WORD ART

An art-ful weekend, including the grand opening of "Best Kept Secret" at the Laguna Art Museum--an ambitious recollection of the lively art scene at the University of California, Irvine, in the critical decade starting in the mid-1960s. A great contribution to this year's celebration of Southern California art in the Pacific Standard Time events.

More of this later. In the meantime, let me begin at the end of the weekend. We drove up to Cal State Long Beach yesterday afternoon to attend the opening of our friend's--and the daughter of our friends'--Cassie Jones's BFA show, Ad Nauseam. Cassie has been studying in the printmaking department at CSULB, and has come up with some remarkable work, beautifully installed...

... in a small gallery entirely suited to its scale and intention. Having seen Cassie's art work develop over the years, we were expecting, I don't know... something different. We were, in fact, astonished at the maturity and level of skill she has achieved. While sparse and aesthetically "minimal" at first glance, her images are intricate, engaging, requiring intense scrutiny and participation on the part of the viewer. It's a rewarding pleasure.

Cassie works with language, "translating" it into the parallel language of art. Taking a page from books that have a special resonance for her--Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea--she painstakingly, and literally, deconstructs the text, dissecting the individual letters surgically and rearranging them alphabetically on a page adjacent to the original. From a Vonnegut page, she excises that familiar, endlessly repeated ironic phrase, "so it goes," and reconfigures the purloined fragments in a patterned sequence. Or taking a single word--"optimism"--she copies it on narrow tape repeatedly, obsessively, in tiny handwritten letters, using the tape to construct horizontal images that resemble abstract landscapes, some light, some dark, the words now barely legible but powerfully present. A neat trick, converting language into landscape.

Described like this, Cassie's work risks seeming a dry and intellectual exercise. Far from it. The obsessive quality of the labor involved suggests a passionate engagement with the texts and words she works with, and carries us along with that engagement. Her images subtly capture--and update--the emotional and philosophical core of her chosen books, the rueful irony of Vonnegut's preoccupation with senseless slaughter and the existential dread of Sartre's nausea...

In a contemporary context, given her repetitive rendering of the latter's title word, it's hard for the eye to miss the juxtaposition of the letters U, and S, and A. The mind--my mind, at least--makes an irresistible leap into the sickening, paralytic morass into which we seem to have sunk, as a country, in our recent history. The image, based on a novel from the late, pre-World War II 1930s, becomes startlingly, uncomfortably relevant.

In part, too, as I see it, Cassie's work is a study of obsession itself. In her artist's statement, she makes reference to the nature of art as "work," and what she has done is indeed incredibly labor-intensive: hence, ad nauseam. There is much lazy art abroad these days, in the galleries, and it's refreshing to find a young artist so dedicated to the persistence involved in making work that is at once truly beautiful, in the aesthetic sense, and replete with both personal and transpersonal significance. The work is also rooted in a tradition of artists using books, texts, words as medium. Now that I think of it, I recall having written the catalogue introduction for a show entitled "Word Art" back in the 1970s. It's a tradition which, as Cassie shows, is not yet exhausted. I wish I had images of her work to share. I don't. If the artist happens to read these words and has some images she's ready to share, I'll happily post them. Meantime, congratulations, Cassie. This is fine work, way more accomplished than what I'd expect to find in a BFA show; it promises great things for the future.

THE LIFE REPORT

(An essay written in response to the request in a column by David Brooks in the 11/28/11 New York Times for a report “[evaluating] what you did well, of what you did not do so well, and what you learned along the way.”)

If you’re a fan, as I am, of the now largely forgotten genius of Don Marquis, you’ll remember Warty Bliggens, the toad. Warty shared the all-too common human delusion that he was the center of the universe. He believed that “the earth exists to grow toadstools/for him to sit under/the sun to give him light by day and the moon/and wheeling constellations/to make beautiful/the night for the sake of/warty bliggens” (sic: archy the cockroach, Marquis’s alter ego and putative author of his poems, was unable for obvious reasons to use both the shift key and a letter simultaneously to create the upper case.) What I have learned in seventy-five years of sometimes painful experience is that, like Warty, I am not the center of the universe.

This might seem like a rather banal discovery, too obvious to be of great value. It’s my conviction, though, that this is the one essential lesson that we need to learn on the path to a modicum of happiness and freedom. My failure to have learned it earlier in life was the source of everything I did not do well; and those things I have managed to do well, I think, result from my having… well, not learned it, but at least having come some way to an understanding of its meaning and importance.

I did not do well, early on in life, with the enormous privilege of a fine education and the opportunity to attend one of the world’s greatest universities. In a word, I blew it. As the saying goes, I also blew it off. I had a good excuse: after twelve years in boys’ boarding schools where such things were not allowed, it was time for me to chase girls and drink a lot of beer. And at the end of it all, I made a choice that led me off on a misguided path for many years: though I had known since the age of twelve that I was meant to be a writer, I opted for the safer path and went, instead, into teaching. I climbed the educational ladder from kindergarten to grammar school and, later, with a doctorate, to higher education as a teacher and eventually a top administrator.

I’m not complaining. It was a thoroughly rewarding path in many ways. It was just not what I was supposed to be doing with my life. I was in my mid-fifties when I came to the realization that I had unknowingly sabotaged every wonderful job I’d been fortunate to have. I quit, cold turkey. That was one of the things that was hard, but which I managed to do well. Since then, for the past quarter century, I have been doing what I was meant to do—and, yes, doing it well.

So much for the professional life. As for the personal, well, I think because I had not yet understood that I was not the center of the universe, I blew a marriage, too. An absent dad, I blew my first two efforts at fatherhood. I did my best, at a distance, but I don’t pretend that it was nearly good enough. I have done a better job at marriage and fatherhood the second time around—now nearly forty years. But the really big moment came—the one that confronted me with the falsity of all the assumptions I had cheerfully and thoughtlessly made about myself, came only after I had followed my instinct and left academia. At a moment of deep family crisis, I was forced to recognize that I had set my life on automatic cruise control and left it there, and that I was headed off at high speed toward the edge of an unsuspected cliff. I had no idea who I really was or how my behavior affected others, especially those closest to me.

