Well Heeled

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“We are each born into paradox: the paradox of the infinite-imagining mind and the finite, cause-and-effect body. So much of our suffering arises from the fact that we can imagine ourselves as gods-immortal, omniscient, impervious to harm-but we cannot be them.”

—Dana Levin, The Kenyon Review

 I was walking home this week along one of my usual routes and happened to glance up when a woman in her thirties and her friend were walking up ahead. There was nothing particularly unique about either woman, a brunette and a blond, the blond pushing a baby stroller. Normally I would dismiss even the most compelling woman pushing a child for the obvious reasons but on this day I happened to notice she was wearing four inch platform shoes. The irony was bewildering to me. I felt celebratory for her command of her sexuality and power post pregnancy but also simultaneously felt she was teasing at loosening her marital bonds. Obviously, I was drawn to the heels and their sexual undertones but it was how they were worn that really got me thinking. I kept walking wondering what it is about heels in particular that illicit such strong reactions in men and why women across a broad spectrum choose to wear them, despite their often painful commitment. Why is it they are such a loaded form of expression? Can high heel ever just be shoes?

Since 2000 I have noticed a marked increase in the height of women’s heels. Even more intriguing is the continued hyper sexualization of younger and younger women with high heels playing a powerful role in that. The photo above was shot this morning through the window of a store called Forever 21. Aside from the idiocy of the store’s name, it is obvious the store is making a clear connection between youthful vigor and high heels. Of course on a very superficial level, heels provide height to women who by pure biology are predominantly shorter than men. Even the term high heels is now a reference to a range of shoes from stacked platforms to stilettos. Karen Kay of The Guardian UK says; "A pair of heels allows me to view the world from a different vantage point. I can look people in the eye, so those who previously looked down their nose at me must view me on their level – a psychological benefit that comes into play socially and in the workplace."

I’m not interested in using this venue for a discussion on the legacy of feminism, the male gaze or a dialogue on ‘taste’. There has been much written on those topics. If you want to read about them a simple Google search will provide a plethora of background. No, my interest is very specifically on the nature of power. The history of high heels goes back to at least the Egyptians 3,000 years ago. The high priests, kings and queens wore ceremonial leather stacks that were arguably the first high heels. In ancient Greece heels were used in plays to provide a clear distinction between character’s social status. In the 18th century, Louis XIV established an edict that no person in France could wear heels taller than his own. As a show of  belligerence, Marie Antoinette wore 2 inch heels to guillotine in 1783. Power and the high heel are fused at the hip. Clearly, it would be disingenuous of me to suggest it is merely status, power or physical height extension that is at play for women wearing high heels. Sex and titilation are the obvious elephant in the room and where there is power there is sex.

In speaking with a female friend of mine the other evening I mentioned my love of heels on women. It is often said women pay close attention to shoes on men, but the first thing I generally notice about a woman is her shoes. An artful and highly stylized pair of heels will get my attention every time. I’m not talking about what men derogatorily refer to as “stripper shoes,” but noticing the difference between a pair of Christian Louboutin’s or Manolo Blahnik’s. In contrast a pair of Keds or ballet flats causes an immediate dismissal on my part. For the record, I'm single. The anthropologist E. O. Wilson has said,

Based on comparative animal ecology and behavior one would predict that males should be advertising through the display of their assets (physical or otherwise). And while males do advertise in Western society, females also engage in equally conspicuous advertising and sexual signaling. Not only do we have male-male competition and female choice, but we also have female-female competition and make choice acting simultaneously...

Increased heel height creates an optical illusion of ‘shortening’ the foot, slenderizes the ankle, contributes to the appearance of long legs, adds a sensuous look to the strike, and increases height to generate the sensation of power and status.[¹]

It’s unquestionably unfair and a clear objectification of an otherwise unique and possibly fascinating human being, but there it is. For me this is no different than noticing the difference between a man who knows how to accurately tie a full windsor knot or a cheap Men’s Warehouse suit and a hand tailored one. As Flaubert said, "Le bon Dieu est dans le detail" (the good God is in the detail).

We are keen in America to wave the flag and point out how different we are than our Muslim counterparts but the reality is we are much closer than we care to admit. One of us is trapped by a religion of consumerism and it’s formal constraints and the other by the Islamic tradition of the 600’s. Women of means who wear burkhas in Saudi Arabia or the U.A.E. will wear Christian Dior or Yves Saint Laurent underneath. Despite the constraint of their dogma, the individualism is there and the need to assert individual power remains. In America women live by the law of The Gap, LIMITED, H&M or Charlotte Russe. These popular clothing stores produce the same mundane fashions year after year. To see women on the streets or in offices is to see compliance to a consumer sameness. But shoes — shoes can be the one standout in an otherwise bland world. It is a way to compete as E. O.Wilson stated. Even a knock-off pair of Louboutins, with their Catholic-red underbellies is enough to establish a subtlety of power even if the rest of the ensemble is jeans and a tee shirt. This, I argue is the underlying push toward ever higher heels in the U.S., our growing sense of repression in an ever more ironic world that asks women to simultaneously exhibit hyper-sexualized behavior while being good domestic, child-rearing, church-going wives and mothers. Stilettos may be an expression of a collective post 9/11 PTSD.

