Postwar Supermen and Cultural Kryptonite

The people I grew up with are the last of the baby boomers. Most of my oldest friends are sons of immigrants. That makes us prime examples of the American Dream. The quest for freedom, economic and political, was our Pablum. Our object lessons consisted of the mythologies of the old countries. Our characters were forged through the intensity of the cold war while being nourished off the post war glut of commercial goods. Our childhood was good, our parents succeeded through us. We are invincible.

Half a century later, we still grasp those early ideals as a lifeline of reassurance. The difference is the change in today’s sociopolitical landscape. Our parents’ feared nationalistic golems are long dead, the soviet menace has been defanged and our economy is reeling like a punch drunk boxer facing Tyson. Still, as a generation, we cannot be dominated. We saw the end of polio, whooping cough and tuberculosis. Medicine fixed all ills, chemistry made us indifferent to the rest. We drove the best vehicles, travelled with impunity to the farthest reaches of our imaginations, saw new worlds and experienced the unknown.

Today begins the end of our era. Fatalistic as this may sound, we are a shrinking demographic. Our parents are setting before us beyond the horizon while friends are contracting illnesses that should not have the temerity to even come nearby. Our invincibility is starting to show fractures along the edges. Injuries linger and aches morph into symptoms as the heart looks for new avenues to explore. My friends are succumbing to outrageous slings and arrows on all sides impelling me to reassess my physicality in an effort to stave of the inevitable. Our band of immigrant sons (and daughters) is condensing into a refined essence. A purified idealism that we attempt to pass on to our progeny and this is an expression of our faith.

Our common religion is based on tenets arrived at through our family experiences. We hold to these beliefs as a security blanket that we in turn pass on to our next generation. The faith derived from our experiences give us hope. We may show our mortality now, but we do not acknowledge that part of our humanity. Our conviction in the science behind us helps us to face the unexpected. Our devotion to those who made the great leap to bring us here causes us to continue the immigratory process. We endure because know it is possible to do so. We also impart this to our children because we know commitment to our experiences provides an indomitable confidence that can protect all who believe in it. I am a believer. I drink this Kool Aid of 50’s propaganda because I have experienced its successes. I believe it enough to endeavor to bring up a second generation in the face of a diminished national luster. I do it because my parents did more than this long ago. I do it because my friends do the same. We have faith in ourselves.

Losing a parent is a difficult event to accept. Losing a second family member adds insult to injury and adds more salt to the wound. My cousin was the only relative outside my parents to successfully immigrate here. He was an adult with one marriage and two children behind him when he arrived. After trying to gain an exit visa for over twenty years, he was able to escape the economic doldrums of his mother country. A new setting with unscripted possibilities faced my cousin. At the end, he found a new love, added to his family and created a bridge between different cultures for all his local relatives.

What does this mean for me? It comes down to trying to understand an emotionally draining malaise that sucks any will to create faster than a double black hole. A personal inertia has taken hold and there is no manual or textbook to help guide me. There is also a pain that can split me in half and continue down past my toes as it tries to reopen the San Andreas Fault Line. Every bad moment in my sad history file comes to the forefront in sharpest focus. What ifs and if onlys fill my trains of thought.

My cousin was only a concept when I was growing up. My parents, brother and I were the only family outside the home country. My cultural background did not match my friends and classmates as a child. An ethnic island misunderstood and ignored. Stories kept the image of my distant family alive in my mind. A trip to the old country when I was two was just another page in our family mythology. It was just us and then everybody else. After high school came the trip that set me on my self awareness phase of life. I met the family and they became real and visceral. They accepted and reassured me. I identified with them though I do not know the extent of their reciprocation. I met my cousin once more and grew to know him on that trip. I realized the depth and sophistication of my culture through him. I experienced the support that only an extended family can provide through him. He showed me a side of the home country not found in travel guides and expressed an impressively broad store of knowledge. I viewed him as an intellectual equal, one of the few I would admit since I was such a smug self satisfied smartass at that time. I learned so much in the three months I spent with him that I was challenged to add anything significant to his scholarly gems for years.

My cousin finally arrives here and begins to reinvent himself and accomplish new things. I spent much time with him at first, but my life quickly took precedence as I struggled with school and stumbled into a career. A family came next for me and now my concentration was even more narrowly focused. All this effort came at a cost to our relationship. The next thing I now, my cousin has a career, then a new wife and son bringing with it another cultural addition to our immigrant family. My cousin’s role had shifted from relative to friend and teacher, then to extended family member and cultural bridge. My personal career and family arcs took me out of the inner circle of our nuclear family and sadly removed me, all too often, with regular interaction with him.

