The Long Silence

I almost need to steal the title from Franklin's latest post: Patience With Everything Unresolved.  In fact, I almost need to steal Franklin's template.  Being is becoming, and blogs are becoming something else.

It's not that I haven't had anything to say.  I've shamelessly blogged my way through several major life transitions; maybe it's in the nature of the current one to be different.  In any case, I'm not making any promises. 

Briefly, the news is this: I've decided to become a physical therapist.  It's a doctoral degree that will take me five or six years to complete, including prerequisites.  Although I've got two bachelor's degrees already, they're--surprise!--virtually useless.  I recently sent for my transcript, and its dominant theme is 'Course Of Study Undertaken By An Adolescent Mind.'  People under twenty-five should not be allowed to go to college, I swear.

What this means is that I will be broke and working my ass off for the foreseeable future, which will not be a big change.  What will be a big change is that when I'm done, I will be employable at a solid middle-class salary for the first time in my life. 

This could not have happened if I hadn't become thoroughly and irremediably disgusted with the state of the art world.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that I am an idealist--stubborn, possibly naive, certainly foolish.  Art represented part of an ideal to me, and I invested a big chunk of my soul in it, along with considerably more money than my actual income. 

And 'art,' as practiced by the self-styled elite of the global art scene, is a giant confidence game.  I used to think I could either change it or create a niche for myself within it; now I think that my values are incompatible with its founding principles.  Continuing to sacrifice my time, money and attention to this cynical game doesn't make me a dedicated artist, it just makes me a chump.

I've long been aware that I have three vocations--artist, writer, and healer.  For the last couple of decades, I've been weighting the 'artist' as the primary part of my identity.  Letting go of that is a wrench to my ego, but necessary to my soul.  I will have a studio again, I will paint again, but maybe not for a good long time.  Now is the time for exercising my lazy but adequate left brain, and taking the adventure that comes.  

The Consciousness Painter

 

'Sunset Holocaust,' Elisabeth Condon, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 118.10 x 78.74 inches

Every now and then I meet an artist who reminds me that with all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, art can still be a meaningful occupation.  When I do, I often notice that artistic mastery is a non-linear process.  Elisabeth Condon is the real deal, and in the last couple of years her work has hit an exponential curve.

Over a year ago, I was lucky enough to visit Elisabeth's studio in Brooklyn with my critique group.  I'd seen her exhibition at Lesley Heller Gallery in 2008, and one painting in particular had impressed me; it started to become metaphysical jazz, blurring the boundaries between space, time and consciousness.  But it was hard to tell if this was an accident or not.

During her crit, it became clear that Elisabeth throws the entirety of her heart, mind and soul into her work, and she's got a lot of these things to throw.  The details of her trajectory make up a respectable résumé--influences ranging from Chinese scroll paintings to Dr. Seuss; trips to China, residencies in Miami, Spain, Yaddo and Taiwan; figure painting intensives, architectural studies, paint pouring. If I were a real art critic, I'd feel obliged to trace these influences in sober detail.

But I'm not.  I'm just another painter, who believes that great art transcends both biography and intellect.  "The Chinese believe that paintings must have chi," said Elisabeth, and her paintings have tons of it.  They come at you like a tidal wave, immersing you in the full experience of color, sucking you into spaces which twist and bulge and drop away, altering the fabric of your mind.

 'Gaoxing, Beijing', Elisabeth Condon, 2009

Acrylic on canvas, 118.10 x 78.74 inches

The paintings she was working on when I went to her studio were a quantum leap beyond the work in her Lesley Heller show; bigger, freer, less literal and more graceful.  One of them, an enormous blue poured abstraction, was half finished.  In standard crit group fashion, we suggested she leave it that way.  She replied, "I can't, I just can't."  Elisabeth doesn't hold anything back.  Art doesn't occupy a cool, political corner of her life; it IS her life.  And her life is a joyous and generous one.  

Since then, things have only gotten better.  In her best work, the distinction between abstraction and representation becomes meaningless--form, space, color and architecture dance among themselves as limpidly as thought.  Standing in front of one, you find yourself remembering experiences that aren't necessarily yours.  Elisabeth's work communicates directly, without any need for translation. 

After Art

Art is not the end of the line.  I used to think it was, but that was just my ego talking. 

