Local Art Seen: Eris Vafias and Dissonance @ Pizza Luce

Pizza Luce's featured artist for the month of March is Eris Vafias of Superior. Though unable to attend Wednesday's opening reception I was able to swing by yesterday mid-morning to share here what I missed.

Eris has been orchestrating the numerous Artist Kamikaze events that have taken place in the Twin Points, a competition involving the pairing of artists of dissimilar mediums around a specific pre-determined themes. 

Looking at the various paintings and multimedia assemblages brings to mind echoes of several 20th century artists. Some of the paintings bring to mind Cy Twombly's later work, and the free-flowing loops with colored sections brings to mind some of the Spanish modernist Joan Miro's abstract designs.

I see Miro.

Black and white linear forms on a more subtle textured colorless field.

Lively and living organic forms.

Foreground and background fluidity scurries about with  endless motion.

Detail from the above.

Detail- from another piece hearkens back organic designs from the natural world.

This last painting has imagery from the ancient game of chess and today's Tetris. The chess pieces stand in what appears to be the opening stage of a duel, just before the duelists have been instructed to take 20 paces. The color scheme has natural sources, earth tones, slate and sky, It's the beginning of a longer story. It could even be a post-modern romp on Thomas Eakins' The Chess Players or Duchamps later years of immersion in the chess diversion, most famously depicted in Julian Wasser''s photo of Duchamp playing chess with Eve Babitz.

* * * *

Reminder: Tonight Marah in the Mainsail will be performing at The Red Herring and The Jane Gang will be playing at the Keyport at 5:00 p.m.

* * * *

Meantime life goes on all around you. Get into it.

Throwback Thursday: White Space and Other Diversions

"Creativity takes courage." ~Matisse

One of the hardest things in writing is a blank piece of paper. Much has been written about it, as the mind races around trying to decide what to put down as the all important first sentence.

In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote that he dislikes seeing a blank canvas. When he sees one he feels obligated to smear paint on it, and I know exactly what he means.

In painting, before you can really do the work you have to do the prep. Once you get the surface ready (if canvas, with gesso) you still want to paint a neutral undercoat of some kind. At least, this is one approach that is common. It certainly doesn't apply if you are pouring stain onto a canvas like Louis Morris, but in traditional painting, that background undercoat helps set the tone.

So, I'm staring at a box here where I am to write today's blog entry and I don't know where to go with it. Should I jump outside the box and write a string of absurd sentences about colons and dashboards or steering columns and carcinoma? Or do we follow this train we're on to some kind of logical conclusions?

I just deleted one direction this could have gone. Let's head southeast for a moment. No, wait, maybe west. Oh, never mind.

So, I am having an art opening this week on Tuesday evening. One of the pieces is a Tribute to Duchamp who said, "I am interested in ideas, not merely visual products." Thus was born the concept of conceptual art. The Tribute piece is an item I found at a garage sale for a buck, which if I were famous might garner ten thousand. The current price is, "To Highest Bidder."

The irony is that young people, and maybe even older ones, have never heard of Duchamp, or the urinal on display in a Philadelphia gallery (Fountain). They do not know Magritte, Matisse or any of the most prominent artists who initially steered the direction of 20th century art away from representationalism.

Another irony: I began my college studies moving in the direction of philosophy (ideas) but found art more appealing because you ended up with a visual product. So Duchamp pushed art in one direction (conceptual), but pure idea as an end had to return to earth in some form... whether it be paintings or perhaps in acts of service to one's neighbors, community, etc.

Think about it. Then express yourself.

19 July 2009

* * * * 
“With everything emptying into white.”

White Space

It was a white space, and I didn't know what to put there.

First I started to write about Free Trade. I tried to make a connection between post-World War I economics and the rise of Hitler. Discarding that, I made a lame attempt to falteringly present with varying degrees of interest and disinterest
in no particular order the relationship between line and form, a digression on Hollywood one-liners, the origin of panpipes,
Dylan’s debutants, kitsch, ambiguity, the Zeitgeist, Perry Mason’s undiminished cool, the man with rose-colored eyes, and the genius of Sitting Bull.

