Panama Canal - Mc Culloch
Ten thousand Frenchmen died of various tropical diseases in an effort to build a Panama canal. The French effort ended ten years prior to the start of the American work. The Americans solved two problems that stymied the French: mosquitoes (they carried the diseases) and where to put the dirt (it kept getting in the way). The mosquito problem was solved by spraying a mist of petroleum onto every water surface in the country from lakes to tiny puddles below downspouts. The dirt / spoils problem was solved by Chief engineer of the Canal project, former railroad engineer, John F. Stevens who spent the first year of his tenure in Panama, to the mystification of his supporters back home, building a railroad into the Panama hinterlands. It was rail cars that carried away the dirt and rock thus making the entire project feasible.
Drum Wisdom
“You either swing a band or you don’t” Buddy Rich
War and Art
The epochal (500 year) paradigm shift of 1912 which affected all art, science and politics was deeply affected by black emancipation penetrating the lapsed Enlightenment project in Europe i.e. the U.S. Civil War, six hundred thousand white men and thousands of black men die in order to acknowledge a non-white culture as citizens rather than property. This potent event revitalized art and science that had been exhausted by the urban nightmare of nineteenth and early twentieth century labor abuse. How to explain the fifty year delay? It can take Europeans at least one generation to absorb the astounding drama and forcefulness of the reifications of the American character. Declaration of Independence 1776 - French Revolution 1789. Picasso celebrates Lincoln in “Le Demoiselles d’Avignon”
Matisse - Once Again
Henri Matisse is underestimated by almost everyone and commonly viewed as Picasso’s inferior when discussing paradigm shifting innovations in painting during the early years of the twentieth century. This is a shame and it is not at all accurate. This misconstrue comes from Gertrude Stein who bore a grudge toward Matisse for remaining socially, emotionally aloof from her and her cozy circle. One can easily assert that Matisse fully grasped and experimented with the paradigm-destroying features of Cezanne’s late work: non- mimetic drawing, flattened, democratized picture plane, creating form with color, unpinned station point, simultaneity, warped linear perspective etc. Matisse’s bold experiments with simultaneity occurred from 1901 through 1920 before his languid odalisques but for the first seven years of the century Matisse was bravely taking most of the arrows for the modern movement while Picasso was dallying in his lachrymose pastiche of Puvis de Chavannes (blue and Rose periods) waiting for the smoke to clear, waiting for the Indians to leave the building. Once the rabid fervor over modern painting calmed down to a mild, gut-churning roar, Picasso along with his wife Braque make their appearance with their cogent abstraction of all things late Cezanne - Cubism and carry all of the glory of bold, earth-shattering innovation to the army of young painters, sculptors and architects in Paris in 1910. Cubism is a shorthand for seven years of Matisse’s experiments with Cezanne’s innovations with some tribal motifs added for dramatic effectIt was Picasso’s bande that included the greatest writers of the time, avante- garde pitchmen, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Cocteau (later) who launched the myth that Picasso was the heavy lifter for twentieth century artistic innovation. This along with Henri Matisse’s self-immolating remark about wanting to make “pictures for a tired working man to enjoy while stretched out on his sofa” - a remark made after ten years of fierce battle - who wouldn’t want to rest up a bit. Picasso had a p.r. machine to expand the perception of his particular contributions and Matisse did not. The situation is similar to the settlement of the New England Western Addition (present day Ohio) during the early nineteenth century. The men who fought Indians, cut trees, surveyed the land, platted new townships i.e. those who did the brutal heavy, dangerous work went bankrupt allowing the following generation of speculators to make a killing. Matisse is the true pioneer of modern painting and Picasso is clearly a latecomer although a potent and important one. Abe Lincoln was a latecomer to Indiana but an effective member of the community. Cubism was simply easier to grasp, more transferable than the early oeuvre of Matisse and the Fauves. The foot soldiers of the Parisian avante- garde could traipse through Picasso’s studio and see all they needed in order to grasp Cezanne. Picasso and Braque’s Cubism is Cezanne in a pill.
Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Bliss
A writer is judged by their ability to tolerate a bliss state in which transcendent thought and spiritual emotion are reified into text. Fitzgerald’s tolerance of this state of mind was far greater than Hemingway’s tolerance of his own bliss. Hemingway may have had grace under pressure but the pressure of grace and its sublimity was too great for his constitution whereas Fitzgerald was a conduit throughout most of Paradise, much of Gatsby and considerable portions of Tender is the Night. Fitz had lost it by Tycoon to that relentless Hemingway popular bandwagon and to alcohol. Protestants fear bliss and transcendence so Catholic Fitzgerald had to be dismissed as second fiddle to solid, stolid, down to earth Ernest.
Literary Lights (Heavyweights)
F.Scott Fitzgerald taught young Americans how to flirt and kiss and play romantic games. Hemingway showed them how to hunt and kill animals and people. Which one of these writers would Americans deify? The killer, of course. “November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence - the night” F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and the Damned
“The nighttime wrote a check that daylight couldn’t cash” Thomas McGuane - Panama
After reading three novels by Ernest Hemingway (Sun, Farewell, Belt Holes) and four by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Paradise, Gatsby, Tender, Tycoon) Fitzgerald is stronger, deeper, far more subtle with more color, lyricism ie magic. Hemingway is a plodder in comparison. Hemingway gets boring often, especially in Belt Holes. The Sun Also Rises is the finest of the three. This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald’s finest.
In The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald is mimicking Hemingway’s terse prose to ill effect. The feminine narrator just doesn’t work.
Hard Edge Defense
The hard edge in late twentieth century painting was the circling of the wagons of the marginally gifted against the born warriors - those with abundant natural talent whom they massacred for the most part though a few escaped: Oldenburg, Rivers, Dine, Johns, LeBrun, Liashkov, Praczukowski.
Episode and Illusion
All painting is episodic, illusory, narrative: Pollock, Rothko, deKooning, Newman and Kline were illustrating/ narrating Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg’s theories. These painters were as much illustrators as Norman Rockwell or Bernie Fuchs simply for a narrower audience.
Babies and Bathwater
Painters of the Renaissance paradigm (1412-1900) fought the same battles in all of their work. These battles were for: 1. The center of focus 2. For pictorial space 3. For story line - the narrative. Modern art, in its swerve, has eliminated the center, flattened pictorial space and removed the story. Has some part of the baby been thrown out with this bathwater? Contemporary critics, teachers and curators clobber this infant each time it crawls back onto the scene - cruel. Time to lighten up. Architecture entertained its turning of the soil of modernist dogma in 1966 with Robert Venturi’s explosive treatise, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The art world still revolves around Duchamp, now a moldy old worn out set of notions that were tired when Andy Warhol took them for a spin around the block to great effect.
Thomas Jefferson and LeCorbusier
Two great architects: Thomas Jefferson and LeCorbusier had extended affairs with nubile young black women: Sally Hemmings and Josephine Baker respectively. How might Jefferson’s affection / attraction to the vital earthiness, immediacy and power of the black soul have related to his unshakable belief in state’s rights, in a restricted federal government? LeCorbusier’s towering precursor and immediate influence Pablo Picasso had invented the art of the century: Cubism, by exploring the power of African tribal art. Picasso opened the door to the dark continent and Corbu walked in via Ms Baker. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” of global political innovation. Jefferson and Picasso: great inventors, synthesizers, enablers of lateral, right brain thought and innovation. One can sense Jefferson’s towering frustration as John Marshall, over thirty four years as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, hammered away in his Madeira-soaked wisdom, the spirit of Jefferson’s Declaration with his left-brain, Enlightenment logic that was more Sherlock Holmes than Picasso. Marshall has made us a nation of corporate slaves (see: Dartmouth College v Woodward, 1819) who, as we serve the protestant ethic of salvation through hard work, are gutted by our foreign owned financial institutions and sold down the river to China via Wal-Mart and Home Depot.