Now he has passed and with him ends my mother’s direct lineage in North America. I am racked with remorse over my lack of familial interaction and obligations. Regret dominates my thoughts. This compounds the pangs caused by the loss of my mother. Idleness overwhelms any inclination to actually accomplish anything. My only answer to this feeling tonight was to drive. Ever my favorite means of avoiding responsibilities, I could drive for hours and days on end. Since learning to drive at the age of eleven, this has remained the one consistent thing I can do. I would drive in high school, leaving campus during the period before lunch and returning at the end of the school day. With classmates or alone, it did not matter. With gasoline at fifty cents a gallon and a never ending supply thanks to my father, I learned all the major roads in and out of Los Angeles County. So, tonight after the reception for my cousin’s memorial I drove. Without anyone to share this evening of mourning I took to the streets to try and remember past events and sites. My memory failed me in the most perfect manner. Houses no longer recognizable, streets long changed and a greater number of fellow drivers stymied any attempt to wax nostalgic. Still, I think best when driving alone. I came to realize the effects of many forces and stresses working upon my emotions. I realized my need for contact, an attraction to beauty and the need for mental stimulation that has occupied my attention for the last month. These interests echo the conversations with my cousin as he was also a cryptic soul. The similarities of natures are obvious, the success in our abilities to achieve personal satisfaction, not so much.

Loss leads to reflection. This reflection can include different responses but these too, are dependent upon one’s emotional state. Work through it, I tell myself. But I am torn between seeking personal dreams or continuing on the path I have forged many years ago. I have not been able to resolve any of my dilemmas, neither does there appear to be any available resource that can lay out the best possible scenarios. I miss my mother. I miss my cousin. I have no answers for the empty set stuck within my parenthetical heart. All I can do is warm up my ice with another hit of Jack. Perhaps the new week will present options.

A Long Walk Overdue

I finally hit the trail behind my house this afternoon. It’s something I should do regularly because it’s good exercise, convenient and relatively isolated. Life tends to crowd personal time into a corner. I’m guilty of allowing this to happen, subsequently there is a price to pay for this practiced inactivity. I started off during the last waves of the afternoon heat planning to climb up for an hour before turning back. I wore my woven slouch hat and brought the camera along knowing that would cause me to stop periodically and hopefully keep from overheating. I realized after fifteen minutes that I wasn’t gasping for breath, sucking in flies as my heart raced. I was actually feeling pretty good and averaged a fair pace. These realizations lead to another concerning my eating habits and physical activity over the last two weeks. This is where the trip shifted from an early evening health walk to a voyage of contemplation.

I was completely alone on the trail, probably because of the heat, giving me a perfect opportunity to think about my state of mind without interruption. The last two weeks were epiphanic with the assistance of a good friend helping me to shake out emotional cobwebs and rid myself of a pervasive lethargy. This period began with a cleansing that was both actual and mental. Clearing out the accumulation of the last nine months lifted an unimaginable burden and assisted me to transition emotional residue.

This realization then connected with the fact that I have, for some unknown reason, started to reread Lacan and his structuralist concepts. Piecemeal as my reading is, it struck a harmonious chord in how I experience a good artist friend’s work and the way the incomplete image carries just enough detail to suggest but not too much that it closes the experience in a finite sense. Lacan’s notions of “the lack” and its relation to desire pierced me, leaving a visceral pang sending me back to the books to look for more definition.

Hopes and wishes had occupied me for the last nine months, or so I believed. Reviewing my philosophy notes reminded me of the concept of desire. Desire explains the feeling that’s been filling me since May. A desire to accomplish and complete. To attempt and compete. This feeling comes from a lack. This is not an appetite for satisfaction but it does involve affections. I begin to wonder if these unspoken desires can become a driving force, pushing me to realization.

This trail of thought also referenced the “other” as a self-not self. Looking inward but not seeing myself. I’ve rarely been able to apply this type of thought to myself. With that thought I was hit by an understanding of the French philosophers idea of “self as other”. By not applying theory to any personal experiences I have been looking outside of my “self”. If only I could have pondered this way when I was in school…

The trip back down the mountain was all too quick. I was repeating the concepts I had thought of knowing I would forget most of them by the time I got home. I did forget most of it, but the germ of understanding was still there. The past two weeks have been an opportunity to see things new and reorganize. These provide comforts badly needed that mend the soul. It was an opportunity to recharge the batteries. Next week promises to bring the return of stability on a new footing.

