I worry.

Are they perhaps clichéd, grounded in sentimental populist nostalgia, less authentic as a consequence?  There is also the problem of intentionally or unintentionally commodifing Native Americans, and Western history itself. 

Jay Lipking, Young Girl, Profile

I love Western movies, but why paint them? Narrative genre painting is trumped by historical photography and then marginalized  by modern cinema. Photographs by Edward Curtis, a George Catlin painting; I feel on more authentic ground with these. So there is is: the compromised intention makes for compromised results.

I think landscape painting seems to be on more stable political and artistic ground. The earth and its natural beauty are ageless metaphors for spirituality and transcendence, identity,survival, the American frontier and way of life. They are especially poignant as we live with the reality of the degraded beauty of wilderness. 

An artist who chooses landscape, eschewing abstraction, can still be viable, though perhaps will never be fully appreciated in today's commercial museum scene. 

These are the landscape painters I most admired in the exhibit:

Lon Chmeil, Unseasonable

Jerry Lipking, Riders, Vermilion Cliffs

Jay Moore, Moonlit Night

George Carlson, Witness of Time

Lon Chmeil, Geological Illusion

Carole Cooke, Mist over Logan Pass

Carole Cooke, Windswept

BOOK COMMENTS: CADILLAC DESERT, by Marc Reisner

After seeing Glen Canyon Dam, I continued my readings on the American West. Cadillac Desert was the book which has made me despair most. Though written about 20 years ago, it provides an overview of the appalling story of American water development and use.  

At 68 I remain naive. The huge downside of open democracy is that its combination of consumerism, rapacious advanced industrial capitalism and human impulse control failure has produced a consumptive short-sightedness, a failure of vision that leads only to the dark. (See book, The 6th Extinction).  

Even more disgusting is how the institutions of society fail to function effectively.  I warned you, naive.  Foolish elementary school Catholic idealism. 

John Wesley Powell called for a political division of the West based on its existing river-watershed-drainages. But capitalism can do little that is sensible, stunted as it is by its pernicious policy of discounting the future. 

First the West was stripped of its pelted animals,its bison herds decimated. Healthy protein, in retrospect, but the calf was golden. Railroad rights-of-way artificially divided western lands, and eager, ill-informed, unexperienced newcomers acquired 160 acre parcels of arid desert to farm. The Mormons were the only group with enough co-operative structure to build private functional irrigation systems, but those models were ignored as water need, rights and use quickly became the great looming reality. 


Weather cycles of wet/dry, so deeply misunderstood and ignored by almost all stakeholders, soon caused landowners of all sizes to fail.  And so the giant program to provide subsidized water to the great West began, though Powell had warned that should all the water in the West be distributed over the territory, it would cover it to a depth of 2 inches. 

Teton Dam Collapse, June 5, 1976

Dams were built in response to growing population needs. Never before was so much promised to so many. TGTBT! Congress members quickly arranged lucrative irrigation programs which provided cheap water for farming, on land that was marginal or not, for crops that were mostly inappropriate. 

In the long run, silting would make the dams useless, salination would reduce crop yields, small farms would be acquired by huge corporations, wildlife and fish populations would be decimated, and thousands of square miles of wild rivers and canyons drowned under suburban-style lakes and reservoirs.

Water is provided at deeply subsidized prices to agribusiness, crops are subsidized by price supports, and American business and bureaucracy has simply learned to "farm the government". 

The American economy is deeply compromised by this support system; the irony of conservative complaints about "socialism" is richly available in the West, as "lone individualist" western lifestyles are touted by landowners benefitting from the generosity and short-term economic thinking of American taxpayers, their elected officials, and agribusiness interests.

The very practice of individualism has become a commodity.  That hectoring, grouchy Thoreau was all too correct and John Wesley Powell's tears mingle with the infrequent rains that fall from western skies on the stupendous monstrosity of civilization we've made.

Very little consolation is available.  I get in my gas-guzzling Jeep, drive over svelte highway systems right up to the red rock canyons, hop out wearing a bug-proofed shirt, hiking boots that John Muir would die for, protein bars, a camel-siphon instant water system, and go for a hike. Utterly impossibly compromised.  God may forgive, but Mother Nature will not.   

ART: LACMA, Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting

"The dichotomy between figuration and abstraction is untenable. All representation is abstract, and all abstraction, no matter how rigorous, is funneled through the language and habits of mind that are representation.  It's not even that one can't have one without the other, but that they are simultaneous."

Helen Molesworth, Exhibition statement

Amy Sillman

Simultaneous funneling?  Sounds like a hydraulics system - the "black box" cognition theory, a mental "push-pull" process of birthing images.  

I love this painting - it looks like an earlier work by the artist, but the color sense is sure and right, and the shapes are at once playful and beautiful, colliding and then erect on the left side of the painting - a no-man's land if one tends to "read" paintings visually from left to right like a text - which I have trained myself not to do.

The idea that all representation is abstract is of course, fundamental to understanding human perception of reality.  "The map is not the territory".  It destroys the "primitive" use of figurative imagery.  Think of all those stone gods worshipped, the "captured soul" perception of portrait photography.