On a deeper level of semiotics, shoes are a fetish. As Marcel Danesi states in his book Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things, “The fetish is a sign that evokes devotion to itself. In some cultures, this devotion is a result of a belief that an object has magical or metaphysical attributes.” Despite heels being painful, causing deformities or several other generally negative health conditions, millions of women in western culture wear them every day. The economic restrictions of the recession coupled with the complexities of daily modern life, likely elevates our need for some kind of magic. As Elizabeth Semmalhack has indicated, heel height in the US and economic depression are a corollary[2]. High heels are a socially acceptable form of sexual expression, unlike the limited possibilities of tattoos or plunging necklines. Think Sarah Palin in the last presidential election. Indeed women can be the biggest promoters of their own high heel wearing;

Zoe Mayson, a business psychologist, suggests that I am not alone in valuing the heel as a professional asset. "There are a lot of people who think women do themselves a disservice by wearing heels, but I'm not in that camp. They are a psychological asset, and we can use them to our advantage. I work a lot with men in suits around a boardroom table, and I would never lead a session in flats. Heels give me gravitas that I would not have in lower shoes.

"From an evolutionary point of view, natural selection favours traits that increase our individual reproductive success. Heels get you noticed and give you physical stature, which in turn, gives you power, without compromising your femininity. So often, women have to take on male attributes to be successful in the workplace, and this is a great way of digging our heels in and saying no."[3]

I have no interest in creating more pain or difficulty for women. I can’t imagine the daily complications and difficulties encountered by women from the glass ceiling of workplaces and the inequality of pay to the simple biological issue of menstruation. It is indeed true most men wouldn’t last a week in a woman’s shoes (sorry for the pun.) In fact there’s a hilarious movie by the late Blake Edwards called Switch where Ellen Barkin plays a man trapped in a woman’s body that comedically highlights this very idea. I do think that owning one’s own drives, desires and compulsions leads us all to a healthier outcome. I am looking forward to the day when this madness of derisive punditry that pits one against the other will end. Repression has persisted a lot of bad things in this country beginning with its birth and the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans by English Puritans. Perhaps heels will come down in height and I’ll become less emphatic about their distinguishing qualities on women when we grow more open as a society. In the meantime I continue my search for the woman with the perfect pair of Christian Lacroix’s.

The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging

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“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

It has been a while since I last posted to this blog, what I have referred to as contemporary art in context. The goal of the blog in the past has been to frame contemporary art, primarily post-WW II work in relation to popular culture, American lifestyle and the reality of our day to day lives. My approach has always been to write in short essay form on a blog. It's an unconventional approach as by nature, blogs have always been intended to be short form, nearly stream of consciousness writings for our so-called busy lives. Therefore, writing short essays on a blog is a contrarian approach in and of itself.

The Son of ManThe other evening I was having dinner with a new friend who is a poet and journalist here in Portland. I was commenting about my blog and the curious nature of what I've been attempting to do and she very concisely and unabashedly said that blogging was the wrong place for me to be writing the way I do. This is not the first time I've heard this but for some reason it seemed to resonate this time. Writing by nature is a form of communication and if I was hoping to communicate a particular point of view in a particular form it is important to place that form where it belongs, in her mind in a literary journal or academic journal or even, and I'm not remotely suggesting I write well enough for this, the New Yorker.

After a couple of days of letting this settle in I realized essentially this was the same internal argument I've been having much of my life. It is the central theme to Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that life is unresolved because it has only the context of other's experience as a framework. We don't get to live our lives again (unless we're Buddhist) and therefore have no way of understanding life as either heavy or light, important or not. Writing, like other art forms is an attempt to impart a shared knowledge because it is self expression. Through that self expression we hope to find synchronicity with other's experiences through identity. Ultimately we are attracted to works of art because they resonate with something deeply personal in our own existence, even though we had no direct relationship with the artist. The making of art is a bit of a desperate act. A way of sharing something so personal it has to take a metaphorical form, it has to be transformed away from the now. This is why when Komar and Malamud conducted their famous survey of people's favorite paintings and colors, the pastoral savanna landscape was the image that resonated most. It is the collective, connective tissue we all share — our roots in the African plain. Our beginnings as Australopithecus afarensis, our early hominid ancestor. My writings in essay form on this blog in the past have been attempts in my own way to defy the gravity of life.

I awoke this morning realizing that I have been more like Franz and not enough like Tomas. Being is both light and heavy because it is a constant tension between the forces of physics and metaphysics, reality and dreaming, living and being. In the end the great void consumes us all like the black hole at the center of our own galaxy and we become a singularity because we become both everything and nothing. The only meaning we have is the meaning of the now and the wonder of vast number of those segments in time strung together.

For that reason, this blog will behave more like a blog and less like an essay from here on out. Light but dense.