A trip to the California Plaza yielded a visceral explosion of the senses that I had not experienced for far too long. A dear friend’s suggestion prompted me to leave my studio cocoon and make the drive to the our city center. Seun Kuti (son of Fela Kuti) leading his father’s band, Egypt 80, courtesy of KCRW and a couple of other sponsors. I have been to performances at this venue before, but these were always staid presentations. The throng of fans raised a significant murmur as they awaited the performance. The music delivered on its promise and the audience responded exuberantly.

A concert can be fun on its own, but tonight’s event was made exquisitely perfect because of the friend who invited me and the others found at the venue. The night was filled with heady discussion of art, social behaviors, creativity, processes and aspirations. Personal accounts added poignancy and strengthened long held bonds. All this transpired with a feverish soundtrack backing the scene. Connections are reinforced by revealing desires and this helps to expunge negative or destructive motives. Creative batteries were charged in my case, especially with the one on one interface of talented artists. A personal need to constantly make new and challenging art is a desire to seek out a catharsis.

The evening continued after the concert at the posh loft of a past student of mine in an historic downtown building. This person received her degree from Occidental College with honors in art but did her printing at Pasadena City College. Her graduate portfolio was exquisitely done and truly gave me a boost. The evening ended with the closest of friends and intimate discussions of the essence of our existence and creative possibilities.

I sadly had to go home eventually, although without an ounce of sleep in me. Once home, it was straight to the darkened studio to shuffle papers and prepare materials. I am now sitting in a cloud of fixative trying to finish a poor write up of a uniquely memorable evening. The sun is barely up and I fear today will pale against last nights experiences.

Piruca en el Norte

In 1958, Ignacia Mercedes Zarate flew from Buenos Aires to begin a new stage of her life. The trip took over one and a half days, hop scotching innumerable cities and towns northward to the United States. Arriving in New York, where many an American family can trace their roots, her new voyage would take her westward across a different continent.

Mercedes has been a wife, a mother, a homemaker, a wage earner, and a grandmother after thousands of miles and fifty three years had passed. Along the way there have been happy times and sad, friendships made and lost, but always every challenge was faced, every opportunity exploited. She was the matriarch of our family and even as she passes from our world, this is only another stage in her voyage. Through our sadness we feel gratitude to have shared our lives with her. The sadness will pass eventually, the love she inspired and that we continue to experience will endure. Her strength of character fills us, even now. We will love and keep her in our hearts forever.

Complete Criticallity

Thanks to a heads up from an artist friend (JT), I just finished watching Robert Hughes’ 2009 documentary for the BBC, The Mona Lisa Curse. I enjoyed it on many levels, first of which was to find Mr. Hughes still in the land of the living and very much the sardonic curmudgeon. This extended video rant can be found on Youtube.com in twelve pieces, making it about an hour and a half long. The transplanted Australian critic displays his hot knife through butter dissections of contemporary art but in this work he turns it on the business of art, particularly in the way commodification has overtaken the main objective of fine art mirroring Wall Street’s carnivorous merger and acquisition mantra from the 80s up through today.

Hughes marks the Mona Lisa’s trip to the Metropolitan Museum in 1963 as the point when art shifted from a cathartic exchange of philosophy device to a mere commercial product with great investment potential. Leave it to crass post-colonialists to corrupt the purity of individual expression. The folk who stood in line to glimpse Leonardo’s spectacle did so on their own terms, most armed only with the knowledge that this was an important painting without any extra information. It was an experience similar to the nascent television offerings of the day. Americans are notorious for ignoring precedents as well as skipping historical lessons. What more was needed to be known considering Nat Cole sang about the painting ten years earlier. The U.S. in 1963 was still flexing its post war muscles while basking in the glow of a healthy atomic economy. Anything needed could be manufactured or simply purchased and shipped over. The mentality of the time allowed for quick fulfillments to any lack. At the time, the country was even producing its own modern art, eclipsing the need for old, musty European versions.