Not Enough There There
It can be said of much art that there is just not enough right with it. Perhaps it is finished but almost always stunted in conception and execution. A painting has the potential to be explosively powerful in its expressive range and in its sublimity entirely independent of the subject matter. See “Rain, Steam and Speed” by Turner or “Girl with a Shuttlecock” by Chardin. The subject matter in these two paintings is incidental to the highly resolved power emanating from the color harmony and composition both tuned to a fever pitch. Whereas Leon Golub or Robert Longo can paint men being tortured or falling through the sky, this work still elicits a muted esthetic/emotional response. These paintings lack resolution. There is not quite enough there there.
Gertrude Stein re-writes History
Gertrude Stein is guilty of casting damaging aspersions upon two immensely worthy subjects, neither deserving her snarky opprobrium. “Oakland, California - there is no there there” Oakland is one of the most beautiful cities in the world and if not for ever-so-precious San Francisco, it would be the jewel of the Bay and of the whole west coast. Stein’s denigration of Matisse comparing him unfavorably to her little lap dog Picasso and her intentional mis-reading and mis-telling Matisse’s remark that he simply "wished to paint pictures that might add a little comfort to a bourgeois life". Picasso rode into his exalted place in the art world on the coattails of firebrand Matisse who had been the stalking horse of modern painting while Picasso was painting murals in smoky cafes in Barcelona. Matisse constructed an intellectual environment in the Paris art world that enabled Picasso and his bande to pursue their bold explorations. If not for the new territory opened by Matisse Picasso would have remained a stylistic magpie.
Avante-Garde Institutionalized
It is strange to attempt to institutionalize the avante- garde in university studio art programs knowing that a feature of any avante garde is the loss of the great majority of its members to random exploration that, however valiant, intelligent and well-meaning, leads to penury, mental illness and suicide (see La Boheme). An institutionalized avante garde is a gross contradiction of terms. Our university art programs create yet another cluster of anemic, static and claustrophobic academic artworks as lifeless as those that launched the Impressionist/ Fauvist /Cubist revolution against the nineteenth century French academy. All cultures require an avante- garde for the new ideas that will save it from itself. It is counter-productive of the vital societal raison d' etre of the avante- garde to homogenize its purpose, program and agenda in a university art department. Academic art is all heading in the same direction. The jargon has become uniform. Language directs the exploration. The current shared dogma celebrates non-narrative, non object oriented, conceptual, gender inspired work that is pale, wan and always doctrinaire. Duchamp wrote out the marching orders in 1920 and so it is. This art is no fun to look at. It is no fun to think about. It all smacks of faux enlightened laziness of mind and muscle. It is as empty as the soupiest, graviest nineteenth century Beaux arts historical narrative extravaganza. The art of today is produced hermetically at a computer or in a studio or factory as separated from nature as the precious polishers of the past.
Cezanne Calculus
The generation of young artists in Paris from 1900 to World War One looked at Cezanne’s late painting as if it were nature itself, thus the work of the Fauves, Cubists, Futurists, Purists et al was already a meta-art, an art about art rather than art about nature or even historical ideas or mythological motifs. From Matisse onward through the twentieth century painting is about other painting. In mathematical terms, Cezanne’s late work is the first derivative of nature and Cubism is the second derivative of nature.
Artist v. Painter
The terms artist and painter are not synonymous. The word artist implies innovation, exploration and a conscious effort to extend the boundary of art. Paul Cezanne was the last painter who was also an artist who used nature as a direct source of inspiration. From the Fauvists: Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, who directly followed late Cezanne during the first decade of the twentieth century to the present, all painting as art ie painting in the lead in defining what art is in its time, has looked only at other painting or into the psyche for inspiration not out into the landscape. Very little painting of the past seventy five years can even be considered art i.e. extending the range of the avante garde. Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Richard Prince perhaps - no one else. Now that painting has reached a dead end (see celebrations of the paintings of Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, John Currin, Robert Mangold, Frank Stella and countless others, all others) perhaps it is time to direct observation and interpretation of nature for a painting that aspires to the status of art. It is time to return to the source. The oeuvre has been exhausted.