Painting: Rene Margritee, The Son of Man. 1964

Reality Bites

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The Bravo TV series, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, now in its second season, is a ‘reality’ television show acutely focused on the world of art. Why not? Reality television which began with game shows and found its seat of power in “The Real World” began to wain as a genre in the mid aughts and needed fresh blood. Dancing with the Stars, a British born ballroom dancing escapade bore the first real fruit in its adoption in America, a country far more obsessed with celebrity, or at least a country bearing more celebrity offspring. The brilliance or sadism or both of juxtaposing professional ballroom dancers with ‘B’ and sometimes ‘C’ list celebrities (and now offspring of vice presidential wanna-be’s) was an inspiration befitting a Warholian wet dream. That inspired dalliance, has become the pro forma reality TV format. It extends from America’s Next Top Model through Project Runway to American Idol to Top Chef. The central theme being, any amateur with enough gusto and narcissism can become a professional sharing the limelight with the likes of Heidi Klum, Alexandra Beller, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) or Gordon Ramsey. And now, that conceit tilting against the windmills of Malcolm Gladwell, is fully realized in the ultimate enigma of contemporary culture — fine art. Forgive us Narcissus.

The most prominent member, with the most street cred in the art world on Work of Art, is the Senior Art Critic for New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz. A former art student at the famous School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later an adjunct professor there, he fell away from art making after college. In fact at one point in his history, he was a long haul trucker. Saltz has quoted Charlie Parker’s  “If you don’t play the saxophone for a year, you get a year better.” and added

After two years of not working at all and fretting about it all the time I stopped making art altogether. I haven’t made it since. I miss it. I miss being able to listen to music while writing, working with materials, and the amazing psychic space making art creates. Soon, I became a long distance truck driver; my CB radio name was the Jewish Cowboy. I’d come on and say ‘Shalom, partner.’ While driving trucks I thought about how much I loved art and the art world. I knew I wanted to be part of that world no matter what. I thought writing criticism would be easy, so I decided to become a critic.

In 1998 he took a position as the Senior Art Critic for the Village Voice newspaper in New York, then the dominant force in art taste making in arts capital city. After eight years of writing for the Voice and Art in America, he took the position he still maintains today. He is an ardent fan of irony and Warholian Pop descendants and is a progressive adopter of the Facebook culture, using his profile page as both a dais and community bulletin board. In 2009 ArtReview named him the 73rd most powerful figure in the art world. Saltz was a clear choice as an anchor for Work of Art because he maintains a very populist vernacular about a culture which is the farthest from populist. He is witty and self-deprecating, which removes the stain of elitism his cohorts, including his wife Robert Smith (Senior Art Critic for the New York Times) are often coated with by mainstream media and middle America. In other words, he was the perfect combination of art world establishment and affable schlub. We don’t much care for informed criticism in this country, but we love our pundits and Saltz is the closest thing to a pundit the New York art scene has.

Being an art critic is to be a critic of the core of societies future. Most of the time it must appear as though one is criticizing the air we breath or the invisible man. If we are to believe the seriousness of Saltz, and Bill Powers having been quoted they hope the show creates a bigger audience for art as a whole, then we should take a critical look at the show. In the book The Crisis of Criticism, the editor, Maurice Berger lays out a beautiful description of what criticism can be in practice;

The strongest criticism today—the kind that offers the greatest hope for the vitality and future of the discipline—is capable of engaging, guiding, directing, and influencing culture, even stimulating new forms of practice and expression. The strongest criticism serves as a dynamic, critical force, rather than a s an act of boosterism. The strongest criticism uses language and rhetoric not merely for descriptive or evaluative purposes but as means of inspiration, provocation, emotional connection, and experimentation.

We are all participants in the absurdity of life, but to play in the art arena/world one must be just a little bit unbalanced. The making of art in a fiercely capitalist society is hard enough, but the effete inner circle of the New York art world, the so-called epicenter of great art, is nearly impossible. The gallery owners, auction houses and art fair doyens of New York live by what Robert Hughes said, “The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive." It is no surprise that when Wall Street takes a dive, so follows the art world. Do those who create wish to be judged by those who wish they could? Is it possible for someone who stopped ‘making’ to have an eye for that which they no longer have the personal will to create themselves? Aren’t we talking about taste-making here and the very Renaissance idea of verity in the form of established beauty within the guidelines of the cultural elite? Isn’t that why in recent years, without shame, Versailles has been the host to solo exhibitions by the Pop Art pugilists Jeff Koons and Haruki Murakami? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the executive producer of the show is the former co-star of Sex in the City, a TV show based largely on gossip and absurd fashion. That the two leading members of the art world who are judges, are fans of Warhol’s legacy is no accident either. To add insult to injury (or irony?), Mr. Powers’ co-owns the Half Gallery with the infamous author James Frey. Yes, that James Frey, the one that hoodwinked Oprah and convinced a ton of people to buy into his false biography of pain-killer-free dental rehab. As icing on this illustrious Pop cake, we have the ‘model’ China Chow and her ridiculous haute couture dresses and perilous high heels (a mimic of Carrie from SITC perhaps?) and the seemingly always mystified Simon de Pury the co-founder of one of the largest art auction houses in the world. Shakespeare said it best, “Like a fair house built on another man's ground; so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it.”