The Critic bemoans the rise of monetary value over emotional content in art and commiserates with the artist Jim Rosenquist over today’s sad state of affairs. The importance of Sotheby’s 1973 auction of the Scull collection is pointed out and images from a documentary of the event are screened which shows Robert Rauschenberg going up to Robert Scull after the event and administering a stern admonishment. Scull responds by stating that the fortuitous hammer prices will benefit the artists, as well. Warhol’s factory production and diminishing standards of quality are noted, as is the obsessive collecting of Andy by a Saudi mega-billionaire and his son. Damien Hirst is Hughes’ ultimate whipping boy for the exorbitant price tags and insipid lack of traditional artistry.

I found The Mona Lisa Curse to be entertaining for its quick and informative pacing but found that acid analysis on Hughes’ part to be most reassuring. At the close of the documentary, I was filled with the urge to tell Mr. Hughes, “Well, what did you expect?” The critic shares some of the blame for today’s speculation in the art market. His book and film, both with the same name, The Shock of the New (1981), displayed the progression of modern art from the mid-1800s through the 1980s. The film series based on the book is more telling as it begins at a pedestrian pace, gaining momentum as it covers all the ‘isms of modernism until it becomes a near stroboscopic blur of contemporaryness. The directorial structure of the documentary presages the shift in the control of cultural power from salons to artists to patrons to museums to collectors to multinational financial corporations.

Hughes truly shows his years when he dismisses Damien Hirst and his formaldehyde-swigging ilk based upon the lack of artisanal skill and inability to insert significant pedagogical content. Hirst, Koons, Prince and their brethren function in an ether created by a post-postmodern economy. An economy not simply based on production and consumption, or even supply and demand. Production of art is secondary to producing an aura around art. Reality TV is a phantasmal echo of the conniving and manipulation of Art. The art of this latest generation lies not within the brush, or even in the hand that wields it. It resides in the mindset that can create a commotion about an object, roil the waters of adorers and imbue it with a scent of theatrics. Oh, and within this cloud of popular lust there is a kernel of an object, complete with title and date, dripping in sarcasm, vacuum sealed within a prophylactic shield of systemic endorsement.

Today’s museums lament their current inability to compete with investment-minded collectors, but their historical existence is less than that of Modernism. The Patron has been the unseen hand that has guided, and continues to guide, the creation, collection and display of art. The Artist has been the indentured object maker far longer than the autonomous creative force of most of the 20^th century. The social services remain the same; it’s the pimp that changes over the ages. Rauschenberg, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein may have missed out on the money train in the beginning, but ultimately Robert Scull was right, crass as he may have been in saying so, the artists did benefit. The pop artists did it by controlling production. They limited their exposure through galleries and they began to keep part of their own art. This type of homemade retirement plan presented the following generations of artists a business plan on which to build. Self promotion as spectacle, popular culture reified as invested content combined with modern manufacturing created an opportunity for the modern day P.T. Barnum.

After all is aid and done, The Mona Lisa Curse lays out a depressing representation of art and the business of art in today’s landscape. But this inflated art bubble will burst and this economic event will occur for several congruent reasons. Art purchased for reasons devoid of aesthetics is indistinguishable from any other portfolio asset. The piece is tethered to the ebb and flow of monetary economies. Content is inconsequential. If the market that includes art investment fails, all the inclusory contents are absorbed by creditors. If the creditors end up with confiscated art, how will they be rated in order to classify them for liquidation? Judgments may have to be made on such crazy notions as quality of construction, artist skill or even socially significant content.

ELAPSED MEMORIES

This week, I went back to the place that ultimately corrupted my career path, Cal State University of Long Beach. I went there intending to learn how to paint expressively, as that was the end-all of artistic endeavor at the time. As a new student, I could not get into the painting studio classes so, in light of having taken one intro printmaking class at community college, I planned to bide my time with a few more similar courses until I was eligible to unleash my sardonic brush onto the painting world.

The printmaking department proved to be more inspiring, while proving to be constantly challenging, than the painting faction. It certainly did have an us against them atmosphere with the painters in a desperate battle to keep the Neo-Abstract Expressionism flag from falling under the dust of the unseen upstart Post-Modernists looming just beyond the horizon. The printers suffered from no such conservative constraints, we had free reign to try new things as soon as the basic processes were mastered.

Dick Swift was the first instructor I had. He was a pioneer in contemporary printmaking, primarily etching, and he wasn't about to let you ignore that point. His continental methods contrasted greatly with Cynthia Osborne. She was the one that drove me to try new things, and I would often try something ridiculously stupid, if only to prove that it was possible although usually useless in the end.