I wish to expand the idea of simultaneity   beyond a linear metaphor and imagine it as a unimaginably dynamic open-ended process involving time, space, somatic perceptions, and mental constructs - like a Julie Mehretu painting come to life, or those exploding images we see at the beginning of movies.

I chose paintings from this exhibit that I "liked" - a "simultaneous" and seemingly pre-verbal process.  For me, finding language to analyze and explain experience, whatever it is, has a desperate, pressured feeling, like being at bat in the ninth inning with 2 out and the bases loaded. 

My liking of them is not merely an intellectual exercise. I love each of these paintings and feel great energy about them and from them that is entirely an emotional response.

Then the struggle begins, to find the words, for they are hiding in those mental caverns that gave me the experience.

Amy Sillman

Oh what colors here - that grey seems to be delivered direct from analytic cubism, but the purple and sly pale yellow slices of color beneath the coffee pot and the lovely violet and lavender blocks to the right of the forms and part of the forms seems to speak to me: I'm perfect here, this is exactly the way it should be - like a Giorgio Morandi does.  All perfect form but exciting directions and finally harmonious balances resolve within and around the volume and mass of shapes.  All flattened illusion.

Mark Bradford

I love this particular Mark Bradford painting - a welcome and recent appointment to the MOCA board - because I am drawn to maps, directionality, and grids. How easy it is to move among the colors here, then halted short by that dark blocky section, then permitted to move around and above it.  I don't wonder what it is.  It's for me to have color, to move in the blocky, accreted directions and be stopped by the "shoreline" of exquisite mint green. 

I think there's something rather retro 50's about the overlapping blocks and their orange color.  How unstable the crazy blocking seems, ready to tumble but never doing so, making for fascinating and repressive energy within and between the forms and colors.

Bradford's body of work is really interesting to view.  His exploration and direction seems so right, yet so fresh.

This last painting I love, but its a very different painting.  The tactility and tonal quality call me to think of Antoni Tàpies, another favorite painter.  How I love that line moving over the rich and hatched surface.  How puzzled I am by the two triangles seeming to quarrel with each other and the painting whether they are below the surface of it or above.  

And that line - free, swinging, yet compressed from the sides of the canvas and the top it seems, forced to slow,curve and turn, pick up speed again, then slow again, until it arrives at a place which concludes the movement, rather like a work of programmatic music - something earthy, like Dvorak. 

The shapes are doughy, and childlike, and the line seems patient and then scribbly. I love the pressures against each other, rhythmic reversals.  At the same time, it's still  flat, a denial of depth and space even as it references it.  Like maps do.

FILM: The Great Silence

Spaghetti-croissant western with Jean-Louis Trintignant Klaus Kinski, filmed in the Dolomites in a deep snowy winter in 1968, this is a film that ends with a bad surprise.


It's based loosely on the excesses of bounty hunters in the late west, who massacred an outlaw group in Utah that seemed to be Mormons hiding until amnesty was granted. 

Klaus Kinski plays a sadistic bounty hunter named Loco and Trintignant a righteous but mute vigilante called Silence - after he's been in town and the shooting stops, that's what you get.

We're denied the virtual cinematic pleasure of a duel between them, and Silence and his girlfriend both die defending the outlaws being held by Loco in the saloon.

The Dolomites are astonishingly steep and deeply snow-covered, and their looming white silence is breath-taking and compelling.

A shocking and quite good film. 

FILMS: Dear White People, The Skin Game

Go ahead, white people, try making funnies about blacks.  Or maybe not.  My working principle is to only make fun of my own stuff, though these days white female old lady jokes aren't even safe, because then people try to make me feel better because because I'm old. Then I can't own my own age after all.  They don't want to think about their own futures.

I once discussed with a black friend how a white person can work for racial equality without blundering.  Her advice, was, "just keep trying, dear,though you may be misunderstood".  Wise words. Maybe someday I'll get it right.  

In the meantime, I go to PC movies for etiquette coaching, and some that aren't so I can actually laugh. 

A wise friend, a southerner whose special area is Faulkner, once chatted with me about "permission to laugh" at stereotypes, whether those of black comedians satirizing black cultural behaviors, or whites laughing at them.  He advised that we should, because it's just another PC trap not to. It's all in the level of awareness, as I understand his point.

It's a very timely issue - consider the removal of a scene from The Death of Klinghoffer portraying a New York Jewish family scene which evidently had stereotypical Jewish types in it.  Not going to be caught laughing during this opera, no sir!

By the way, this film has a smart, really funny musical score - lots of clichéd masterpieces that stand for the boring, materialistic yet well-intentionededucational institution.  (One time at a party on the East Coast I heard two old guys discussing the size of their schools' endowments - each mentioned sums in the millions of dollars, but it was definitely a "mine is bigger than yours" conversation.)

I liked Dear White People a lot.  Yes, students actually do have racist-themed parties; I found six listed on the web, not all black.  Equal op racism. I'm almost more disappointed with the privileged college fun scene portrayed. Where is the intellectual journey part? It's the back story, you make it out in the distance, as the literary "cuties" try to out-do each other with clever party themes, pretentious literary magazines and blogs.