I am not making an argument here against criticism or Jerry Saltz’s particular criticism, but rather its waning value to 21st century popular culture. An accidental conspiracy of the internet and capitalism has promoted amateurism above professionalism. Indeed the current art world itself, may be the most devilish trader in this idea. Saltz, as a cultural critic, has abdicated his responsibility to elevate our understanding of art. Despite the fact a liberal arts education in America is vanishing, we have never been a culture, as Europe is, well versed in the idiosyncrasies of fine art. Our patience is low and our drive is toward capital and superiority at all costs. Art does not fit into that notion very well at all. Publicly supported/sponsored art just makes sense in Europe, where as in the U.S. it requires complicity in a lie. A lie that we are a culture at all and the public will “get it” if we simply set public money aside for it. Whether it’s Serra’s Tilted Arc, Mapplethorpe’s S & M photography or Ofili’s elephant shit Virgin Mother, we as a nation are uncomfortable with conceptual thinking. The only conceptual thinking tolerated is of those who make so much money it obscures criticism. I’m thinking of the late Steve Jobs here. Ask any random American on the street what gestalt means or who Andre Serrano (a guest critic on the show), Damian Hirst or Jeff Koons are and you’ll get an equally quizzical tilt of the head. All of the aforementioned artists would be referred to as ‘blue chip’ in the art world and their work sells for thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in the leading galleries.

Ultimately, my disappointment with Saltz and company in The Making of Art comes down to something said by Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in the masterful 1976 movie, Network;

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'

Why the hell is nobody on this show mad as hell? Two seasons now of artists dancing like monkeys before an ever increasing television audience and not one of them is breaking the rules and getting pissed off at being treated like a captive in a zoo? And Jerry Saltz, like some Stockholm Syndrome victim expurgating sensibility in exchange for sympathy for their captors? In the last couple of weeks I’ve taken the time to query artists on their thoughts about the show and I get one of two solid responses. One camp simply doesn’t give a damn because they dismiss it as the same formulaic crap that is Project Runway or Top Chef. They see it as a dismal attempt to put amateurs lacking social graces and borderline personalities in a room together to ‘perform’ for an audience that knows little or nothing about the creative process they are pretending to compete in. The other camp of artists take the position, not of disappointment in the formulaic show or even Jerry Saltz, but rather the pathetic and regressive behavior of people who call themselves artists and yet follow the rules given them explicitly, i.e. the contestants. When contestant aren’t crying over criticism or whining about how hard things are for them, they’re busy gossiping like teenagers about sex or wistfully dreaming of how they’ll spend the next $20,000 bonus for winning that week’s monkey dance.

A part of me watches the show and thinks Andy Warhol is still alive living in a penthouse in Las Vegas producing Work of Art, as yet another cynical gesture intended to tear the last vestiges of art apart at the seams like the defeated Scot, William Wallace was drawn and quartered. Never before was Woody Allen so prescient when he said, “Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.” And that’s why Work of Art is actually dangerous. As the historian Kenneth Clarke said at the opening of Civilisation, “great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts. The book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless you read the two others. But of the three, the only trustworthy one is the last.” And therein lies the broken promise of the show and the damaging deceit it carries out — that art in America, in the 21st century is nothing more than a series of clever skits, designed by the cynical and carried out by the greedy. With each successive week of Work of Art, season two, we see the producers throw more and more money at the artists as an incentive to perform as if all that matters is fame and cash, and of course that is the only way to achieve great art. The allure is great as we live in a society ever more divided along lines of economic strata. The rich do indeed get richer—much, much richer and believing in the American myth leaves one either isolated and adrift from society, fighting an uphill battle against a mighty foe—greed, or succumbing to participation in the belief, we as a nation will only endure and remain strong if we place money at the top of our idealistic pyramid. Work of Art: The Next Great Artist portrays the last bastion of hope for a cultural legacy, art, as nothing more than a device like all others, developed and pursued for riches at the expense of anyone else who stands in the way. Work of Art portrays all artists as whores, who think they can cleverly bend the rules, convincing the elite they have produced something truly sustaining and enriching in the hopes of making a fast buck. We no longer glorify our gods, our emperors or science, we only glorify money.

Some of you will say, but who cares about a silly television show only a small demographic of American’s will watch. Why does it matter? To me it matters because it is a symptom of something larger and in this case that symptom is in my own backyard. I suppose if I were a chef or a fashion designer, I would have already written about these appalling shows, but Work of Art deals with my profession—art making. More importantly it matters because we can do better and succumbing to this nonsense makes us all complicit, even if we don’t watch. Saltz has at least 5,000 Facebook friends and he writes a column on art in a populist magazine, New York Magazine, and now he’s on television. In other words, he influences popular culture, much more than he cares to admit. This has a trickle down effect on all of us in the same way that bad design does. Accepting silly gamesmanship and mediocrity as art and playing that back to a larger audience, largely ignorant about art, is negligent and narcissism. As mentioned, Jerry Saltz and Bill Powers have both commented on how they participate in the hopes of making art accessible to a larger audience. I maintain, that a larger audience experiences art, fine art (for lack of a better term), by way of indirect exposure. Just try to imagine how much influence Picasso has had on popular culture in the last one hundred years and the closest thing he ever came to making what you could call “pop” was a series of ceramic plates. He is however, a household name, even among the great uninitiated masses and rightfully so. He foresaw the conceptual dynamics of quantum physics before it was put to mathematical formula and his sense of fragmented, folded space has changed the way we interact with things from iPod’s to clothes. We accept a looser organization of things more easily now because of the huge impact Picasso had on society. Art does not need to be, nor in many cases should it be, more accessible to a larger audience. That is the Pandora’s box Warhol opened when he shifted art away from making to making money.