So the first, big, painful effort was to learn about the self I thought myself to be. On impulse, I signed up for one of those men’s training weekends. I arrived there, basically a shrink-wrapped Englishman, and was cracked open like an egg. I devoted years thereafter to an intense and often challenging search for authenticity. And I did that, I think, well. The search, I mean. Not only did I learn to be more honest with myself and those around me, and therefore more open and generous in my relationships. I also found a new clarity, a new focus for my work as a writer. I have learned, in recent years, to do that well. Whereas, before, my writing was controlled—and sometimes blocked—by the editor on my shoulder, I began to write more easily and spontaneously in the flow.

The biggest of all lessons, though, was still to come. It came with a renewed contact with the spiritual dimension of my life. The son of an Anglican minister, I left the church as soon as I left home, at the age of eighteen. I was never a believer—and I remain a religious skeptic. I found, however, in Buddhist teachings—others will find it elsewhere, I do not intend to be a preacher—my own way to reconnect with that missing part. After a great deal of actual practice and a great deal of study, I have come to understand that I am not even who I think I am; nor am I that person others imagine me to be. I am rather an unreliable blend of shifting selves, no one of them more “real” than any of the others. I am not some solid being at the center of the universe, but a being in constant flux, amidst the great flux of other beings, and of beingness.

Is this wisdom? I flatter myself to think that this realization has at least put me on the path to wisdom. It’s my belief that we human beings need to relinquish our desperate hold on to that comforting illusion of a seemingly solid self, and to see our “selves” in the context of our fellow beings on this planet we call home, if we are to start out on the path to true happiness and freedom. The self can be a stern, unyielding jailer and will not readily give up his key. It’s up to us to find a way to take it from him if we want to move forward in our lives. Such is the lesson I have learned, and I hope that I have learned it well.

GO-TO

A brief entry and a referral today on Vote Obama 2012.

I am the 99 percent. And I support the rest of us. I was about to say, "May our numbers grow." What I really mean is, "May our numbers shrink."

It's about justice. Social justice. In this country. See my referral on Vote Obama 2012.

PATRICK NAGATANI: DESIRE FOR MAGIC

Followers of the photographic work of Patrick Nagatani will be pleased by the publication of Desire for Magic...

... by the University of New Mexico Art Museum. It is a comprehensive overview of this challenging and imaginative artist’s work, with key introductory essays focused not primarily on its chronological development, but on the recurring thematic issues pursued, some of them over decades. The result is a coffee table book that is rich with both illustration and thoughtful critical analysis.

Since his earliest work, an engagement with social and intellectual issues has been the hallmark of Nagatani’s art, along with a creative commitment to innovative formal challenges. The earliest "Polaroid Collaborations" (1983 – 1989) with the painter Andree Tracey (disclosure: my wife and I have two of these works in our own collection) took on the fears of nuclear and other environmental catastrophe in pictures that made an instantaneous record of settings that were painstakingly created in weeks of staging, combining painted backdrops, intricately suspended “flying” objects, and actual figures—usually including the artist himself as alarmed observer and recorder. The results are chaotic, melodramatic, electrifying… and hilarious. It’s a bemused, ironic take on the ease with which our species is now able to bring about its own destruction, as well as of the underlying psychological undercurrent of paranoia that destructive power can generate. Things fly apart, making manifest the insanity and chaos that actually, perhaps imminently, threaten our existence. The later “Nuclear Enchantment” series (1988 - 1993), is counterpointed in the book with lyrical texts by Joel Weishaus. It shifts the focus to the deserts of the Southwest, the location where nuclear weapons were developed, to explore links between the natural landscape, ethnic human identity, and the awful potential of the destructive power we have invented. We are reminded of J. Robert Oppenheimer's citation from the Bhagavad Gita, on watching the first atomic explosion: "Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds."

The deserted landscape and the persistence of memory remain a preoccupation in Nagatani’s odyssey into his own family’s past in his series on the “Japanese-American Concentration Camps” of World War II (1993 – 1995). These melancholy scenes are not simply reminders of that inglorious chapter in our history; they are also expeditions into the artist’s own unconscious past, and an attempt to come to terms with lasting psychological wounds inherited from a previous generation. The legacy of past history is also the concurrent (and subsequent) theme in "Excavations" (1985 – 2007). As meticulously staged, in their own way, as the earlier scenes of nuclear holocaust, these more intimate works derive from the fictional inner dialogue between Nagatani and his alter ego, Ryoichi, a tongue-in-cheek takeoff of archeology as a scientific “rediscovery” of the past and a lyrical, literary riff on language as art in the form of pages from Ryoichi’s journals. Like all of Nagatani’s work, the series is multi-layered in image, association, social and historical reference, text and meaning.

From the artist’s recent personal encounter with grave medical issues, Nagatani’s early inroads into the "Chromatherapy" series—dating from 1978 and continuing through 2007—may seem eerily prophetic. These sometimes graphic, sometimes even lurid contemplations on the vulnerable human body exposed to the bleak, objective eye of modern medical technology are rendered in deep chiaroscuro with shockingly artificial highlights of radioactive color. They confront us unsparingly with the fearful prospect all of us must face—the prospect of disease and death—as well as with the equally repellent and sophisticated technology we humans have invented (vainly!) to stave them off. To contemplate these pictures is to be confronted with the susceptibility of flesh to disease and decay, and with our own inevitable mortality. “Therapy,” such as it is, is perhaps just another manifestation of that "Desire for Magic," though it turns out to be more a matter of coming to terms with the psychological and psychic implication of these truths about human frailty than of arriving at a “cure.” “Color” therapy, in this context, might be understood as a kind of aesthetic healing for the receptive, attentive mind.

After all this, at the end of the book—though also created over many years—Nagatani’s "Tape-estries" (1982 – 2008) bring us the relief of a certain visual serenity. Created for the camera, remarkably, with masking tape, this series presents us principally—though not exclusively—with images of Hindu and Buddhist deities, subdued in palette, respectful, meditative. They suggest a need on the artist’s part to achieve—and impart—an alternative vision, to balance out the persistent apprehension of chaos, danger, fragility and loss with the prospect of a lasting and reliable inner peace. It is, after all, the Buddhist view that suffering is an inevitable part of our human experience, but that there is a path, through meditation and eventual enlightenment, to the end of suffering. As I see it, the “Tape-estries” are a nice note on which to end the journey this visually compelling book, the story of an artist’s continuing, exhaustive search for the complex inner truths that govern his life and work.

