Art

As I write this, I am 61 years old; my father taught high school English and was a poet; my mother taught middle school Art and is an artist. I was alone on a ferry between Amsterdam and London for my 17th birthday; pop had picked up a Volkswagen van on his way to Greece with his new wife and her child where he wrote poetry during a sabbatical year. I was on a vision quest and was guided into sculpting by a kindly pottery teacher who also happened to be a Professor of art at the University in Brighton. Vision quest is shorthand for dissipated youth, or "Do your thing" which at that time was more than a commercial on MTV. That I didn’t die with a needle in my arm is due largely to the kind encouragement of that professor. I share this not in false intimacy with you, or to do 12-step on your dime, but so you may sense the scope of commitment I feel toward an activity which goes back to the dawn of our collective history - Art. The possibility that I may be living amongst the last artist/shamans is an irony that cowers from even my vivid imagination however addlepated with age or blunted by fear that once vivid imagination may have become.

Mark Rothko was a color field painter whose demand became stratospheric after his suicide. He was betrayed by fellow artist, friend and executor of the estate Theodore Stamos an instructor at the Art Students League of NYC where I attended some 5 years after the death of Rothko. His betrayal by a friend for profit was background noise to the saintly influence of my friend and mentor Jose De Creeft - a 90 year old Spaniard. There is a photo of him and our class at a Christmas party at the League; he had placed his hand on my head where I had knelt for the group photo. He was always doing funny shit like that. For example, he showed me a painting of him greated by an admirer depicting herself with an arm around his shoulder; in the version he shared with me; he'd painted over her as an elephant with its trunk around his shoulder; in another fanciful piece he'd modeled a rat upright grasping a nut to its cheeks in a cake pan full of nuts and bolts. I am heir to this irreverence which is all that constitutes my bonafides as artist, more so than the 1,000’s of studio hours; erudite lectures or museum wandering which comprise part of the very real and necessary training required to call oneself “artist,” I have never faired well calling myself an artist; it was decades before I’d whisper that word out loud, so strong was my aversion to the  dilettantes I have watched occupy the high ground of creative commerce.

Lucky me - my training became a battle not much different than the one for the soul of Charlie Sheen in the movie “Platoon.” My soul dangled for decades between the heinous betrayal of Mark Rothko and the sacred - the same conflict between time and product over which Michelangelo and Pope Pious struggled; the Pope, according to Vasari, dispatched the political apparatus of the time to retrieve the renegade Michelangelo from his native Florence over a disagreement about what exactly the artist should turn his hand to next. Nor was it as cut and dry as today’s purely venal criteria of successful industrial artists, (however the fuck that is determined), for Michelangelo was a reverential soul believing deeply in the sanctity of his work - today sacred art is the almighty buck; this sad fact plays out all up and down the line, except that today’s budding “creatives” are used as clickbait fisherman with pre and post consumer filters for targeted demographics creating content that is then pushed and prompted into viral celebrity. "Liked" keystrokes are harvested as trending tastes, making some rich fuck a little richer and better able to leverage whatever the puppeteers of the gladiator "art wars" wish to serve up as top tier culture - talk about your hamster on a treadmill.

Art has been hijacked by the profane precisely at that point in our odd human history when a mystical vision for that successful existential hunt which might guide humanity through the horrific danger we face as a species. Nearly every contemporary artist I know today is fully and completely absorbed by the financial reality and need for celebrity status and commensurate business model which provides excess inventory; outsider cache and/or wall space in the “big house” - papa museum. Many artists are diverted from the sacred to commercial validation by the tempting influence of the corporate media. Hypocrite that i am, i too proffer this content to you, an unknown reader, scrapping for “keystrokes” or other viral bounty that might translate into pennies with with which to continue my quixotic petition into that same marketplace - another traitor in the mix. My alma mater, "The Art Students League of NYC” has been subsumed by a bitter internecine squabble over a proposed overhanging shard of "capital" from the newly adjacent highest skyscraper in NYC. This project was shoehorned into the rapidly gentrifying Manhattan and is a perfect metaphor for struggle of our age - human being vs corporation.

A more perfect example of the rich and their role in art training today could not be written into the annals of history regardless of scholarship or arcane grasp of the classics. For some $25 million the developer for the adjacent skyscraper bought the airspace over the League to hang a cantilevered outcropping of penthouses into perpetuity, or until they collapse onto the studios below.  These penthouses provide a clear view of Central Park making them priceless, but hang like the sword of Damocles over the heritage four story art school in midtown Manhattan; understand that the origins of the Art Students League were purely democratic, wherein much like the origin of universities in the middle ages, students intent on organizing and seizing control of their own education, rejected academy doctrines and formed their own “league.” Students at the league when I attended were expected to be responsible for the nature and direction of their own studies, while instructors were hired to provide insights from actual working artists - a proletariate art school of worker artists. Had the league retained this orientation for training hard charging independent creative souls, rather than negotiating away paltry “airspace” rights for a lousy $25 million, the board of control could have sold the entire existing lot for 100s of times more dollars, then relocated the school to a much larger compound and invested that money toward the original mission of art training rather than vetting art harlequins to dance at the dissolution of the human species - today's modern art "scene."

jts 11/21/2014

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

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reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