I was saddened frankly to watch an established artist who calls himself “The Sucklord,” kowtow to the judges and diminish his own creative abilities in the hopes of self promotion and a quick buck. Artists on the show are punished for not working outside of their own oeuvre, and yet, presumably that is how they managed to be selected for the show. This reeks of typical art-school crits, where tenured professors sit in judgement of burgeoning artists and fearful of their own tenuous grasp on the art world, pour vitriol and disdain on another’s creative expression. Work of Art  also reinforces terrible stereotypes:  the art school girl, the art slut, the freak, the redneck self-taught artist, the euro-trash artist and on it goes. Place can be paramount in an artist’s work and throwing an Arkansan into the mix with seasoned kids from New York and LA is simply throwing the proverbial Christian to the lions. In both seasons of Work of Art contestants hailing from rural towns are akin to blacks in horror films—sacrificial lambs. Asking a painter to make something of a gutted Fiat’s parts, proves nothing about that artists’ ability, other than their ability to perform like a trained seal. Art at its core is subversive, dangerous and guileful because it asks questions that most people would rather leave unasked. Its power lies in its truth. Not some ultimate truth, but the truth that we are all better off when we question the status quo and we understand the rational is inextricably connected to the irrational. Work that leaves you bewildered, stunned, shocked and questioning is always the best art. Art that is mystifying and misunderstood in its own time is usually the most important in the long term. As long as the artists on Work of Art continue to play by the rules, the title of the show will remain the ironic joke it is. As Dave Hickey has said; “If there is no art, no culture, then what the fuck are we going to talk about? These are our stories and our stories are all we got!”

Imagine Zero

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Chaveux Cave drawingsFrancis Bacon famously said, "I'm optimistic about nothing." I believe that was his clever way of confronting the possibilities that remain in a world that is psychotic. The author and environmentalist Derrick Jensen has said; "For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities." I believe that art can be a means of cutting through the lies we tell ourselves and an opportunity to confront the deeper meanings of our own existence. This can be conceived in a multitude of forms from humor to horror, but anything in art that fails to "deepen the mystery" is a lessor form and we should confront it as such. We are quite literally teetering on the brink of self-annihilation in this current time of our human history. I don't believe I'm overstating that or playing to melodrama. Art has always lived at a primal core of our evolution and by understanding its role and embracing its importance, perhaps we can participate in a different kind of evolutionary leap than the one we seem to be headed for. I do not mean this in some utopian fantasy, but in terms of active engagement. Identifying through our most profound and brave artistic expressions that which is meaningful and destructive to us, is a way of overcoming the crushing depression of multiple end-time scenarios. I call it imagining zero because zero as a conceptual idea becomes a metaphor for our own unimaginable potential.

Last week I saw the film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog. The film was likely the first and last film footage ever to be shot in the caves of Chauvet in France. These caves were sealed some twenty thousand years ago by a land slide, perfectly preserving the oldest known art work on the planet. Ancient drawings spanning five thousand years time remained largely unchanged in their technique and content. Made thirty-five thousand years ago when enormous ice sheets covered the surrounding mountains in three thousand meters of snow and ice, they are a testament to how art literally changed human beings. At the time homo sapiens were occupying the very same region as Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) a preceding branch of the human species. Although Neanderthal jewelry and some fragments of masks and pigment residue have been discovered, no other significant art has been found. Of course, we know, Neanderthals did no survive till today. Something profound happened in our evolutionary process thirty-five thousand years ago in the caves of southern France that changed the course of human evolution. It may have contributed to our dominion over the Neanderthals or at the very least our survival in opposition to their disappearance. We began to express ourselves by framing outside of objects, our experiences and the environment in which we lived. Why did we begin to draw on the wall? What was the significance of creating drawings in a dark cave that could only be witnessed by torch light? The lions, rhinoceros and antelope that were drawn with an eerie life-like realism and deliberately worked with the contours of the cave walls to create a three-dimensional illusion were our first forays into framing our existence as something outside our tactile experiences. Their dreams were reimagined as charcoal drawings sketched inside the dark caves in order to better comprehend the meaning of existence and their seat within the world.

Today we are able to reimagine our dreams in an almost infinite array of mediums from movies to video games, and we have achieved the capacity to literally re-shape our world. If we can look more closely at the world and more precisely examine what artists are expressing we have the capacity to rediscover what started us on this amazing journey some thirty-five thousand years ago, and with it, perhaps imagine a radical new shift in our species.

In the coming weeks I'll be working to expand Imagine Zero and I encourage others to more robustly participate in both commentary and offer their writing. I'm interested in this being a location for multiple perspectives and multiple viewpoints on art and its meaningfulness in today's world. If you're interested in participating please contact me through the email here and as always, thanks for reading.

—Odin Cathcart

Billboard Dreams

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Lanai “Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It let's us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.”