These, too, failed to get me jazzed and the center would not hold.
So we’re back… to the white space.

22 October 2010 

Dali's Christ of Saint John of the Cross Is on the Move

Low res reproduction used with permission.

In every field of endeavor there are dozens or even hundreds of names that are familiar to those who follow that sport or discipline, but only a handful whose names are actually commonly recognized by all. For example, in boxing, Muhammed Ali. Maybe Joe Louis. In baseball Joe Dimaggio became a national symbol of something bigger than baseball. In soccer, how many household names are there? Yet most people, when the hear the name Pele would associate it soccer.

In architecture there's Frank Lloyd Wright, but how many others are household names? (Howard Roark doesn't count.)

So it is that though there are thousands of 20th century artists written up in the art magazines, you can probably count on one hand the majors known by all: Picasso, Warhol, Duchamp and Dali.* Even Duchamp may be questionable, despite the fact that some art historians cite him as the most significant of these big four for having pulled the thread that unravelled modern art, resulting in art's post-modern demise. (Basquiat my now be more memorable today than even Duchamp only because a Hollywood film highlighted him, a film that featured another pop culture emblem, David Bowie.)

All this to say that if you're in London in October, there will be a major show featuring two of these art luminaries, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali. Today's Art Daily features a story about moving Dali's Christ of Saint John of the Cross from it's home in Glasgow to London for this major show. If you click on the link it will give you a sense of the scale of this painting.

Note the dramatic angle of the cross and the figure suspended there. It hovers as if parallel to the earth, and yet the vertical post points to this body of water, which you might imagine to be the Sea og Galilee, though in point of fact it is the bay of Port Lligat where Dali lived at the time.

When Dali painted this piece in 1951-52 he said the image came to him "in a 'cosmic dream' in which I saw this image in colour and which in my dream represented the 'nucleus of the atom.' This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it 'the very unity of the universe,' the Christ!"" **

If you draw lines from the hands to the feet it forms a triangle, which represents the Trinity. The head forms a circle in the middle of the triangle, representing the unity of all things.

What I find interesting is how the artist was not taken seriously by many art critics when he painted this. They labeled it "kitsch", which when I was an art school student in Ohio was pretty much the ultimate insult, comparing it to cheap paintings of Elvis on velour that you might find in tourist shops. Because it wasn't "far out" like much of his other work one critic said it was a stunt.

For a good read on the role of critics, check out this story in the Guardian on who decides what constitutes art?

One of the truly great painters of the past century, it's a privilege to have the Dali Museum located in the U.S. within a stone's throw of another mecca of contemporary life, Disney World. St. Petersburg is adjacent to Tampa, and a worthwhile destination there is the Dali Museum. You will not see Christ of Saint John of the Cross there, but you will see plenty to blow your mind, as the saying goes.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Get into it.

*It's interesting how one of the signs of a person's pop worth is that we call them by a single name, eg. Dylan
** I, too, had an image to me in a dream which I sketched afterward and called The God House. Writing about this here has served to prod me to consider following through on that painting some day.

Throwback Thursday: Themes

When I began this blog in 2007 I decided that one way to set it apart would be to combine my writing with art that I created. As time when on the illustrations and paintings I'd been creating led one of my readers to suggest having an art show featuring the art. I'd not had an art show since college and since a space was offered I took him up on it. I titled the show First Hand Experiences. As it turns out I hung more that 120 pieces in that show, and even sold a few. Here is the blog post I wrote in July 2009 regarding the artwork displayed that month in Duluth's West End.

"A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing." ~William Dobell

A lot of people have asked me if my show has a theme, or what kind of art I do. It was always hard to answer that since my work goes in a lot of directions. Eventually, I came to answer that my paintings and drawings were "in the modernist style." It is not classical, baroque or art nouveau, nor is it realism, landscape or still life. I can't call it abstract because much of it is representational to some extent. Certainly the portraits of Lincoln and Sitting Bull are straight up portraits.