DOING OUR BIT?

Feeling patriotic this morning. Yesterday we went out and bought a Ford Fiesta. The first car I ever owned was a British Ford Anglia...

... a little less green than this one. It was England's effort to catch up with American stream-lining, and I was inordinately proud of it.

Since the 1970s, though, we have bought only Japanese-made cars, persuaded that they were more solidly built, more reliable, and better designed than comparable American vehicles. The only exception was a bright red Jeep Cherokee, which we drove in the 1990s for the length of a three-year lease. I couldn't say whether our bias was based on reality or sheer prejudice and promotion, but that's what we believed.

The backstory for this big change in our lives includes the fact that we bought a high-end SUV back in 2004, at a time when such a purchase seemed reasonable. We needed the cargo space, we reasoned, to accommodate our dual residence life-style and to have space to transport art work when necessary for Ellie's remaining activity in that business. Besides, gas was still relatively inexpensive, and we liked the high-off-the-road ride and the comfortable interior. We did our research, and ended up with a Lexus RX 330. And I have to say it has been, continues to be, a great car.

Why think of trading, then? Top of the list is the fact that we just don't drive it. Later in 2004 we also discovered the Prius--and fell in love. We drive it all the time, particularly since the rise in gasoline costs. The Lexus sits majestically in the garage, virtually unused. We take it out once a week or so for "exercise"--and to keep the battery charged--and take it on a longer drive occasionally out of a sense of obligation to keep the machinery functioning. In more than seven years now, it has accumulated only a little more than twenty thousand miles, and it's in immaculate condition.

But why hang on to a car when we scarcely ever use it, especially at a moment when we are expecting the arrival of a grandchild who we'd like to see riding with the safety and reliability that the Lexus can afford? Our initial thought was to pass the Lexus on to our daughter and to try making do with a single car between us. A tempting notion. But after a few weeks' trial period, I was beginning to feel the pressure and indignity of dependency. Ellie is more professionally active than myself, at least in the out-and-about sense, and for that reason exercised more priority on car use. But we live in a big city; I like to get out to the galleries and museums, to an occasional lunch with a friend, and so on. It began to feel constrictive to be reduced to asking Mommy for the car keys.

So we did our research again, this time looking for the most inexpensive, economical, eco-friendly, high-mileage run-around car available--one that still provided minimal comfort, with four doors to provide access for our grandchild's car seat, for those occasions when we would be transporting him. In view of the reports I was reading, it seemed that this time around we would need to move past our prejudices and give the American cars a chance. We did. We went through plenty of online detail before starting out. We test-drove a Japanese car, a Korean car. And, having found the Ford Fiesta at the top of a number of best-choice lists for its class, we took one out for a test spin--and were convinced.

There are still some details to sort out before we sign on the dotted line, but we're looking forward to soon being able to sign the Lexus over and, for a few weeks, to enjoy that new-car smell--along with the slightly smug satisfaction that we're doing our bit for the American economy and the environment. Fingers crossed that we made a good choice.

READING...

I have been reading The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis It's like drinking a fine wine. There's a taste of Kafka, a hint of Richard Brautigan, definitely a flavor of Borges... Russell Edson lurking in there somewhere, too. And a couple of others I have not yet been able to identify. Not that Davis in any way derivative, that's not what I mean. It's a distinct pleasure to read her and make all these associations. Her stories are a fine blend of the absurd and the lyrical, the emotionally disturbing and the outright comic. Her "characters", such as they are, are defined sidewise, somehow, by their quirks and neuroses, by their insecurities and their never-quite satisfying relationships with other human beings like themselves. Mostly unnamed, they resonate with simple, difficult humanity. They are us.

Here's the thing: I'm discovering that if I try to read this book "as a book", that is, from cover to cover, it's like drinking too much of the delicious red stuff. It goes to the head and leaves me with a lingering hangover. What's frothy and funny and enlightening and sad can easily become heavy and depressing. So if you're curious and have not yet come across Lydia Davis, my advice is: read her. She's terrific. But do it in small doses. Keep the book by the bedside and check in once in a while, read a couple of her (often very short) short stories, and you'll smile. Read too many and you might need a double dose of aspirin.

(And by the way, thanks to Jean at Tasting Rhubarb for the recommendation...)

TREES

We have lost our neighbor's lovely eucalyptus trees which filled the view through the french doors from our bedroom in Laguna Beach. We know that, historically, as non-natives, these trees are invaders in the Southern California landscape, but they settled here more than a century ago and they have made themselves at home in this part of the world. Indeed, they are a familiar feature in many of the plein air paintings made hereabouts in the early 20th century, and their elegance is hard to resist. There is a quality to the way in which their leaves and branches respond with a lift and a sway in the slightest breeze that brings a certain serenity to the natural environment, and these ones will be missed.

There is something of a dispute about the eucalyptus currently, here in Laguna. In neighboring Newport Beach, just recently, one fell and crushed the occupant of a passing car; in consequence (revenge? an obsessive desire for safety?) that city mercilessly culled a hundred of them. Here in our little town--though whether in sympathy, I don't know--more have been condemned, to the outrage of some of our fellow citizens who enjoy their shade and object to the potential loss of perching space for birds. (They are not good nesting trees--though the herons, around Silver Lake in Los Angeles, seem to like them for that purpose.) The controversy here in Laguna, I believe, remains as yet unsettled.

Our neighbor's trees, like many in this community, have been sacrificed to another neighbor's claim to an ocean view. It's sad to see trees hacked down, whatever the reason. The planet is losing too many of them already to disease and human expansionism. We ourselves have two beauties up in Los Angeles, eucalyptus both, which were infected by a disease that left their leaves shriveling up and coated with a nasty gummy substance. Falling off in masses, they left an awful mess on the deck outside our living room, hard to sweep up because of that gum. We recently had the trunks treated with medicinal plugs, and they seem now to be on the road to recovery. We still worry about them, though. They are of that species of eucalyptus that grows very tall and slender, and they have shot up alarmingly in the past couple of years. Thus far, we have resisted expert advice to have them cut down; and will continue to do so, unless and until they seem to pose an imminent threat. Self protection sounds like a justifiable defense against arboricide.