'Tis the Voice of the Asshole

Some asshole gets hold of the intercom:   

Two South Jersey Wal-Mart customers who heard a racist message broadcast over the store's public address system say the whole ordeal is no laughing matter.

Sheila Ellington and Virginia Tinsley were shopping inside the Washington Township Wal-Mart along Rt. 42 in Turnersville, N.J. just before 5 p.m. on Sunday when they say a man came over the PA system and said: "Attention Wal-Mart customers: All black people leave the store now."

"It was a disgusting comment," Ellington said. "Once I heard that, I was absolutely shocked and appalled."

Why do we listen to assholes?

Statistically speaking, we are less likely to be overrun by Mongolian hordes, Roman legions, conquistadors, or renegade cowboys than in the vast majority of human history.  In most countries, rape and kidnapping are frowned upon as a means of obtaining wives.  Brute force is no longer the final word in most social interactions. 

At no other time in history have we had quite the luxury of shrugging off the perspectives of assholes, in the way we do now.

And yet our bruised psyches do not believe it's true.  Thousands of years of brutality have left their mark; we still behave as though the Voice of the Asshole will inevitably be followed up by an unanswerable blow to the head.

As a result, the psychic power of assholes is magnified beyond their natural scope.  Thus I propose a mantra: call it the Mantra of Emerging Civilization. 

The next time you hear some asshole broadcasting his assholery to all and sundry, say to yourself, "Dude, you're an asshole."  Then mentally flip the switch.  Turn off the Glenn Beck in your head. Consign Rush Limbaugh to the trash heap of history.  Open your mind to a new era of freedom.

Pain and Ignorance

The more I learn about chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia, the more it is clear to me that medicine is still in its infancy.  From the New York Times:

The cause of this disorder is unknown. Physical or emotional trauma may play a role in development of the syndrome. Some evidence suggests that fibromyalgia patients have abnormal pain transmission responses.

It has been suggested that sleep disturbances, which are common in fibromyalgia patients, may actually cause the condition. Another theory suggests that the disorder may be associated with changes in skeletal muscle metabolism, possibly caused by decreased blood flow, which could cause chronic fatigue and weakness.

Others have suggested that an infectious microbe, such as a virus, triggers the illness. At this point, no such virus or microbe has been identified.

Pilot studies have shown a possible inherited tendency toward the disease, though evidence is very preliminary.

Could this be any more vague and tentative?  We're only about a decade away from dismissing the whole thing as 'crazy woman syndrome.' 

Fibromyalgia is one of the reasons I became a bodyworker.  I saw people close to me suffering from it, and I saw the medical establishment making their suffering worse through ignorance, indifference and judgement. I may not be able to cure people's pain, but at least I can do someone the honor of taking it seriously. 

People with chronic pain, for the most part, cope with it by coping.  That's not a tautology.  Coping is a fluid process, different for every person and at every time.  Exercise may help, or not.  Pain medication, ditto.  Massage, sometimes.  Acupuncture, heat therapy, yoga may work, then stop working.  It never ends.

One thing I have observed, in over a decade of giving and receiving bodywork, is that there seems to be a powerful and complex relationship between fascia and the nervous system.  I have noticed that often the subtlest forms of bodywork can have the most profound affects.  I don't pretend to understand the mechanism behind it, but there are a couple of areas where I'd like to see some research done.

One is network spinal analysis.  The theory behind it is that by stimulating the spinal cord in areas where it attaches to the spine, you enable the body to release spinal tension and adjust itself.  After one treatment by an NSA chiropractor, I found my hips releasing the turn-out stress of twelve years of ballet training, and re-aligning in their natural forward-facing stance.  This chiropractor reported that many of her clients saw significant improvement from conditions as serious as MS, from treatment over time. 

The other is the M.E.L.T Method, a simple self-care technique that uses balls and rollers to rebalance and hydrate connective tissue.  It is now primarily used by athletes and personal trainers, but the results I've seen have been so dramatic that I'd like to see more research into its effectiveness on fibromyalgia and other chronic pain syndromes.

The more bodywork I do, the more it seems to me that the mind/body dichotomy is meaningless.  I'd describe it as a mind/body continuum.  At the very least there is a constant feedback loop going in both directions, both consciously and unconsciously.  An adjustment at any point in the loop can have wide-reaching effects; my interest is in finding the most efficient points of intervention.