—Don Draper (Jon Hamm) from Mad Men, The Wheel, 2007

Mad Men resides in the louche, languid and heavily intoxicated world of the Madison Avenue advertising firms of the sixties. Now in its fourth season, Mad Men evokes the imagery of the consumer side of the sixties, the new middle class side. Sequestered in suburbia away from the turmoil of the Vietnam war, the inner city and college campus explosions of discontent. The irony of Mad Men is in its title. The self-named advertising executives and creatives of the sixties were a group of egomaniacal, mildly crazy individuals whose own lives betrayed the false dreams they sold to everyone else. When the character Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) talks about nostalgia as the motivation for buying he is fully detached from cynicism. In essence he’s revealing the foundation of pop culture that arose in the sixties and now dominates the landscape of middle class America. Draper is referring to the paradigm known in the German vernacular as kitsch (based on Immanuel Kant’s philosophical theories of aesthetics). Kitsch first took form in the newly moneyed Munich bourgeoisie of the late 1920‘s. A derogatory term from the German, meaning pretentious trash (dialect, kitschen, to smear, verkitschen, to make cheaply, to cheapen) it was a descriptor of class distinction more than actual aesthetics. Hitler as dictator-artist gave the force of law to his own aesthetic ideas in the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst. Hitler’s fascist cleansing of what he called degenerate art, was an attempt to eradicate intellectualism and reinforce the power and pride associated with Germany’s bourgeoisie. It was also, of course a swipe at the culture and money retained by the German Jews, whose cultural awareness was rooted in intellectualism. Goebbels and Hitler rightly understood the power of art but misplaced their enmity by singling out those who they considered degenerate, empowering them in a way they could not have achieved alone. Entartete Kunst was also the first instance of state-enforced kitsch, when Goebbels paralleled the degenerate exhibition with Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German art exhibition), an exhibition filled with sentimentality and nostalgic portrayals of an idealized, bucolic Germany. Kitsch’s dominance was largely crushed by the economic and physical destruction brought by WWII in Europe, but found its treatise written in America at the end of the fifties by Madison Avenue.

The uncomfortable link between Nazi Germany and 1950‘s/60‘s America is an important one. Fascism is wrongly associated with demagoguery and socialism but in reality Nazism had its foundations in corporate capitalism. Aside from his sociopathic behavior, Hitler’s philosophy was dependent on the power of production and manufacturing. Corporate production was the purest form of German nationalism and was of course responsible for powering one of the most destructive armies in history. It is the kernel of corporate ideology that found fertile soil in the growing bourgeoisie in 1950‘s white, suburban America. A second or third generation European immigrant population living in the inner cities of America, capitalized on their new-found wealth and education from the GI Bill and fled the inner city. Industry began to shift to white collar jobs and companies relocated to the suburban landscape as well in support of their chief economic fuel - the white middle class worker. This had a chilling effect on American culture In the 1930‘s the artists who fled the great European conflagration and immigrated to the U.S. were the seed for a new American aesthetic that achieved global recognition with Pollock’s drip paintings in the 1940‘s. Unfortunately, the migration of the middle class to the suburbs diluted our emergent cultural maturity. Without the benefit of influences from the abject poor, minorities and the patronage of the wealthy, suburban life became of vacuum of kitsch. Materialism supplanted imagination and Madison Avenue stepped in to fuel the fire of desire. Firmly entrenched in the white bread, cookie cutter sameness of suburban life, the American middle class fell into the same nostalgic leanings that dominated Hitler’s aesthetic of the 1930’s. When Draper talks about the ‘pain from an old wound’ he is not only speaking to his own personal trauma, resultant of his escape with false identity from the Korean war, but the collective pain of a ghettoized white immigrant population that now found pride in their materialistic desires. When spiritual and personal well-being are fixed to materiality the subtleties of human expression are lost in a sea of mediocrity. Advertising becomes art and even when art mocks and mimics the devices of modern advertising as in Pop Art, the general public is left to rely on their Barbie dolls and Cadillacs for aesthetic grounding instead of the works of Rauschenberg, Warhol and Rosenquist. The suburbs contain no art galleries or museums outside of the strip mall poster shops and inkjet printed canvas reproductions of digestible masterpieces.

Kitsch is not to be confused with the art movement of the 50’s and early 60’s — Pop art. Beginning with Rauschenberg and Johns, Pop art became a reaction to the internal conflict and existentialism of Abstract Expressionism. It leveraged suburban kitsch and ever growing domination of advertising to subvert the cultural exigency for materialism. As Madison Avenue advertising became the dominant, piquant expression of suburban desire the artist James Rosenquist entered the art scene. James Rosenquist was born on the plains of Grand Forks, North Dakota in the heartland of rural, agricultural America. After attending school in Minneapolis in the early 50s he accepted a scholarship to attend the Art Students League in New York, fulfilling the peasant to urbanite conversion Greenberg refers to in his 1939 essay on kitsch. Rosenquist’s subversion of a dominant form of advertising he worked at before moving to New York — billboards. Rather than inure himself to what we now call the ‘red state’ mentality of provincialism and pedantic expressions of a Norman Rockwell cum Ronald Reagan mythology, Rosenquist embraced the dynamism and cynicism of advertising as a way of providing an alternative vision of American possibility. James Rosenquist added a surrealist twist to Pop art which questioned the semiotics used in American advertising by juxtaposing its imagery with the dreamscapes of the suburban imagination and the mundane. It was a nod to the so-called degenerated artists of the 1930’s and it would lay the groundwork for postmodern irony that followed. It was also a warning to the nostalgia fueled kitsch that was gaining a foothold on the aesthetic sensibilities of middle America as television grew in influence.