I wonder, though, do trees count as "living beings"? In any event, we would certainly wish to "do no harm" to the environment.

THEATER OF MEMORY

I have not been able to visit my friend Gregg Chadwick's current exhibition in person, but I have the catalogue in hand, and I have seen some of the paintings in his studio. "Theater of Memory: Paintings by Gregg Chadwick" is installed at the Monterey Peninsula College Art Gallery through November 4. The catalogue, by the same title, is available online. It's a beautiful little book, and the images give a reliable impression of the artist's work, even though in reduced scale: some of the paintings are of imposing size and in artworks, of course, size matters. Still, failing a visit to the gallery, the book is a fine way to make a preliminary acquaintance with the work.

The text is written by the artist himself--who is also an excellent and perceptive writer, as you'll discover if you visit his lively and always interesting website at Speed of Life. His words in the catalogue reveal a part of the narrative content of the paintings that can otherwise only be intuited through the immediacy of their emotional impact. Gregg is interested in the depth of being human, the complex of heart and mind, presence and memory, dreams and reality, flesh and spirit that make up the wholeness of our experience and the way in which we relate to each other. His approach to painting, and the end results, make his intention clear. We gaze into, and through, multiple translucent veils of paint, laid on in layers and scraped away, erased, repainted, so that we seem eventually to encounter the figures--he paints people--as process, emerging from mists of the past into always tentative and shifting consciousness.

Particularly moving to this one viewer is "Memory Wall: My Father at the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial" (24" x 18", oil on linen, 2011) ...

(all images courtesy of the artist)

... a portrait of the artist's father in U.S. Marine dress uniform. The face is seen in three-quarters profile, pale and stern, lips full, eyes gazing upward, as if respectfully, toward an unseen flag or deity. The uniform, complete with medals, speaks loudly of his pride and service. The portrait speaks of duty, unwavering loyalty, discipline. The man is tough. And yet... we see him through the eyes of a son, respectful, yet aware of the vulnerabilities, the softer side of real humanity that lurks behind the outward show of strength. We are reminded, as men, of our own experience with fathers--giants for us as little children; imposing, distant, to be feared for their infinitely superior strength and wisdom. We may come to resent the discipline they impose on us, but accept it grudgingly because, like God, our father can't be wrong. As we grow, however, if we're fortunate and strong ourselves--if that father has managed to share his strength with us--we come to see the uncertainty, the self-questioning, the doubts and fears that assail even the toughest of men, and to recognize the deep bond of love between us.

This, at least, is what I find in Gregg's portrait. Were I his father, I would be much moved by the tribute and learn much about myself and my son. The painting from which the show and the catalogue both take their title, "Theater of Memory" (48" x 48", oil on linen, 2011) ...

... explores a different and equally moving aspect of the father-son relationship: it recalls, in the foreground, the boyhood face of a young nephew whose eyes seem already conscious of the destined brevity of his life, already focused beyond life itself; and, in the middle ground, the boy's father, watching over him with love and concern, as though attempting to step across the space that separates them. Against a dimly-perceived landscape, the figures are at once close and irrevocably distant.

There is, in Gregg's paintings, a thoroughly human compassion, let's say a love for every one of his subjects and a profound connection with their vulnerable humanity and the ephemerality of life. It is not surprising to find, in other examples of his work, images of the Buddha and of Buddhist monks--here included only in "Arlington" (72" x 36", oil on torinoko paper on canvas, 2010) ...

... a painting inspired by the funeral of a young Marine, killed in action in Iraq.) One senses in this work the influence of the dharma, the understanding of human suffering and the supremacy of compassion as the worthiest of human values.

NONE DARE CALL IT LOVE

I've had this coffee mug...

... for many years. I forget who gave it to me; perhaps I bought it at a garage sale. It seems like a fair representation of the state of affairs between the parties, though these days it's more like date rape than love-making. Have fun...

MASS EXECUTION IN OHIO

I was appalled, as I am sure most others were, by the images that came out this morning of those magnificent animals shot to death in Ohio, after their release from captivity by their clearly deranged and abusive human "owner." To see these creatures sprawled on the ground in lifeless heaps was heart-breaking. The arrogance of our species seems untempered by shame, or conscience, or compassion.

First, it is shameful that our laws allow our fellow beings in the wild to be captured and treated as chattels by members of our own species, to be traded and sold into the hands of people who quite obviously have no understanding of their needs and care.

Next, it is shameful that a man just released from jail on a firearms conviction, on whose property were found, I read, more than 100 other weapons, and who had received repeated visits from police in consequence of complaints about his mistreatment of the animals--it is shameful that our laws would not prevent such a man from being responsible for fifty or more wild animals; and that our law enforcement should be powerless to intervene until it was already too late.

And finally it is shameful that, as a consequence, we find ourselves reduced to our familiar solution of last resort: the use of firearms to inflict lethal punishment on the innocent. I am hard put to fault the law enforcement official who saw no other option when human lives were at stake. But there is even then a certain arrogance in our assumption of superiority over other species and the assertion of our right to dispose of them as we will.

At the very least, were we able to bring a little of the restraint of sanity and compassion to the exercise of our rightly cherished freedoms, we would manage to do a great deal less damage to the planet and our fellow-travelers through life.