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post apocalyptic living

The idea that there will be some demarcation for the collapse of empire is ludicrous, and I’m not referring to the celebrity of the same name. Much of the thinking and emphasis by our wiser counselors today focuses on some timeframe or order of events - this happens before this .  . The reality is we are more like a large ocean going vessel who came at the dock too hard and as a result will cause much damage to the dock and ship, or if your vision is linear, we can listen to our bard Bob Dylan . “ . I think when my back was turned the whole world behind me burned . “ . However you are able to fix in your mind the image of an irretrievable past against an indifferent future you’ll be on your way to preparing your gene pool as possible survivors of the species, if there be any. Dire you say, no actually you say - the disintegration of all human convention into a hollow cutout can be described by the mechanical “thank you” from any harried retail worker; the fake air of authority from that employed bureaucrat declining your loan application or appreciating your time for making the job application. The retail worker is not thanking you anymore than the bureaucrat has any remorse for stepping in front of your ambition. Both are clinging to a portioned out illusion no different than the the stories of heroism in defense of a sacred religion where no congregation on the planet is not without stories of betrayal and excess at the hands of its clerics - not one.

In our world we are no longer given the courtesy of being assured you’re fucked. In the olden days a tyrant would flat out say - you’re a slave, and you are not. Today’s leadership is dodgy and covert having discovered people want to believe the best even at the expense of food, air, water and wellbeing. As long as there is a plausible explanation or identifiable culprit for the momentary lapse - we will not be unlike the “Titanic” merrily humming along until the vessel’s momentum slowly crushes the hull of the ship rendering it useless and destroying that part of the landing which gave purpose to the ship. The degree and extent of destruction is all that is being discussed now because the laws of physics don’t care what you think, feel or believe. The process now becomes one of salvage; which in turn becomes an issue of priority. For example, the mother on the dock with her baby in her arms knows in her heart she and the child are not safe where they are standing. Just like that moment on a bicycle when the physics of falling overcome the physics of riding there is no intellectual consideration, one tucks and rolls with bodies and objects broken relative to the instincts of those involved. In the case of the mother, she runs for higher ground or not.

It is this time for our incinerating planet; some, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out disproportionately represented by the indigenous 1st nation people are instinctively preparing for the collision by focusing on where the planet is showing the greatest stress, water, air and food. Whether this leadership and foresight will mitigate enough of the collision to aid in salvaging the contents of our colliding vessel or leave enough of the dock intact to help in the process of building another ship only time will tell. Though as with all catastrophic events or as Bruce Lee describes the proper pace for boxing, time will slow to a crawl and what happens in an instant will seem like forever. Whether this distortion of time will aid in strategies to ameliorate some of the death and suffering we have begun to enjoy as a way of life is anybody’s guess, but there are many steps that can be taken now, up to and after impact. For one, almost as though g_d in her infinite wisdom provides tools for our salvation equivalent to the potential for destruction. For example at the inception of the Industrial Age humans were treated as farm stock to be worked, fed and clothed no more than was necessary for maintenance. However just as communication improvements were an outgrowth of industrialization and improved technology the close proximity which centralized industrial centers fostered, also created strong inter-community bonds and additional exposure to the world’s stockpile of knowledge.

This gave rise to the illusion that was Marxist thinking - the only thing required for a worker’s paradise was to kill off the ruling class - unfortunately this myopic vision of the human animal evolved as George Orwell opined in “Animal Farm” and one tyrant was supplanted for the next over time. Yet that hopefully informed scenario is not dissimilar to our onrushing Ocean Liner, for as certainly as oppression will be vanquished, our ship shall crash into the “Dock of the Bay.” Like the farm animals in Orwell’s story, we have the technical wherewithal to achieve extraordinary change. Regardless of the pig’s narrow vision and subsequent defeat we have between now and impact, both collectively and individually; not only the knowhow to soften the impact but the capability to hit the ground running. Unless we are to repeat the errors of all previous revolutions this massive undertaking cannot be on our own behalf but on behalf of the human unborn 2, 3, 4 or more generations hence, if we are that lucky. If we can take our cues from the more intuitive 1st nation members of the world body, luck has has a place in human history - look at Bill Gates for example, bought Quick and Dirty Disc Operating System (Q-Dos) for a song and then sweated bullets until IBM sold the farm distracted by its manic greed for absolute control over hardware with absolutely no clue what software even meant - now Billy will be the world’s first trillionaire and IBM has become a faded “hasbeen” like the Republican Party and it lilywhite adherents.

Unfortunately the chimera of 0s and 1s that constitute that remarkably ethereal fortune are little different than the hash marks on the first clocks when they could make a second hand sweep - of little import other than a gross approximation for concept of time from which we spring from and back into completely unaffected by war, money, fame or sorrow. The pool of human wisdom as distinguished from the chaff of today’s information gluttons should be ruggedized, standardized and decentralized such that fire, flood and famine in any one location will not impair the ability to immediately redistribute itself. The ecosphere itself must gain legal protections as Bolivia has begun by attributing legal rights to mother earth herself. Communities for self-sufficiency will needs be the standard organization as the empty product of the corporate overlords becomes increasingly desperate in its attempts to retain market share, for once the ruse of the infinite growth paradigm becomes crystal clear for its role in the exhaustion of the world’s resources politically, intellectually and economically, as Edward Colver has said there will not be walls high enough behind which the ruling class may hide. Fury cannot be the barrel of this assault; we do not have that margin. Socrates said,”the secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” For those amongst you who’d shrug off Socrates , I say to you “oh well.”

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