Long before America’s superpower dominance, Glement Greenberg wrote his seminal essay on Avante-Garde and Kitsch in 1939. He eloquently reveals the underpinnings of Draper’s sentiments on nostalgia;

“The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city's traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless, their taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.”

Instead of peasants settling in the city centers of Europe, Americans resettled the suburbs in an inverse form of Greenberg’s theory. This suburbanization or faux rural culture allowed predominantly WASP culture to distance itself from integration with other cultural influences found in the city, streamlining edgy and complicated urban culture. It was a way of creating a false security amongst an increasingly integrating world. The unrest of African-Americans in inner cities,  the college rebellions of the disenfranchised youth, the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the terror of annihilation to the forefront. Middle class, white identity reacted with a flight response to the nearby, newly bulldozed bucolic suburban landscape. Cineplexes replaced museums and isolated auto travel replaced mass transit.

Enormous half spheres, supine soft and wet against the backdrop of a giant spoon materialize from James Rosenquist's 1964 painting Lanai, like upended orange-yellow half moons. The peach halves, at three feet across take on the monolithic proportions. They’re imposing sumptuous, borderline sexual entities affecting a blushing response when taken to such human scale. Upside down and floating against them is a 1964 Lincoln Continental, silvery and mirrored against the convention of early sixties autos that were normally muted pastels, white or black. The car is both coveted object and reflection of the infinite and intangible. A spidery pattern of starbursts float above the peaches and Lincoln like a transparent linoleum appliqué. This fragmented scene pushes right against an erotic pink nude kneeling and bent between the rails of a swimming pool ladder. The ladder and woman are abruptly segmented a la Magritte by a penetrating blue sky holding a floating half pencil. In this painting Rosenquist thoroughly captures the American, suburban dream of the early ‘60's. The pedantic pseudo-luxury of canned fruits sweet in their syrup sexuality and the automobile as spaceship, twisting its mirrored finish in the glow of the peaches, making a fleshy sun. The unveiled, and unfurled nude whose coifed hair curls up as an expression of domestic bliss. The voyeuristic Hugh Hefner-like day dream of the housewife-whore, bending over in supplication offering the unseen pool dweller (or is it sky dweller?) a cigarette (or is it fellatio?) All is bacchanalian overkill as advertising billboard. Imagine a world where advertisements were surrealist renditions of the secret collective suburban unconscious.

Rosenquist rightly saw the open range as a fever dream vision of American idealism taken far too seriously. Billboard scale represented a forced perspective that mimicked the open landscape of the plains and demonstrated the false conquering spirit of post-war America of the 1950s. The idealism of the great plains could be seen as the endless breadbasket of American prosperity or the harsh reality of natures infinite power, a great ocean of grasses and petulant weather capable of crushing the hardiest of individuals beneath its churlish sky. The gigantism of billboard advertising was the perfect venue to express the hubris and irony of American. Billboards arose in concert with the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System in the 50s. Eisenhower developed the freeway system in response to his exposure to the German Autobahn and its necessity as a national defense construct. The highway system provided both a gateway to the American landscape for the newly prosperous, and a vast network of access for rapid military deployment. Paranoia and pleasure. Whether Rosenquist intended it or not, the billboard painting became an ironic statement for the suburban sequestration of fear in the face of growing unrest. Irony is ultimately quieted by blurring its sharp edges. Ramming huge strands of spaghetti against F-111 fighter aircraft or peaches bleeding into silvery Lincoln Continentals forced the viewer to confront the idolatry of consumer objects as dream-state meanderings in an otherwise natural persistence. Where the plains of the Midwest form an illusory vision, unconquerable and dwarfing in its scale, the urban landscape offers a mash-up of manufactured imagery that becomes a living collage. Rosenquist transferred the urban living collage to his billboard canvases, recontextualizing them as billboard dreams.

Art can reinforce the notions of nostalgia or obliterate them. Advertising only reinforces them. Think of the last commercial you watched that represented women in a realistic light. We are still living in a post-war 50s misogynist, reactionary dream state where women are servants. As we watch, sometimes in laughter and more often lately in subdued horror at the machinations of the characters in Matthew Weiner’s creation Mad Men, we should reflect upon that subtext. What Weiner is suggesting, in part, is an examination of our past in order to gain insight into our future. We can continue to embrace our mindless consumer-capitalist system reinforced by the masters of simulacra (advertisers) or we can make our own world, shaped by the entirety of our surroundings. As The Sopranos exposed gangster mythos by showing the human dilemma of mobster family life, Mad Men does so by exposing the dark underbelly of Madison Avenue advertising and its ironic juxtaposition to the lives of the creatives who make the ads. Creativity used as propaganda, however splendid, is still disease — still kitsch. Rosenquist sees the irony of consumer icons and modern advertising as surrealistic expressions of our own fears and desires. The simulacra becomes a symbolic exchange for freedom through purchase.  Advertising is reality now, even as we understand it to be false. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek describes advertising’s driving motivation;

“They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?”