Stalin Cools Commies
Stalin didn’t give a damn about communism. Some considered him a double-agent for the Czar. He kept silent about his true allegiance and controlled the communist party as a grand infiltrator. He was alarmed when party hardliners began to complain about his wavering dedication to communist principles. Stalin killed the party leadership during his purge of 1938. When Senator Joseph McCarthy began harassing communists in the U.S. in the early nineteen fifties, Stalin’s communists had been dead for fifteen years.
Big Blender - Dick Cheney
If you took every adult in the United States and put them in a big blender and turned it to puree, the substance you would draw off would be pure Dick Cheney ( the foam would be Sarah Palin) Dick Cheney rose to prominence as the former most influential individual in the country for at least eight years. He is the embodiment of all Americans including the populous silent majority - the warm, dark matter, along with all of the pretty people we see on television, in the movies and in glossy magazines. If you are uncomfortable with this you might stop using petroleum products ie stop being an American. You say Cheney is mean spirited? The most friendly of us are a single degree of separation from violence, meanness and greed. Conservatives are not as shy about this as liberals.
Lake Letterman Indiana
It is time for a very large scale WPA style civil engineering project to get the heartland and the rest of us back on our feet. Let’s turn Indiana into our sixth great lake and connect this lake to the rapidly diminishing Oglala aquifer that lies beneath the Great Plains states. What to do with the farmers and small town residents? Swap them their soon to be submerged land for lakefront property. There will be thousands of new miles of this valuable real estate. The actual edge of Lake Letterman will be located ten miles from adjacent borders. Indianapolis will become an island of sorts connected by spokes that form the five major highways into surrounding states. Lafayette / Purdue may lobby for island status but it is not likely to be granted. This project will employ all willing workers on the North American continent for ten years: blue collar, white collar, no collar. Lake Letterman will become a thriving tourist destination for vacationers and shoppers from around the world with direct flights from Asia and the Middle East. Our new great lake will replace rust-belt industry with global scale recreation opportunity. “Make no little plans” - Daniel Burnham
Twenty Year Plan - most recent
Twenty Year Plan (the past twenty years)A master plan to screw Americans eleven ways from Sunday: 1. The Bum’s Rush - Financial leaders convincing politicians to hurry hurry hurry the trillion dollar bailout. No time! No time! See corollary bum’s rush into terror wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 2. Fatten Us Up - Produce high fructose, high fat, high salt processed food and sell it ubiquitously and cheap. 3. Drug Us into a Stupor: Using bovine pharmaceuticals as a drug delivery system to humans making us sleepy and cranky. 4. Invite too many to the real estate party. Invite all working Americans who can fog a mirror to own a home. Re-structure government regulation and banking, finance and mortgage industries to facilitate this massive ruse. Fleece a generation of lower-middle class Americans of every penny they can beg, borrow, steal for three or four years then take their homes away and sell them to another population of dreamers. Repeat as required until an entire class of American citizens has been devastated, their American dream shattered. Note that these offending institutions are publicly owned and controlled by a large percentage of foreign capital i.e. people who don’t give a rat’s ass about the American people. 5. Allow huge agribusiness enterprises (also publicly owned - see above) to buy up small farms all across America sending small farmers into the now marginal industrial sector. 6. Allow gargantuan box retail enterprises to collude with the Chinese to drive all locally-owned hardware stores, household goods stores out of business. 7. Allow / encourage white collar job drain to India 8. Allow banks to charge phenomenal interest and banking fees. 9. Allow health care conglomerates to assign themselves a middleman role in health care delivery draining billions of dollars away from patients and doctors 10. Privatization of water - the sale of local utilities to foreign financial entities. 11. Create an all-volunteer military that victimizes a lower class - the same class that is getting reamed by banks. Of the people, by the people for the people? Run that by me again.
Americans are no longer comfortable with its royal court, the New York financial industry, that dominates our elected representatives.