As for themes, we have a friend who does gnomes. And some people do flowers. In American art, the major themes might include scenes from everyday life, historical subjects, abstract art, landscapes. Jackson Pollock did the large splatter paintings which brought him fame and fortune in the modern art world. Warhol did screen printing with images from pop culture, creating iconic reproductions of Marilyn Monroe, electric chairs and soup cans.

Although the styles in this show vary, one can't help but notice upon deeper reflection that certain themes emerge. One of these is the theme of suffering. We live in a broken world. Pieces like Scars Remain and Chase Ends In Suicide show the chaos of our culture, and paintings like Grief and Sad Clown likewise show the personal impact this brokenness has.

Another theme, which may or may not be immediately recognized, is the underlying sense of the comic. I like making funny pictures, and also enjoy toying with people a little. My found art piece Tribute to DuChamp was intended to bring a wry smile to art connoisseurs, though I have now learned that the average person no longer knows who DuChamp was. Nearly everyone gets a kick out of The Great Escape, a small brush and ink drawing of a man crawling on hands and knees, a guilty expression on his face.

The most important thing to me is that people who visit the show take time to engage each piece, which might be an impossibility in light of the quantity. Someone once said that "the holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it." I can relate to that. I'm honored when people get drawn in, engage, interact. Too much of life is lived on the surface, and so it is that once in a while we need to get jarred, to be made to pause, to reflect... not only on the piece, but on that which is occurring within our selves.

Maybe I'm just trying to share a little about what I like to do when I get away from it all while others go fishing. Some people might just call it glorified doodling. For me, making art satisfies a need. Sharing what I've created, and seeing other people enjoy it, satisfies a second.

Have a great day! Hopefully the rain will have stopped when you walk from your cars to the show tonight.

The Leisure Class and the Arts

Every now and then I make observations that I do not know fully how to process. One of these is in relation to our notions of wealth and poverty, and especially wealth and the arts.

It occurred to me as I was reading the diaries of Andre Gide that his "situation" was far different than mine. The Nobel Prize winning French author produced 80 books, many of which were self-published small circulation pieces that were shared with friends. Some diary entries mentioned playing piano for six hours during the day. When he traveled to Tunisia he had fourteen large trunks of belongings. In short, he was not like me. He was from a different class of people.

Having last weekend visited the Duchamp collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art stimulated questions about the man who many acknowledge now to be the most influential artist of the twentieth century. The Duchamp story is interesting because he achieved so much fame, created such a stir in his earlier life and then abandoned it all to play chess for the second half of his life.

It made me ask questions as regarding his employment, or rather how he supported himself. Some would call playing chess all the time the same as being a do-nothing. I find it astonishing that he did this amazing work before World War I commenced and yet lived quietly out of the public eye right through to the Viet Nam War, passing away in October 1968.

The phrase "leisure class" came to mind and I decided to see what Google had to offer. First, this desciption from Answers.com.

Consuming, parasitic class, represented by an idle elite engaged in continuous public demonstration of their status. Idea particularly associated with the American sociological economist, Thorstein Veblen, who published The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899. Veblen saw the fundamental human motive as the maximization of status rather than orientation towards any monetary variable. In establishing status, expenditure was more important than income, enhanced status being often achieved by ‘conspicuous consumption’. Thus a leisure class comes into being which dominates and trivializes leisure within a culture, though this pattern of consumption may be a necessary feature of the working of the economic system. Veblen's theories belong in the category of critical analysis of consumer society, a form of discourse embracing such writers as Lewis Mumford, J. K. Galbraith, and J. B. Priestley. — Lincoln Allison 

This passage lead me to Veblen himself and this passage from Wikipedia.