Don Draper’s secret life is a metaphor for our collective lies and majestic hypocrisies. He is trapped between the nostalgic, falsehood of a past he never lived, a past emulated in the father-figure of Roger Sterling and the future that is Peggy Olson and Pete Campbell. Cinema and television are the medium that was the Caravaggio and Rembrandt paintings of the past. They are telling us stories which inform our collective conscious and offer options for other choices. At their best they fracture our protective spaces and push toward a more intellectually rich, creative space. Rosenquist’s billboard scale paintings were narratives that in the sixties offered us an opportunity to view our flaws objectively as the fragments of our daily experiences rather than the carefully fashioned dream states of advertising symbolism. Rosenquist said; “I got below nothing by introducing imagery again...That nothing came from painting advertisements up-close so they didn’t mean anything to me but color and form. They were recognizable imagery again, but I thought of them as completely nonobjective.” As a novel provides narrative that we must build visuals around, Rosenquist sought to deconstruct the modern life of bombarding visual distractions and carefully constructed realities by juxtaposing them on canvases that mimicked the imposing billboard dream scale of color and form. His aim was to remove the forced semiotics of advertising by blurring the lines between it and our own everyday reality. He obliterates nostalgia through scale and the masterful use of collage. James Rosenquist saw advertising as brainwashing and sought to unravel its message using one of its original mediums, the billboard. Scale was also a nod to the hegemony of abstract expressionism and the way large canvases by Kelly, de Kooning and Pollock could immerse their viewers in the mélange of modern imagery until it blurred into an internal dialogue that forced reflection. This is in opposition to Draper’s “carousel” as Rosenquist used his inherited Midwestern roots as a lens to observe the underlying deceptions of big city pathos and cynicism rather than a means to wallow in nostalgia.

Mad Men mimics Rosenquist’s paintings in its portrayal of the fragmented array of personalities that lay behind the creative vision of sixties advertising. As with Richard Yates’ tragic book Revolutionary Road, Mad Men is a study in the duality of America’s hopeful wishes and deepest fears in the wash of enormous prosperity. The realization of newfound prosperity in the 1950’s and 60’s brought with it the oppressive environment of the corporate workplace. Serving the master of success required long hours away from one’s own life, family and more often than not the quashing of youthful dreams. Draper’s “carousel” is a metaphor for the trap of modernity, the endless round-about that comes with Draper’s alcohol fueled hallucinations of suburban disillusionment. We mustn't be completely seduced by the constructs of Rosenquist as a perfect alternative either. At their best Rosenquist’s paintings underline our weaknesses, fears and desires within the context of modern living, but at no point does he escape this way of living either. Rosenquist sits not as some ascetic on his judgmental dais; he too was an adherent to the Cedar Bar’s collection of rough and tumble abstractionists who found solace at the bottom of a whiskey glass. He worshipped the work of Willem de Kooning and spent a great deal of time with the artists responsible for turning the art world on its head in 1949. He was (and possibly still is) a hard living, hard drinking man’s man. If his aim is to reveal the extant melancholy of modern advertising and its adherent suburban lifestyle, it’s because he is fomenting his own nightmares. Jackson Pollock revealed to us that after the Bomb and the foibles of consumer prosperity we are left alone in the dark with our own thoughts. Abstract expressionism annealed the irony of our manifestations and Rosenquist reaffirmed those ironic moments in the context of the existential crisis that would define the later half of 20th century America. The advertising creatives emulated in Don Draper’s character are projecting dreams onto a public in response to their inability to look inward. There is only one brief period of reflection in Draper’s life, when he finishes reading Frank O’Hara’s poetry collection Meditations in an Emergency after feeling intellectually taunted in a bar by a young intellectual. He meanders off in California and considers building hot rods and avoiding his family forever, awash in the baptism of southern California surf. Unfortunately his own fears bear down on him and he seeks the comfort of the smooth thighs and white bed linens of a wandering rich girl who finds him beguiling. This only serves to reinforce his ego and results in a return to the cynical hubris of Madison Avenue, and drowns a chance at self examination in Scotch. Draper sees nothing but the pastoral grandeur of idyllic imaginings in the creative campaigns he produces as a replacement for living, whereas Rosenquist accepts the impossibility of nostalgia and exposes advertising for the ugly, suffocating ironic expression it is. Mad Men reminds us to re-read Frank O’hara and Richard Yates so that we remember the foundations of our current malaise and somehow find the creative spirit to face it and change the course we’re on. The irony of a Mark Rothko hanging in the office of Bert Cooper is not lost on Weiner as he hints at the knowing duality of the men who craft the lesser dream for the rest of us, just as the paintings of Rosenquist have done for a half century.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of

pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of

perverted acts in pastures.  No.  One need never leave the

confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't

even enjoy a blade of grass unless i know there's a subway

handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not

totally _regret_ life.  It is more important to affirm theleast sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and

even they continue to pass.  Do they know what they're missing?

Uh huh.

— Frank O’hara, from Meditations in an Emergency, 1957

Image at the top of the page; Lanai by James Rosenquist, 1964, Oil on canvas, 5'2" x 15'6" (157.5 x 472.4 cm). Private Collection