HARD WORK

We were over at our daughter’s house yesterday afternoon, helping her with the preparations for the arrival of the newcomer in our family, due to arrive in just a few days’ time. Because she and her boyfriend (not really an adequate word, but what else is there?) have only recently moved into a new home, there is much that still remains unpacked from the moving boxes—most of which had taken up temporary residence in what is to be the baby’s room. We were impressed with their progress in settling in—until we took a peek into this one room, and found it stacked pretty much floor to ceiling with everything for which they had not yet found a place…

First, then, it was a matter of clearing some space—a task that initially involved displacing all the crates and boxes and setting them all down in the middle of the living room. From there, we had hoped to shift everything down to the basement, a trek that would take us through the kitchen, out through the back door, down the steps into the garden, and around to the basement door. Turns out, the basement was already pretty much chock-a-block with the no longer needed accumulation of two lives, and not in the kind of order I myself—being of a mostly orderly inclination—would have liked to find. No easy task, then, to find space for more. Added to which, decisions about what to keep and what to consign to storage are never easy, and proved particularly hard to make under the pressure of imminent need. We settled for more sorting than storing, creating, particularly, new stacks of boxes filled with books and setting them to one side. Would it be possible—affordable?—to arrange for adequate bookshelves to accommodate them all before the baby’s arrival? And if so, where would the bookshelves go? The dining room? The living room? The baby’s room? But then, consider the possibility of an earthquake…

Imponderable questions. There must have been a dozen boxes of books at least when we were done, rather more neatly and compactly filled, but still needing a provisional destination; they could not simply sit there on the living room floor indefinitely. Final decision, after much anguish: the shelves would have to wait. Space would have to be carved out in the basement, and the boxes carried down there one by one. I volunteered for the following afternoon—but was relieved, immensely, for my back, when Sarah told me this morning that Ed had put in the hard work overnight.

It’s a funny thing with books. We hang on to them—I should speak for myself, but I do think it’s a common phenomenon—we hang on to them long after we have read them and allow them accumulate dust for years on our shelves as though there were some possibility that we might read them again one day. An unlikely prospect, for the most part. I sometimes get it into my head to delve back into the work of a writer who has meant a lot to me along the way—a Marcel Proust, say, currently, after reading Edmund De Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes; or Michel de Montaigne. But I can remember few occasions when I have actually done so. I hear of people so inspired that they keep returning to a favorite text, but it’s not something I do myself. The books just sit there, until they overfill the shelves and need absolutely to be culled. Then they go into storage, where they lie in boxes, awaiting who knows what purpose or occasion.

Books, simply, are hard to give away, even though they do gather dust. My rare shelf-cleaning efforts soon have me in fits of sneezes and leave me, often, with dreadful headaches. So why do we keep them? Why, I should ask, do I insist on keeping them? They do have, on the one hand, a kind of decorative value in a home, and there is also a certain vanity at stake in putting the substance of my interior life on display. My books declare a lot about who I am. By the same token, I confess to examining other people’s shelves and making certain judgments about who they are. But I think it’s also in part because a library is the material record of our intellectual history: to throw books out would somehow feel like erasing some part of my memory banks—not to mention the association with sacrilegious book-burning.

Then, too, books feel like friends and colleagues: to cast them aside would feel like an act of personal betrayal. They are richer with associations and meanings than most of their fellow objects in the material world. They have character and personality, fresh-faced or worn; thick as your fist, and weighty, or skinny and light; extroverted and assertive, with bright, attention-getting covers, or mousy, secretive, internal. Some of them have been through hard times with me; many of them have brought joy into my life, along with the insights that have contributed to such small wisdom as I have come to possess. So, yes, I understand my daughter’s reluctance to part with them. And it we have to cling to something, books are surely a relatively benign addiction. It’s just a lot of hard work, when the time comes, to cart them about.

A BOOK REVIEW: "The Hare With Amber Eyes"

There are many excellent reasons for reading The Hare with Amber Eyes. Its author, Edmund De Waal, is known to the world as a fine ceramic artist, whose work is widely shown in museums and galleries. He is also an exceptionally fine writer, bringing an artist’s sensibility to this other medium: a meticulous attention to the detail of language, its rhythms and its evocative potential. Read the book for its exhaustive descriptions of interiors, whether bel époque Paris or Wiener Werkstatt Vienna; for its evocations of historical moments like fin de siecle France, or Austria at the time of its annexation by Hitler and his Nazis, or immediately post-war, bombed-out Tokyo; or for its compassionate portrayal of flawed and fascinating human characters. Read it as a four-generational family saga, or an insightful history of Europe from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Read it even, also, particularly, as a personal journey, an exploration into the complex world of family heritage—and inheritance.

I came to the book as the result of reading a column by Roger Cohen in the New York Times before we left for Europe last month, and ordered it in time to take it with us on our trip. But I didn’t get to actually read it until this past week. The column was called “The Netsuke Survived”, and Cohen’s description of the book intrigued me. It was a story of the survival—not only of a collection of Japanese netsuke...

(Image borrowed from the author's website)

... but of the European Jewish family through whose various hands it passed, the family of which De Waal, brought up as the son of an Anglican minister, was the barely informed scion. His research soon turned into an obsession that sidetracked him for two years from his own work as an artist.

The story, as it eventually revealed itself to him—and now, in turn, to us—is at once absorbing and increasingly moving as it progresses. The Ephrussi family, originally from Odessa, worked its way to fame and fortune in Paris and Vienna in the late 1800s. The fortune derived from its prodigious success in the banking business—a success that initially gave its members access to the social elites and the cultural salons. This part of the story involves associations and friendships with artists Renoir, Degas and others; with giants of the literary scene like Proust and the (virulently anti-Semitic) Goncourt brothers. Until “l’affaire Dreyfus,” and its opening of that deep vein of envy and distrust of Jews in French society—a time at which the family seemed suddenly to have outlived the welcome they had worked so hard to foster since arriving from the East. Once great and powerful social hosts and patrons of the arts, they found themselves all too soon personae a lot less grata. De Waal’s descriptive narrative places us there, in the center of it all, at this turbulent time.