The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), by Thorstein Veblen, is an economic treatise and detailed social critique of conspicuous consumption, as a function of social-class consumerism, which proposes that the social strata and the division of labor of the feudal period continued into the modern era. The lords of the manor employed themselves in the economically useless practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, whilst the middle and lower classes were employed in the industrial occupations that support the whole of society; economically wasteful activities are those activities that do not contribute to the economy or to the material productivity required for the fruitful functioning of society. (emphasis mine)

As for Duchamp, his obsession with chess was all part of his mystique. On one occasion he went to Buenos Aires for nine months and played chess with game pieces he carved himself. He actually became a Chess Master, and algorithms of all his games were fed into a computer so that you yourself can play against Duchamp (or what purports to be his strategic play) online today. Here's how the invitation reads...

Marcel Duchamp is widely recognized for his contribution to conceptual art, but his lifelong obsession was the game of chess, in which he achieved the rank of Master. Working with the records of his chess matches, I have created a computer program to play chess as if it were Marcel Duchamp. I invite all artists, skilled and unskilled at this classic game, to play against a Duchampian ghost.

Do you want to play Duchamp?

As for the "leisure class"... which bears a striking resemblance to one percenters, what painter would not like to have a patron who has oodles of money to buy up one's works? Well, think again. Some of these are people with so much money that a forty million dollar Picasso doesn't make a dent in their pocketbooks. Why would they buy your art when they can own a Warhol? If they bought everything you have ever created, they would then simply have a problem of knowing where to store it all. And that would not be very conspicuous, would it?

For what it's worth, most of us who wish to make art need to support ourselves with other vocations. And that may not be a bad thing. It keeps us in the loop was regard what is really going on in the human race.

Hope your weekend is a great one. Do something creative. And keep in touch.

Disclaimer: The author of these blog entries is both an amateur philosopher and amateur art historian.

The Creative Act

“Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes posterity.” ~Marcel Duchamp

In 1957 Marcel Duchamp gave a speech at the meeting of the American Federation of the Arts. The roundtable consisted of several other notables from Princeton and elsewhere. Duchamp referred to himself as a “mere artist.”

Whereas today there is a kind of leveling going on where we find voices exclaiming that every artist’s work is important and significant, DuChamp came down heavy on the other side.

“Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity," He said.

“In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Art History.”

Duchamp concludes, after refining and defining the “art coefficient,” that the creative act is not performed by the artist alone, but rather that the spectator brings the work into a new place in the world by “deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” Ultimately, posterity itself gives a final verdict “and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.”

It's now more than fifty years later, and the verdict regarding Duchamp is unchanged. His "significance" according to art historians, is paramount. How did this happen? Like many things in life, it's partly who you know, partly where you go. Hence, actors and actresses flock to Broadway and Hollywood. As Sinatra sang, of New York, "If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere."

This is why pure conceptual art must be mediated in order to win over what might be an otherwise confused public. Art critics help explain what the work means, why it is important to the person creating the piece and why it was important enough for this gallery to house it. Art journalism helps broaden the reach of an artist as well. Art magazines, and now online artist communities, help explain the foundational ideas that support the artist's work and put that work into its larger historical context.

Every creative act, birthed as it is within a context, has significance. But not every creative expression is created equal. The picture of a robin scribbled in a fourth grade elementary school art class may show excitement and even a measure of giftedness in the youthful student, but it cannot possibly be said to have the same importance as Gaugin's "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" The mother of that student may disagree, but Duchamp stands on the other side in this matter.

In the meantime, if you get a chance, tomorrow evening there's an art opening at Ochre Ghost, Irresistible Sorcery: new work by Jessica Liszewski, 6 p.m. till ten. Hope to see you there.

Duchamp Speaks

Libraries are great. A couple weeks ago I found a 1960 gem called The Artist's Voice by Katharine Kuh. Imagine having an opportunity to meet and talk with Pablo Picasso, Josef Albers, Georgia O'Keefe, Alexander Calder or Hans Hofmann. Sounds like a dream assignment to me. For those of you not students of modern art history, a few names in this book might be obscure, but for those who have been involved in the arts in any semi-serious manner the seventeen artists interviewed here by Ms. Kuh are movers and shakers. It is an impressive collection of interviews.