Skin Game, a comedy western (1971) with a young Lou Gossett and James Garner, is surprising.  Lou Gossett is a free black pretending to be a slave as partner in a con with Garner.  The "n" word is used casually and frequently, racism is presented in all its ugliness, and Gossett fakes black southern slave dialect, and we'd call his acting "coding" his behavior to suit his surroundings - all very non-PC, but the comedy gets away with it, despite my raised eyebrows. It's naiveté and date seem to have slipped it by the PC police.  

In a plantation scene, Gossett's character discovers Songhai Africans kept in the barn as cowboys.  They speak no English, and Gossett, who has pretended to speak an African dialect in an earlier scene, makes up words until after a few missteps, he hits on words they understand, and all become fast friends.  It's such rich send up of fake dialect.

The film does include chains, a whipping scene, slave auctions, the Kansas slave/free vote, and in the framework of the comedy, is very hard-edged and unpleasant to watch - who thought this was ever funny? (Despite my earlier statements about comedy, I still have my limits.)

All the folks Garner cons seem to richly deserve it, rationalizing the deceit,and Garner is a good guy when prevailed upon. 

ART: VAN GOGH'S CONTINUING SIGNIFICANCE

Another "new" Van Gogh to me: I don't know this one, because it's been in a private collection, now going to the auction block.  It's expected to sell for $30 to 50 million.  No museum will ever be able to afford this and so it will go away again, a kind of sleeping death. It confirms the bedrock of economics, of commodity, of capitalism, that art elitists must not deny.  Their bedfellow is a jailor from which there is no escape.

So I look at a picture and yearn.

50th High School Reunion

"We are old, Father William, the young man said...Take down this book, and slowly read... dream...and murmur, a little sadly, how time has fled..."  (Lewis Carroll & W.B. Yeats paraphrase)

But we were. Old. It was mildly shocking to see them all - the handsome kids I went to high school with, pretty girls' marvelous bee-hive hairdos, boys with  lettermens' jackets, slim shoulders filled out by the padding, hanging cool.  

Fellow students, once just beginning adult lives, now have retired, or transition to the challenge of slower energy and newly-fashioned opportunities.  

About 1000 students walked the stage that day in Long Beach, June 1964. The reunion gathered about 150. Where were they all? Suddenly I wished to know, though it's a bit late for that.  But we're used to going on with missing pieces now, aren't we?

The memorial slide show, sad and final, showed me over 150 18-year old faces and names I hadn't concerned myself with for 50 years. We mark passings, and the room is quiet. In my mind, they were all merely older, not dead from cancer, Vietnam, heart attacks already.

My two best high school friends, Linda and Diane, were there, and I was glad to sit with them, a warm embrace and gentle smile shared between us. Linda's face still has its openness, and Diane's lovely smile lingers. 

We have children, grandchildren, have lost our parents, and we are now solid and certain, grounded by the fact of our motherhood and old times, knowing that it will always be the same for us. We tell each other the truth.

Kids who'd been at best casual friends chatted each other up.  I walked around checking out name tags, because I recognized almost no one.  The polish of 50 years has given us new names, white hair, dyed hair, no hair, weight, limps, canes. We are not who we were. Do they see that?  Do I remember them?  Do they remember me?  Yes and no, but that's okay.

It's like a field of poppies suddenly blooming across a swath of dry desert hillside.

We all had old boyfriends and girlfriends to find - a reunion ritual practice. "Mousie" and I "went steady" (I think) in 7th grade.  We didn't talk again, even in high school, until 1970 on a plane flight from Danang to Guam.  Joe Vernon was a Marine rotating out from his Vietnam combat year, and I was a flight attendant on that plane. There we were, astonished to recognize each other, our nation tangled in war and conflict. 

Years later, seeing him living; he'd made it home and I was very glad. It was a celebration of the particularity of our lives, a memory path that finds our place in the history we lived.  

Stan and I were friends and then began to go out on dates in our senior year.  As graduation activities began, we moved on. His intelligence, attractiveness,and the experience of being known remained with me, like an heirloom charm, kept carefully put away. 

A few years ago, a newspaper article I chanced to read while back East brought news of him.  He and his partner were instrumental in  securing gay rights legislation in Vermont, I read.  I had to think for a time over this news but wasn't surprised to know of his accomplishments.

I always knew that Stan would lead a life of conviction and testament.

He was there.  We laughed over the old songs the band played, and danced as I haven't danced in years, though Stan is practically ready for "Dancing with the Stars" while I might be voted most improved. I was touched that Stan remembered our friendship - he is vital at 68, charming, now poised and certain, too. 

The tentativeness I sensed in him sometimes has become a communication space to enter and talk; he is a church deacon and therapist, most fitting, I declare. 

The night drive home was congested, miles of Los Angeles' industrial yards finally leading past a skyline burning like far-away lanterns through dark heat.  An evening I'd almost passed on had surprised me. I thought my quota was used up. I found myself smiling and laughing a bit, and then Yo Yo Ma playing Fauré's Elegy began to float from the radio. Perfect.

.