Wednesday, August 26, 2009

MAKE THE OBVIOUS LESS OBVIOUS...

24. MAKE THE OBVIOUS LESS OBVIOUS - BRING WHAT’S HIDDEN TO THE FORE:

The Sandra Sullivan Foundation wants you Steamboat Willie drowning in your own IDOLATRY reading about Marsden Hartley writing notes on the thinnest rebar building towers to God and Mammon always in competition and the discussion arose about ‘stairs’ versus ‘risers’ and even though they do the same thing they are different implementations it was decided - the ‘riser’ is the section with the cut-outs onto which the ‘stairs’ are placed and to get upward anywhere you need both at least in the CONTRACTING world and we then DECIDED TOO that we knew all that and what did it matter anyway who cared ? nobody did ? and with that the eight forty-four left the station with us in tow wrinkle-levio old man’s fodder darning needle in the haystack OH and I SILENTLY began watching the little man who always comes by as he stood at the fiction stacks and slowly and precipitously paged a book page by page reading surreptitiously it would seem whatever he could garner from some old man’s fiction – little man skittle man the one who knows it all – and the exercise of this life is perhaps to get a wife or chase a wife your choice at this point and after the end there are no sacraments left and nobody to come to the games where they’re held Poughkeepsie or Tabernacle Grove with the apple and juice stand on the right (‘now all hold hands let’s take a stand NO WAR no war no more today’) and many many volunteers it seemed showed up for that one and the young kids the ones who once went south deep south in their ’59 Chevies leaning on one side now take part in their three-year-old cars made in a foreign land or even here with a foreign name no difference for all that counts is where the money goes and the factor of design alas has so been lost it is unspeakable interchangeable pudding pie Georgia High and do they even KNOW what they’re fighting for ALL GALORE and hasn’t grief had enough already ? and ‘Susan’s Cover Is Gone’ was as I recall seeing the title of the orange colored book the other guy was reading at Lyndhurst on the seeded park bench by the railroad tracks but ‘MARSDEN HARTLEY’ was called ‘the searcher’ too – a ‘great’ artist whose greatness is of a piece with the provincial clumsiness of American high culture in the early twentieth century – a Yankee Modernist – who stands in the history of modern art like an increasingly unavoidable bumpy detour and at different points in his career (he died in 1943 at age 66) he was inspired by French masters Cezanne German Expressionists Blue Rider Group Wassily Kandinsky and he adored Germany and had extended stays in Berlin and participated as well in the fast-track salons of his day (Gertrude Stein’s in Paris Alfred Steiglitz’s in New York Eugene O’Neill’s in Provincetown and Mabel Dodge Luhan’s in New Mexico) and as a ‘secret’ homosexual he was in his later years part of an elegant gay scene that formed around the photographer George Platt Lynes in New York and he fit in nowhere and SOLITUDE owned him - it is seen now that in retrospect his best art was made in Berlin from 1913 to 1915 and especially in Maine starting in the mid-nineteen-thirties and that art looms so far above the works of celebrated contemporaries as Georgia O’Keefe Charles Demuth Arthur Dove and John Marin that it poses the question of how such achievement was possible and like Edward Hopper – a very different painter but Hartley’s only equal in their generation – he possessed a self-reliant temperament that pitted gritty American resources against the intimidating authority of European art and even as he is an aesthetic and ethical hero in his work beauty still comes and goes in it and intuitions of truth are constant even as all of his work itself presents the viewer with one constant question : ‘do you live in a way commensurate with such honesty?’ and with that I continued my escape Marsden Hartley this and Marsden Hartley that but in such a world as this is it becomes heartily difficult to formulate precise movements by which to inhabit and locate (first) the productive urges and meanings which make up what we strive to achieve as a ‘correct’ life : two guys living in the woods hiding out from the law in Trumansburg NY after ransacking a church or two other guys stripping a car on the Westside Wharf after jimmying the locks and jumping the ignition after punching out the owner and leaving him behind and IT”S ALL THE SAME for you either love your brother and fellow man everywhere or you love no one anywhere and only an artist has the sensitive eye and hand needed to calmly and slowly negotiate the perils of this land - and art is all art - the writing and coloring and lining and drawing and sounding out of that all-other-world which the low-brained and stupid among us can only bray at complaining whining and grimacing at what they do not understand AND that is the punishment of caprice and uselessness that is the TRAP of life itself and everyone one of them apart from each other is nothing Stan Lease to Fred Keiser to Charley Fucking Eisenstein and his humbled wife himself – AND SPEAKING OF DOGS – let’s just think like this ‘what do you hear my dog ? you will tell me if I should worry’ let us do primal justice to the history of dogs those which sat around the campfires in our distant private and primal scenes so long ago as we sat clothed in skins huddled by the fire with a dog with tiny pointed ears next to us ears pricked for the sound of danger SOUNDS TOO FAINT FOR MAN TO HEAR so can there be a history without a dog ? ‘take Columbus for instance – he believed that for fighting Indians one dog was worth fifty soldiers so as he advanced into America he took a pack of two-hundred-and-fifty-pound mastiffs with him and in one industrious battle in 1495 these mastiffs leaped upon and disemboweled more than a hundred Indians apiece as reported by an observer of the battle one Bartolome de las Casas who realized that it was hard to credit such an event and went on to explain that the dogs were used to disemboweling deer and boars and so found the soft and hairless skin of Indians quite easy to bite into’ and yet for all the human lives that dogs have saved – and among those rescued from certain death are Lewis and Clark (charging buffalo Newfoundland) Alexander the Great (charging elephant Greyhound) Napoleon (stormy sea Newfoundland) Abraham Lincoln (dark cave Mutt) – the history of the species has been a history of oppression BUT SO MUCH FOR DOGS they will all die soon and it just goes to show ‘keep your mind where it should be fella’ it’s always worth more that way’ said to me by the fat bellowing cigar-chomping truck loader on the slim side of 22nd Street pushing cargo like it was silk flowers along some grimy edge of bright morning with a whistle and a bob in his step ‘it’s better this way I act like Springtime is coming and everything feels better as I remember day after day of brighter and brighter mornings still chilly each of them but with a better light and brighter spirit and somehow in a moment I try to capture that and get it down and replay each moment in my head so as to make my dreary work more fun to do and these streets they don’t leave a man alone no how and you know how some people thrill to visit New York City well for me it’s just the opposite I see it every damned morning just like this the cold the air the traffic the lights and congestion the sense of not getting anywhere for hours and I fight and struggle on these local streets delivering everyday stuff and when I don’t have to believe you me I don’t ever want to SEE this place again’ and so I’m thinking magic I’m thinking art’s touch and the classy side of things and what do you know here comes my own personal culmination right at me - two or three people walking like Gods holding leashes with great dogs on the ends and carrying paints and notebooks and drawing pads and all the rest and I know it just then I realize it at that instance ‘this really is a Paradise of sorts’ no matter what the truckman says (for he only wears the shirt of life and never the great broad overcoat of all blessed Creation itself but HIS LOSS CAN BE MY GAIN) and that takes me back to Hartley again HARTLEY WAS FABULOUSLY UGLY in an Abraham Lincoln way – a big man a long face that joined a high dome deep-set eyes under slipping brows a huge nose and over all the look of an extraordinary intelligent hound dog and in photographs his gaze is often worried but firm HE STOOD HIS GROUND born Edmund Hartley in Lewiston Maine the youngest of eight children of English immigrants whose father worked in the cotton mills and whose mother died when he was eight and his father then remarried and moved the family to Cleveland where Hartley studied at the Cleveland School of Art and became devoted to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (an early brooding painting is of a 1905 rendering of Walt Whitman’s house in Camden NJ) and in 1899 he came to New York and worked his way through Impressionist and Fauvist styles (‘Stormclouds Maine 1906’) and he imbibed spiritualist ideas and met and was influenced by Albert Pinkham Ryder (and he took on his mother’s maiden name ‘Marsden’) and left for Europe in 1912 where in Berlin he began making his heraldic semi-abstractions in the years before and after the onset of the First World War – they were a conjunction of jazzy Cubist compositions and rough Expressionist handling and sometimes have the air of textbook demonstrations performed with forced high spirits.