What's impressive is how these artists talk with such easy informality, with none of the pretentious mumbo jumbo we can sometimes get from art critics or might expect from people in the arts. They're just real people being themselves.
Kuh, an art consultant and curator, leveraged her connections to bring about a truly wonderful book which has now been reprinted for a new generation.

While an art student at Ohio U. in the early 70's Marcel Duchamp's work made an impression on us, though his limited output also left me confused. (All three of his brothers were artists also, by the way, two of them painters.) And what was that two year name change to Rrose Selavy all about? ("Eros, c'est la vie" it turns out.)

The meaning of his work has been endlessly dissected one wonders what the original artists were thinking. Kuh's dialogues with Duchamp, Tobey, Picasso give us an opportunity to hear them in their own words. It also makes you realize that too often we interpret interpretations without ever really engaging what is going on. I'm not so sure Duchamp had his tongue so firmly in cheek as late 20th century analysts extrapolate. To some extent he was joking with us, but that was part of the point. Don't take it all so seriously.

When asked by Ms. Kuh about his decision to move away from the physical aspects of painting, Duchamp discusses the retinal approach to making pictures and how artists had become liberated from having to be employees of patrons or the rich and were now free individuals who could negotiate as equals with collectors. This liberation initially took the form of impressionism, but was evolving. "One hundred years of the retinal approach is enough," he said. "Earlier, paint was always a means to an end, whether the end was religious, political, social, decorative or romantic. Now it's become an end in itself. This is a far more important problem than whether art is figurative or not."

When asked about the influence of modern machines and science on his work, Duchamp began by stating, "People living in a machine age are naturally influenced either consciously or unconsciously by the age they live in." No question this observation is as true today as ever, resulting in our digital arts and multimedia technologies. Technology has not only made an impact on how artists make and share their art, but also on how we encounter and interact with art... at least some of its forms.

If you have an interest in 20th century art, the book is highly recommended.

Image right is his famously controversial Nude Descending a Staircase.

Themes

"A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing." ~William Dobell

A lot of people have asked me if my show has a theme, or what kind of art I do. It was always hard to answer that since my work goes in a lot of directions. Eventually, I came to answer that my paintings and drawings were "in the modernist style." It is not classical, baroque or art nouveau, nor is it realism, landscape or still life. I can't call it abstract because much of it is representational to some extent. Certainly the portraits of Lincoln and Sitting Bull are straight up portraits.

As for themes, we have a friend who does gnomes. And some people do flowers. In American art, the major themes might include scenes from everyday life, historical subjects, abstract art, landscapes. Jackson Pollock did the large splatter paintings which brought him fame and fortune in the modern art world. Warhol did the screen printing work with its focus on pop culture, creating iconic images of Marilyn Monroe and soup cans.

Although there is a variety of styles in this show, one can't help but notice upon deeper reflection that certain themes emerge. One of these is the theme of suffering. We live in a broken world. Pieces like Scars Remain and Chase Ends In Suicide show the chaos of our culture, and a paintings like Grief and Sad Clown likewise show the personal impact this brokenness has.

Another theme, which may or may not be immediately recognized, is the underlying sense of the comic. I like making funny pictures, and also enjoy toying with people a little. My found art piece Tribute to DuChamp was intended to bring a wry smile to art connoisseurs, though I have now learned that most people do not know who DuChamp was any more. Nearly everyone gets a kick out of The Great Escape, a small brush and ink drawing of a man crawling on his knees with a guilty expression.

The most important thing to me is that people who walk the show take time to engage each piece, which might be an impossibility in light of the quantity. Someone once said that "the holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it." I can relate to that. I'm honored when people get drawn in, engage, interact. Too much of life is lived on the surface, and so it is that once in a while we need to get jarred, to be made to pause, to reflect... not only on the piece, but on that which is occurring within themselves as they engage the piece.

Or maybe I'm just trying to share a little about what I like to do when I get away from it all while others go fishing. Some people might just call it glorified doodling. It satisfies a need. Sharing my work, and seeing people enjoy it, satisfies a second.