Satan Unmasked

Jerry Seinfeld was always abhorrent. It is simply that it took most people a couple of decades to notice:

The one star who appeared to be immune from the curse was Jerry Seinfeld who enjoyed relative success in stand-up comedy despite ill-conceived endeavors such as Bee Movie. But now with his new near-universally loathed show The Marriage Ref his legacy seems more threatened than ever.

'Seinfeld' was not a brilliant sitcom.  It was evil and vile.  It was wilfully and self-righteously shallow, trivial and vain.  It was not funny.  It was vicious in its banality.

I may have watched an episode of 'Seinfeld' in its entirety once or twice, but I never managed to do so without feeling that I had been spiritually spat upon.  Most of the time I did not last for more than two or three minutes.  Even now I feel my stomach seize up if someone tunes to a rerun in my vicinity.

The fact that Jerry Seinfeld's new show is being universally panned merely demonstrates that our collective consciousness is catching up with reality.  Smarmy, facile spite is not only destructive of the fabric of society, it is not even good for a chuckle.  

Spiritual Necessity

It's about freakin' time.

What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand. A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name where museums are concerned.

It's sad, really, how over the top was the reaction to Roberta's editorial. Jerry Saltz's Facebook page exploded with expressions of gratitude from hundreds of artists.  The Brooklyn Rail posted a remarkably militant expression of solidarity:

We would go a step further and state unequivocally that many of these individuals have not only shirked their public responsibility, they have turned the museums into playgrounds for an elitist group of trustees and globetrotting art fair devotees, stocking their exhibitions primarily from “powerful galleries.”

Parallels to the financial institution debacle did not go unnoticed:

Sometimes the art world actually lags behind society, and the bursting of its preachy-self-indulgence bubble follows rather than leads the collapse of the economy's credit bubble by a couple of years. In the money world, anybody could borrow any amount for practically anything. In art, anyone could claim to be addressing any social issue with just about any work, and curators believed it.

So the question remains, why should we care? 

In my opinion, Roberta's much-quoted phrase 'intense personal necessity' does not go far enough.  It conjures up a vision of the obsessive, solipsistic artist working alone in the studio, churning out quirky, useless objects for purchase by wealthy people.  Given the dire economic conditions in which we find ourselves, fighting a battle to bring more painting into museums seems a little quixotic, and I say this as a painter myself.

Artists, as a whole, are pretty good at dealing with poverty.  We have to be. To look at the 'art' in museums, you'd never know that artists today have meaningful responses to real-world problems; you'd think we were a bunch of useless, smarmy man-children.

What is truly disgusting about the museum playgrounds is the way in which they siphon energy, resources and attention from artists who are working not only out of personal necessity, but out of spiritual necessity--responding to the world in ways that expand our ideas of what is possible.  Artists like the members of Urban Farm Syndicate:

Our goal is to turn Central Brooklyn’s biggest problem into its greatest resource by working with landowners instead of against them. 13% of the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, is vacant land. This vacant land creates opportunities for crime, vermin and dumping, and drives down property values. We believe this land also has the capacity to give rise to the very things that grow a community: dignified living wage jobs; a thriving local economy based on delicious, healthy food and an enduring educational resource for local schoolchildren and academia alike.

Or artists doing what we always do, going into neighborhoods that might as well be war zones and revitalizing them:

Artists are being pushed out left and right, publications folding, galleries closing, all while more and more MFAs continue to be churned out than can possibly be hired on by Manhattan’s service industry. Space is at a premium. Do we continue to go even further east into the cramped, treeless, concrete, PCB infested jungle of Bushwick, eventually reaching East New York’s hour-long commute for valuable studio and exhibition space? Or do we begin to explore other venues west of the Hudson? In the wide-open (*gasp*) NEW JERSEY!? In our case, we're going with Jersey.

Contrary to the apparent beliefs of the curatorial set, 'meaning' does not reside in facile, arcane references within a pile of visual koans.  It does not reside in unintelligible wall text.  It most certainly does not reside in the cynical manipulation of political and economic systems to grab a share of money and attention that is totally disproportionate to the quality of one's contributions.

Spiritual necessity is about a lot more than making objects.  It is about allowing the world to change us, as much as we change the world.  Most artists don't plan to become community organizers, entrepreneurs, healers or activists; it's what happens to us when we the irresistable force of our creativity meets the immovable object of the physical world.