The scene, along with ownership of the netsuke collection, shifts to pre-World War I Vienna and its social whirl, where another branch of the Ephrussi family has also established a foothold in the banking business; their massive mansion occupies a significant site on the Ringstrasse, and their role in the business and socio-economic establishment seems assured. They have become the proverbial pillars of society, living a life of extraordinary privilege and wealth. Patriots, too, they give generously of their wealth and power to their adopted country, serving with distinction in the military, supporting the war effort in every way, and sharing in the humiliation of defeat. They could scarcely have foreseen what the next decade would bring them in return: increasing distrust, suspicion, isolation and, all too soon, the arrival of the brutish Nazis and persecution, not only at the hands of the Gestapo but also those of their compatriots. We watch, aghast, as the family is brought to ruin. It's a dreadful lesson in impermanence

In the chaos, it is Anna, a faithful family retainer, who saves the netsuke collection from the hands of the invaders. They, with impunity, steal everything else—the art, the beloved books, the mansion, the bank, and eventually all traces of identity, dignity and security. One of the great strengths, I think, of De Waal’s account, is not to disguise the classism of the nouveaux-riches, not to minimize the extent of their wealth and privilege nor the excesses--and sometimes the frivolity--of their way of life. We understand, perhaps, a little more—though without in any way condoning—the angrily envious attitudes of the have-nots that laid open the way for an Adolph Hitler and his gang of murderers. (We also understand a little more about the problems that we face today, a century later, and their origins in a capitalist economy and its detractors.) But never, as we read, are we allowed to share that “got it coming to them” rage that led to the horrors of the Holocaust.

The penultimate chapter in the netsuke’s journey is in the country of their origin, Japan, where De Waal’s great uncle goes to take up residence after World War II and, along with the author, we reflect on that far country’s culture and the aesthetic that produced these tiny, intricate and meticulously crafted works of art. By the end of the book he himself is in possession of this family treasure—all that remains, aside from brittle letters and documents, of a great family and its history. It is a poignant end. In the course of his search, the author has found some important piece of his own humanity and a renewed sense of the value of those closest to him in their London home.

In all, this is a very rich and satisfying read. When in England, we felt compelled to make the pilgrimage to see "Splash," the current installation of De Waal’s art work at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The elegant, simple, even minimal shapes of his pure white pots, dozens of them in a staggered, uneven row, occupy the entire “whispering gallery,” the circular base of a dome on the top floor, in the museum’s wonderful ceramics department...

(The above images are borrowed from the artist's website.)

The installation requires a sharply raised head to gain even a distant glance at them. At this remove, they offer the viewer a sense of serenity, an appreciation for the beauty of form for its own sake, a stillness as remote as Keats’s Grecian urn. Their cool, insistently formal, abstract beauty contrasted curiously, I thought, with the intricate carving of the netsuke he describes in his book, and with its emotional intensity. Placed so far from the viewer’s eye, they do not invite the touch that clearly means so much to him in his relationship with the netsuke; on the other hand, the touch of the artist’s hand is clearly what defines their shape and presence, and their denial of it to the viewer is perhaps as powerful as the permission. Certainly, it brought attention to my own desire to know things in this way, through first-hand experience; and yet, as de Waal’s book shows, time alone deprives us of that possibility. There is much we must be content to know only at a distance, and through the mediation of one who cares enough to show us the way.

DAWN

Out this morning, early,

six-ish, for George’s

pee and poop walk.

Westward, the moon,

high in the sky, and bright,

and nearly round. I’d not,

I thought, mind a walk

up there, if managed

without fuss: the rockets,

the space suit, the lunar

landing module. Just me

and George, and a glance

back at our footprints

in the silver moon dust.

Meanwhile, to the east,

the first glow of sunrise.

Thin slips of high cloud,

pink-ish, ready for the dawn.

Grateful for all this

beauty of the firmament

we make our way back

home, the two of us, ready,

if not yet quite resigned,

for another earthbound day.

A POLITICAL NOTE

Please note my return, today, to Vote Obama 2012. I have been neglectful of this site over the summer, but am anxious to get back to it. Listening to the rhetoric of the Republican field, I am more than ever convinced that we need Obama's steady hand. I agree with those who express disappointment over those things he has not been able to achieve, but stand firm in the belief that a second term would allow him to do more--especially if backed up by greater numbers in the House and Senate. And I absolutely dread the alternative.

I would welcome your contributions to this blog, and will be on the watch for anything that supports this cause. I know that there are many of you out there like myself, who give Obama more credit than his detractors would allow. Send me your thoughts--it does not have to be a lengthy screed!--and I'll be happy to help you make your voice heard on Vote Obama 2012.

PST/OC

Robert Kinmont: 8 Natural Handstands, 1969/2009; nine black-and-white photographs; courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo: Bill Orcutt

Pacific Standard Time is ubiquitous these days. You couldn’t escape it even if you wanted to. Down here in Orange Country, where we have come for a week away from the city, there are a good number of don’t miss shows—including the one we saw yesterday at the Orange County Museum of Art. State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 was curated by Constance M. Lewallen and Karen Moss, and it’s a surprisingly comprehensive survey of the art growing out of the advent of “Conceptualism” in California. Surprising, because there was so much diverse activity at the time, with results ranging from the wildly funny (William Wegman, Paul McCarthy), to the absurdly irreverent (Lowell Darling), to the angrily and demonstratively political (the feminist artists, Chicanismo, the Vietnam war), to the socially conscious (Newton & Helen Harrison), and the perceptually challenging (Stephen Kaltenbach, whose “Raised Floor” was one of my favorites); and more often than not, a blend of all of them.

It was a moment, of course, when artists—particularly the young ones—were challenging every accepted notion about what constituted a work of art. They picked up where Dada had left off, in the 1920s, its energies channeled into the politer and more formally acceptable modes of Surrealism. 1970 was a mere ten years from the landmark retrospective devoted to the heritage of Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum. It was also the year that marked the transformation of L.A.’s traditional art school, Chouinard, a bastion of painting, sculpture and drawing, into the eagerly revolutionary, apostate CalArts at its new, temporary campus in Burbank. It was perhaps fortunate that Walt Disney had died a few years earlier; he must surely have been turning in his grave.

Not that CalArts was the only art school where ferment was happening. The University of California at Irvine was rapidly become another hotbed of dissent from traditional dogma—a story that is told at another Orange County venue, the Laguna Art Museum. And schools were not the only institutional targets of young revolutionaries: the perhaps not-so-venerable-after-all Los Angeles County Museum of Art, just recently divorced from the county’s Natural History Museum in 1965, was soon to come into the sights of neglected constituencies and their artists—African American, Chicano, women… No one, it seemed, was safe.