Have a great day! Hopefully the rain will have stopped when you walk from your cars to the show tonight.

"Creativity takes courage." ~Matisse

One of the hardest things in writing is a blank piece of paper. Much has been written about it, as the mind races around trying to decide what to put down as the all important first sentence.

In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote that he dislikes seeing a blank canvas, and when he sees one he feels obligated to smear paint on it. And I know exactly what he means.

In painting, before you can really do the work you have to do the prep. Once you get the surface ready (if canvas, with gesso) you still want to paint a neutral undercoat of some kind. At least, this is one approach that is common. It certainly doesn't apply if you are pouring stain onto a canvas like Louis Morris, but in traditional painting, that background undercoat helps set the tone.

So, I am staring at a box here where I am to write today's blog entry and I don't know where to go with it. Should I jump outside the box and write a string of absurd sentences about colons and dashboards or steering columns and carcinoma? Or do we follow this train we're on to some kind of logical conclusions?

I just deleted one direction this could have gone. Let's head southeast for a moment. No, wait, maybe west. Oh, never mind.

So, I am having an art opening this week on Tuesday evening. One of the pieces is a Tribute to Duchamp who said, "I am interested in ideas, not merely visual products." Thus was born the concept of conceptual art. The Tribute piece is an item I found at a garage sale for a buck, which if I were famous might garner ten thousand. The current price is, "To Highest Bidder."

The irony is that young people, and maybe even older ones, have never heard of Duchamp, or the urinal on display in a Philadelphia gallery (found art). They do not know Magritte, Matisse or any of the most prominent artists who initially steered the direction of 20th century art away from representationalism.

Another irony: I began my college studies moving in the direction of philosophy (ideas) but found art more appealing because you ended up with a visual product. So Duchamp pushed art in a direction, but pure idea as an end has to return to earth in some form... whether it be paintings or perhaps in acts of service to one's neighbors, community, etc.

Think about it. Then express yourself.

Terrorists Preying

It is Short Story Monday. This is the first section of the story I wrote about here on this blog last Friday. After sharing the first portion of this story with a professor and writer of fiction from Chapel Hill NC, I was encouraged by the words, "a good beginning." He suggested I develop it into a much longer piece. This is that first section.

Terrorists Preying
c 1992, ed newman

"The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." ~ Bruce Nauman

Although I'd been an art major in college -- mostly painting and drawing -- I became discouraged with it shortly after graduation and gave it up. I was living with my family on Long Island at the time and for some while afterwards I still visited the New York art galleries, making regular tours of the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Modern.

What finally got me out of art was the whole directionlessness of it all. No one seemed to know what art was about any more. DuChamp started it, of course, with his Readymades. It took the rest of the world a half century to catch on. Everything was art, the critics were saying. For myself, their steel-firm logic stubbornly taunted everything I'd built my life around, leaving me creatively disabled, impotent, and broken down. In the end, I became the essence of minimalism, and ceased to exist.

After leaving Long Island in 197-, I knocked about various parts of the Midwest until by some circuitous route I ended up in Minnesota. I hadn't been to an art gallery in nearly ten years when I finally decided, while living here in Minneapolis, that I should check out the Walker. By chance I had picked up some Twin Cities rag and saw mention of a show that included new work by Les Garnet, with whom I had shared a studio at Tyler where I'd gone to school in Philadelphia. Les was a small town Ohio hick who back in '72 got mesmerized by the Big Apple and turned freak, getting his hair kinked, wearing snakeskin boots and finding his way into the weird world of fashion design. On the side, he maintained a loft in SoHo, which was fashionable at the time, and began doing a lot of work with sprayers.

I remember how Les kept saying he hated the city and would one day get a farm in the country, but the review of his current show gave every indication that he and Kyle Benders -- it was a joint show -- were New Yorkers through and through. The review referred to Garnet and Benders as being in the forefront of New York's "New Breed Movement." Their work was described as "serious" and "provocative." The reviewer went on to praise their "refusal to compromise when dealing with the real issues of our time." Mention was also made of the "myopic vision of our age.