These photos mark the first time I've been back in about ten years. Since then, the department moved to a building next to the old studio, taking up the entire bottom floor.

This is a long shot of the litho room, taken from the silkscreen end (silkscreen is nearly always shunted off to one side).

The screen table in the foreground arrived while I was there and I helped to assemble it, the one-arm assembly and counterweights are currently rusting outside in the courtyard.

These are the two large litho presses. The tympans hang on a neat system on the wall between them. I used the Griffin press mostly, the Takach (Garfield) arrived the last year I was there but I used it enough to learn to buy one of my own later on.

This is a one hundred year old Fuchs and Lang cast iron press. This baby had a notorious bed wobble as it traversed under pressure. It would get progressively bad as it neared the end of its travel. The shop was open 24 hours back then (it still is today) and one night, with a critique the next day, the studio was packed with students all through the night. One girl was using this press trying to squeeze out some images for the crit and was working as fast as she could in the wee hours. The longest vertical bar in the picture above is pulled down to set the pressure on the litho stone. Well, with all the rushing and considering the nasty wobble the press bed had, the pressure bar (also known as the Devil's Tail in olden print times) snapped up and cracked this girl on her temple. Never had a full studio been so quiet. I regret that I can't remember names, but the girl was laid out cold and we thought she bought the farm at first. After a trip to the hospital, she turned out to be OK, plus she got a pass on that crit.

The old graining sink made the transition but I don't recognize the solvent cabinet.

These are the same instructions for graining stones from 27 years ago!

These plates are from the second lesson in Dick Swift's etching class. Twenty four small zinc plates (2" x 3"), each with a different technique. Two, perfectly matched prints, pulled from each plate were turned in inside a little manila folder. Nearly half the class would drop the course when this assignment was presented.

He was very serious about etching.

This was the best etching press in the studio. We also had a Laguna and a Brand press, but this little English beauty was the best suited for the sizes we worked on. Once you got the big wheel going, the inertia would carry the bed through its length, as if it was motorized. A little contact on the outer edge of the wheel and it would slow it down pretty as you please. On night, Rock (that was his studio nickname, he was a merchant marine) bet us that he could stand inside the wheel and make a complete revolution. The group that was there urged him to not try it, but... He spun until his head was pointing down at 4:00 o'clock when he did a headfirst Superman dive onto the concrete. I have been very fortunate to never hear such a sickening thud ever again. Rock rose from the floor, grabbing his head, while we were about to try to find some help (no cellphones back then) he kept insisting that he was OK and damned if he wasn't. We never let him live that down and I don't believe anyone from the school ever suspected anything.

This is an old Leach press (made in LA) from the 50's. The roller assembly and furniture was gone when I was there. I used it only once and that was enough. The poor thing is little better than a boat anchor.

These rollers were there when I was. I sure hope they have some real ones stored somewhere.

This is the current etching hotplate. We had a huge restaurant hotplate that we would clean up and use to have potluck cookouts. these were done late at night or early for breakfast or we would have starving art students pouring in. I hear they still carry on the communal cookout tradition, but with barbecues in the courtyard.

Speaking of courtyard, this shot shows the entrance to the Litho/Silkscreen studio. But what could that be under the little table?

Why, it's me! They currently number the stones in the studio (how common!) but way back when, Cynthia would name them all. I was lucky enough to earn a stone because...

I grained and backed piles of them when I was there! The printmaking department received a couple gifts of stones, some from Gemini GEL. We hauled them to the school in a convoy. One grad student used his little Toyota Hilux truck and the weight of the stones forced a monkey grip plug (look it up!) to pop out of a tire. The truck was so heavy, we had to unload it on the highway so it could be jacked up to change it. There were stacks of stones piled in the old courtyard. After prepping some of them, it was possible for anyone taking litho at that time to have a stone large enough to print a full sheet (22 x 30 or 30 x 40) that semester.

I was happy to see the new facilities but I could not help but to seek out the old bits and pieces surviving from my days there. The few students that were there while I was poking around are as avid and dedicated as the bunch I remember. The community of printmaking trumps the lone gunslinger of painting, in my opinion. Discoveries are shared, events are group projects and tradition is wedded to innovation under printmaking.

The experience of learning how to make art through printmaking at Long Beach has set the tone for my career. The connections I made then have certainly helped and I can't imagine having to limit myself to a single medium as a form of expression.