Linda Mary Montano: Chicken Dance: The Streets of San Francisco, 1972; performance documentation; courtesy of the artist, Saugerties, New York. Photo: Mitchell Payne.

“State of Mind” will surely bring all this rousing history to mind, as you progress from gallery to gallery, each one recalling an aspect of the cheerful disorder. There’s the sometimes painful “Body Art and Performance” (Chris Burden’s “Shoot”...

Chris Burden: Shoot, November 19, 1971; performance at F Space, Santa Ana, CA. Photo courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; gift of the Naify Family. Descriptive text for Shoot: At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.

... Barbara T. Smith, and others); “Public and Private Space” (Allen Ruppersberg’s “Grand Hotel”, Terry Allen), “Politics” (Martha Rosler, ASCO); “Perceptual and Psychological Space” (Paul Kos, Bruce Nauman, Kaltenbach); “Artistic Process, Language, and Wordplay” (John Baldessari, Tom Marioni, Wegman.) And for visitors too young to have been a part of it all, it’s an invaluable history lesson: they would not be doing what they are, no matter what form it takes, without this precedent.

Paul Kos: Sound of Ice Melting, 1970; installation view from Sound Sculpture As, April 30, 1970, Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco; installation with two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice, eight boom microphone stands, mixer, amplifier, two large speakers, and cables; 78 × 240 × 180 in.; courtesy of the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California.

The show is also a tribute to the diversity and energy of art in California. An article about Pacific Standard Time in yesterday’s New York Times makes mention of the West Coast’s reputed inferiority complex vis-à-vis New York. It may be news to New Yorkers, but we left that behind a long time ago.

Also on view at OCMA is Two Schools of Cool, an exhibit that pairs the vision of a… well, older bloke (Llyn Foulkes, John Baldessari, Ed Moses, George Herms, Allen Ruppersberg) with that of a much younger, emerging artist—Stanya Kahn, Shana Lutker, Robert Williams, Sarah Cain and Amanda Ross-Ho, respectively.) An interesting idea, but one that I personally found to be more fun than informative. The results felt more arbitrary, somehow, than organic—the most successful, in my view, being the Foulkes/Kahn contribution...

Stanya Kahn and Llyn Foulkes, Happy Song for You, 2011 [stills], color HD video with sound, 5:07 min.

Courtesy of the artists ©2011

... a blend of the weird and the wonderful, the banal and the horrific, of art and nature. It's a show that usefully demonstrates the continuity I mentioned earlier. The past, in art, is not easily forgotten. Nor should it be.

MIND WORK

I hope, today, you might hop on over to Persist: The Blog to read the revision of the preface for my new book, "Mind Work." Assuming all goes as planned, it will be available before long from Parami Press--the publisher of "Persist." I have been working to refine the book's focus, and the preface tries to put it all in the proverbial nutshell. I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts, either in the comments section or via email...

Art Saturday, Part II

We left off this narrative on an exquisitely beautiful afternoon in the Robert Irwin garden at the Getty. There was much more we could have done there, including the exhibition Luminous Paper: British Watercolors & Drawings which I would much like to have seen. Another time. We had already decided to extend our trip west--we do not often get out to this part of town these days--to see the Leon Kossoff show at LA Louver gallery in Venice. We were not disappointed. The British painter is now in his mid-80s, and there's something about the authority and maturity of age, a certain abandonment of all concerns and demands but those of the painting, an assurance that could care less about any aesthetic correctness that allows the artist perfect freedom to lay it all out on the canvas. Kossoff's palette is now remarkably subdued, but the brushwork is powerful and unhesitant; the familiar, heavily impasto'ed surfaces are in constant agitation, exciting to the eye and requiring the mind to participate in the creation of the image. There are landscapes here...

(all images are borrowed with acknowledgement from the galleries' websites)

... and portraits...

and images of cathedral facades...

... that call to mind those paintings Monet made of Rouen Cathedral. Kossoff's work reminds us of that traditional strain of British painters that resisted the grand sweep of American-led abstraction and retained its own values through the turbulent twentieth century. Wordsworth's words also come to mind: "emotion recollected in tranquillity."

There's something of that same masterful quality in the work of Robert Irwin--yes, the same Robert Irwin who designed that lovely garden at the Getty--at the relatively new and quietly spectacular L & M Arts gallery, also in Venice, a stone's throw from LA Louver. This gallery's current New York show, Dan Flavin, Three Works, featuring that pioneer of art employing colored neon tubes, is complemented here in their California branch by Robert Irwin, Way Out West...

... in which we find another artist of mature years working with a medium that has held his attention since his earliest years: light.

I found the work quite beautiful, functioning in somewhat the same way as the stained glass windows in those magnificent cathedrals; for lack of a better word, I'd want to talk about a kind of "spiritual" glow that requires some time to seep into the soul. The immediate impact of such upfront technology-dependent work can seem cold and affect-less, particularly coming straight from the hands-on emotionality of a Leon Kossoff painting. I like the Irwin work more in retrospect, oddly, than in their immediate presence. I find that they resonate more warmly in my memory.

That same evening, we bestirred ourselves late evening to hit the road once again--this time heading to nearby Echo Park where our daughter, now eight-and-a-half months pregnant, was scheduled to play a gig at Lot 1. She scarcely fit in behind her drums, but still managed a stirring performance with her boyfriend Ed and their band, the Pick-Up Sticks. So good to hear them play with such passion and, they too, with a growing sense of authority and ease. The pictures and videos I took with my I-Phone did not turn out well enough to show. Apologies!

THE GETTY: PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

It's a hectic time for the art enthusiast in Los Angeles. Last weekend, on our return from our travels, we managed to make a jet-lagged visit to Art Platform, only one of the art fairs opening that weekend--and one of the best such events in memory: a fine, international representation of galleries, almost all of whom had brought with them excellent work. Art fairs are usually, in my experience, rather dreary commercial affairs. This one was refreshingly stimulating and of consistently high quality. We're hoping it will make a return visit next year. The opening of Pulse was regrettably the same evening, and we simply lacked the energy for both. I did hear good things about the latter, too.