"Was this the same Les Garnet with whom I had painted at Tyler? I kicked myself for missing the opening -- he surely would have been there -- yet looked forward with eagerness to visiting the exhibition of Les' work as soon as possible nonetheless. I decided I would explore the Walker that following Sunday and experience first hand the hottest new trends in modern art.

Sunday afternoon. As I casually made my way through the Walker, I was impressed by the well-represented selection of Modern works, including pieces by nearly all the "names" of our century. The Chuck Close piece was strikingly placed. A prominent Frankenthaler, somber Rothkos, a colorful Morris Louis, some Pop art and kitsch by Lichtenstein and Warhol, pieces by Albers, Poons, Rauschenburg -- all these marvelous pieces hanging out together like an old gang.
They left their mark on all of us, the young painters who flowed through art schools in search of answers to the Big Q, "What is Art?" These are those who provided versions of the answer, annotated, up-dated, and outmoded, inebriating us with inframaddening inferences, delicious anti-art sentiments, and godlike gestures; fanciful creations that were probably not always authentic in their pretensions. So be it. I drank of that well and, for a time, it satisfied.

Had I not been seeking it, I may not have found the New Breed show at all, as it had been tucked away in a special gallery on another floor at the top of an unmarked flight of stairs. No doubt this would explain why there was no one else present to witness or experience what I was about to witness.

Entering the gallery, I noticed a small holder stuffed with silver brochures and I took one.

- Imitation Reality -
A Preview of Recent Works

by Kyle Benders and Les Garnet

Sponsored by The Walker Museum of Fine Arts

in conjunction with the "Best of Show" Modern Arts Series

Itself a very attractive piece, this silver chromecote brochure radiated slick sophistication, with its blazing blood red letters laying down the challenge, Imitation Reality, implying there's more here than meets the eye. I was ready. Still, I've never understood how the critics, the press and the galleries could take these guys so seriously.

Then I saw their work.

The first thing to capture my attention upon entering, on a wall directly opposite from where I'd been standing, was a series of eight or ten large framed pieces which gave the appearance of being the most grotesque color enlargements from a medical encyclopedia, body parts with the skin removed, infected with cancerous tumors but somehow distorted. The images were super-realistic, as if actual photographs, though the legend stated they were mixed media and non-representational. Title for the series: "Man's Essence in the Age of Science."I turned away and chose to find something else to dwell on.

There were a number of small paintings on the wall behind me and a number of unusual three dimensional constructions in various sections of the room. To my left there was a very large painting that was obviously Les' work, but before losing myself in it I was tantalized by the holographic image that was set before it. On a thick patch of lush grass knelt a life-sized image of a woman, a woman in motion, removing her robe in the most provocative way imaginable. She was kneeling with her back to the room so that one had to walk around to her other side to really see what men long to see, but as soon as I began to walk alongside her, she drew the robe back up over her shoulders and modestly bowed her head. The holographic scene was absolutely stunning in its effect and I walked around it twice to see if there were any way to gain access to some secret vision, and failing. I couldn't imagine how it was done. When I walked behind her, she slid the robe off her shoulders again and was about to let it drop. Yet when I stepped again to her side, she once more began pulling the robe back up over her shoulders.

The whole scene left me both amazed and amused at the clever use to which modern technology had been put in this provocative demonstration.

When I at last turned, I found myself standing beneath and before an exceptionally large canvas titled "The Light" and I saw what it was before which this woman was kneeling, unveiling herself.

From a distance the painting appeared orderly and actually restful to the eye. It was a yantra of sorts, a focus for meditation in which one stills the mind by becoming absorbed in its balance and symmetry. On closer inspection, from my new position between the woman and the wall, the painting was an incredibly detailed and graphic reproduction of scenes of sexual perversion and unspeakable violence, crushed together in a horrifying vision of hell. But these images of cruelty and ugliness -- painted beautifully, I might add -- which fanned out across the canvas were not the primary focus of the painting; rather, they were obstacles hiding from view the primary theme: behind all darkness there is light. Ultimately, it was light which illuminated these scenes of degradation and brutality, a light that was hidden by these same scenes, though from a distance one could see gleams of that brilliance breaking out from its hiding place beyond the wall of corporeal images crammed into this immense space.