In addition to the fairs, there's significant activity in the galleries, many of them piggy-backing on the much-anticipated Pacific Standard Time, an initiative involving "over sixty cultural institutions... coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene." Right. I'll be planning to report on some of these events and exhibitions in the coming months. They cover pretty much the art activity in this part of the world since 1945. I myself arrived in Southern California after the the first two great waves--the hard-edge abstract painters and the "young Turks" of the early sixties, whose flagship was the landmark Ferus Gallery--but felt almost a part of the latter through my association with my wife, Ellie Blankfort and her family: Ellie's parents had been much involved from the late 1950s as art mavens and collectors of those who were, at that time, still the young and the unknown--artists like Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, Wallace Berman and George Herms. Ellie herself opened up a gallery showing the even younger and still more unknown in the early 1970s, and acquired a fine reputation for her eye and the quality of the artists she chose to represent. And it was around that time that I started writing about the art I saw around me in the galleries, and even edited a couple of issues of the LAICA Journal--the publication of the most serious of the alternative spaces that sprang up around L.A. So I feel a strong personal connection with what is now being celebrated.

So many different aspects to be explored, some relatively modest but no less interesting than the big museum shows. One such opened up last week at our friends Amy Inouye and Stuart Rapeport's Future Studio in Highland Park--a great little pocket of art activity just north of downtown Los Angeles off the Pasadena Freeway. They were too late in their planning to hop aboard the PST bandwagon, but their show, "Gang of Carp: Ephemera," is a trove of fascinating historical material from the archives of Carp, an alternative arts program run by Marilyn Nix and Barbara Burden in Venice, CA, in the 1970s--photos, postcards, letters and other material from the work of such then young artists as Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Kim Jones, Alexis Smith and others, who were just emerging on the art scene. They were still installing when we visited, and we were unable to make it to the show's opening, but we did see enough to get a good flavor of the time.

With obviously far more extensive resources, the Getty has also put together an exhibition of ephemera under the title Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics, 1950-1980 at the Research Center. The Getty...

(this is a seductive Charles Ray sculpture on the grand entry steps) ... spearheaded the Pacific Standard Time initiative, and will be providing important leadership in the overall exhibition programs in the course of the coming months.) We started there on our visit, Saturday, and were happy to have done so. The show digs into the museum's extensive archives, documenting not only the artists and their efforts to develop a new public for their work, but also the significant contribution of dealers and curators, critics and collectors. The Women's movement and the Vietnam War both left their mark and these, too, are included in the exhibition. Having known many of the people--and indeed collaborated with not a few of them--it was a pleasure to get reacquainted and be reminded of the role they played.

From "Greetings," we scooted across the Getty campus to the main exhibition area, where Cross Currents in L. A. Painting & Sculpture, 1950-197o, the first in a series of shows covering the blossoming of L.A.-based art in the post-WWII period. No photography, but there's access to plenty of images at the website. I've heard that there are a number of artists who feel they should have been included, but in general it's a carefully selected and well-defined collection, starting with a wonderful gallery covering the work of hard-edge abstractionists: John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Karl Benjamin and others. There was a time when these artists were widely and too glibly discredited or, worse, ignored. But the glow and poise of these works is a veritable pleasure for the eye. Beautiful, yes. And why not?

The next room brings together artifacts by assemblage artists, a number of them associated with the Semina circle inspired by the late Wallace Berman--including Bruce Conners, George Herms, Ed Bereal, Melvin Edwards, Kienholz and Betye Saar. Moving through the next galleries, it's also a pleasure to meet old friends like David Hockney's "A Bigger Splash" and Ed Ruscha's "Standard Station"--an icons of the 1960s Pop Art ; and to revisit some fine works by Bengston, Craig Kauffman, Ken Price, DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Judy Chicago and others loosely identified with the so-called "Finish Fetish" and "Light & Space" schools--certainly not schools at all, but the terms are comfortable and familiar enough to set the scene. And more painterly works by Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Moses, Joe Goode and others. All in all a satisfying and eminently pleasurable show, small enough to enjoy without exhaustion and yet surprisingly exhaustive.

We made our way around the southern end of the museum with its spectacular views...

... and across the courtyard to the Getty's airy restaurant...

... with its interior spaces disarmingly decorated with food-related art by Alexis Smith, an absorbing, tongue in cheek challenge to the whole idea of "decoration" and still holding its own in the years since the museum's opening. Our close-quarters neighbor at the next table was inveighing cheerfully against "Cross Currents," pronouncing it too California for his New York taste; not enough there there, if I understood him right. Pretty much dismissing Southern California art wholesale. Which gave us the opportunity to reflect on the personal nature of aesthetic prejudices and expectations, on how tastes are formed and, once that happens, how hard it is to reach beyond them into art that is different or new. In my old "One Hour/One Painting" series, in which I invited participants to sit with me in front of a single painting for a full hour--not talking about it, but simply looking at it, with my guidance--the first thing I asked of them was to drop all the expectations they brought with them about what art should look like, along with everything they knew about what they liked or disliked. To clean, as it were, the eye and freshen up the mind. Those sessions were a great success. I regret that I have not had the opportunity to offer more of them in the past few years.

After lunch, back to work on PST with three single-artist contributions: an entryway installation, "Black on White" by Robert Irwin, a quiet, quasi-anonymous presence greeting museum visitors and guiding them subtly into the main plaza; Bruce Nauman's "Four Corner Piece"--a solid white block with video cameras placed in such a way that perambulating visitors would catch mere tantalizing glimpses of themselves as they navigate the central square, hugging the high white walls along the way; and "From Start to Finish: DeWain Valentine's Gray Column," a fascinating documentation of the process involved in creating that monumental polyester resin wedge...

... and the challenges faced by conservators in maintaining its surface perfection.

Once done with the exhibitions, we took some time to walk through the Robert Irwin garden, now gorgeously filled out around the central maze of low hedges set in the circular water treatment...

The garden, like the museum, was quite crowded, but seemed quite able to cope comfortably with large numbers of people. What struck me particularly was the number of smiles: everyone seemed genuinely uplifted by the experience of spending their day with art, and artful nature, on a glorious fall day with clear skies and Southern California sunshine. And why not?

This was by no means the end of our Saturday, but is more than enough to fill today's page of The Buddha Diaries. More to come...