While staring at this awesome painting, which filled nearly a whole wall, I wondered how long it had taken Les to paint such a volume of detail. Only the drivenness of obsession could propel a man to produce this kind of work.

Just then, a jogger in a grey T-shirt and red shorts walked in through the main gallery door. I had been alone for some several minutes at this point, so he startled me. And he, being unaware of me, breathing heavily and wiping his forehead, cheeks and neck with a bunched up hand towel, strode past me on his way through the center aisle of the room. His sweat-soaked T-shirt clung to him. I guessed that he'd just finished a lengthy jaunt around the lakes and came in here to cool off. His vacant-eyed head bobbed as he walked, hanging forward with bushy black brows too full for his thin, slack-jawed face. I could feel his fatigue as he ambled through the pristine corridors of the Walker.

As the jogger approached the far end of the room, three men emerged from the double doors there. The jogger stopped when he saw them and responded as if he knew them. I couldn't hear what they were saying.

The smallest of these men squared off with the jogger in a half jest sort of way as if to box, like old school chums do upon meeting. Next, the guy started poking at the jogger, once or twice reaching out and pinching his leg, then slapping him lightly.

Suddenly, they were all over him, grabbing him and bringing him down. The one man was a huge, bull-necked kind of guy, all bronzed and enormous like a Turkish bouncer. The jogger writhed, making desperate spasmodic efforts to escape. They shoved the hand towel in his mouth as a gag and while the other two held him down, the Turk began twisting his foot. The jogger moaned in anguish.

Waves of panic shot through me as I realized I should do something. Should I run to get help? Then I became confused. Was this even real? Or was it some kind of performance piece, like the three dimensional woman who appeared to be disrobing there beside me? "Challenging our sensibilities"... "new level of intensity"... I stood dumbstruck; I didn't know what to do.

The Turk now had the leg sideways. A crackling sound of breaking bone echoed through the gallery and the agitated jogger went berserk. Wriggling his good leg free, he crashed it into the biggest guy's side, without result. Quickly the other two brought the loose limb under control and continued their torture.

I was walking toward them now, walking the length of the room until I was standing over them, close enough to touch them, and they didn't even notice me, as if I were invisible, a mute phantom eavesdropper.

Their faces were serious, businesslike. They worked quickly, not frenzied. One of the two smaller men, a man wearing a green army jacked, perspired slightly. Glancing up he caught a nod from the Turk and pulled out a knife, which he flipped open with a click.

At this, the jogger was in fits. His left leg had been broken and was pushed forward, perpendicular to the floor, the foot twisted around backward, everything all wrong and stupid and unbelievable and sickening.

At this, the jogger was in fits. His left leg had been broken and was pushed forward, perpendicular to the floor, the foot twisted around backward, everything all wrong and stupid and unbelievable and sickening.

The Turk shoved the knife into the side of the knee and with quick jerking movements severed the kneecap on three sides. Grabbing the dangling kneecap in his fist he pulled it away from the leg and, with a twist, wrenched it from its place, leaving a gaping hole, torn tendons and bloodied flesh. Immediately, like rodeo cowboys who have just finished branding a terrified calf, the three men leaped to their feet. As if on cue, all three shot glances in my direction, then turned and bounded from the room, leaving me alone in the gallery with the jogger, who was lying on the floor at my feet, his head arched back, arms and hands convulsing at his sides, the leg flopping now, pathetic and strange.

Evidently a guard who heard the commotion had run to call the police. An ambulance had been called while others from The Walker rushed about to help administer first aid to the violated man. When the police finally arrived, I was seated in the stairwell, staring with unfocused eyes, my hands fastened to the handrail.

Continued next week on Short Story Monday

PERMISSION TO REPRINT GRANTED if attribution is cited.
Please send me a note telling where you shared it.