Take the high seas to the high seas or don’t you understand what I’m saying as the clock runs out on mankind’s handle and all the Heavens are broken and blown to red bits ‘London Bridge is Falling Down Falling Down’ and someone is singing in the background about the old aqua sea and all its fine attributes and the places they’ve jolly been BUT let’s get serious here once more - ‘in 1915 the political pressures of the war forced Hartley to return to New York where because of the apparently ‘pro-German’ nature of his previous paintings with their military symbols and designs his reception in artistic circles was chilly so he entered upon nearly two decades of wandering – both geographically and artistically and a certain layer of uncertainty thus pervades his ‘lovely but brittle’ Cubist still-lifes his Cezannesque landscapes and here and there in different genres a cultivation of bulky forms outlined in black that steer increasingly close to the style of Max Beckmann and then sojourns in Mexico and the Bavarian Alps further attributed to the full maturation pof Hartley’s work and talent as he developed a sense of mystical immanence in desert landscapes and a tactile appreciation of he contours of rocks and mountains and he once said ‘as a painter I HAVE to have a mountain’ – and so he did and it was a hamlet called Dogtown inland from Gloucester Massachusetts and he painted it over and over various scenes and locales within it as he visited it many times and produced works that distilled lonesome ecstasies of communion with subjects that he had all to himself if only because NO ONE ELSE WOULD HAVE NOTICED THEM!’ and all that talking to myself went on for a long time by the vestibule in the vast hall where I’d slipped in for a chance to get warm and finding it filled with instead people of the Jeremey Bentham Society Northeast Chapter who evidently had just finished their weekend convention after hearing a few talks and seminars and such and I asked the fellow in the dark blue suit what was next and he said “why nothing we’ve just finished our last speaker and had our farewell and awards presentations so now I guess all the people left here are just milling around as they prepare to leave WHY do you ask?” which question of course sort of baffled me because I figured that any question like that was fairly self-explanatory so I replied “you really have to know why I asked something how silly is that?” and he turned to reply and said “no no not at all I merely thought you had a specific need or request and now that all of our scheduled operations are over I really didn’t want you to be disappointed you see I was only being polite really” and I said “yes I guess” and we parted but at that instant too I realized the propriety of approach and demeanor of that guy was probably characteristic of the whole bunch at the convention so I expected none but the best if anyone else spoke to me and settling down I bought a coffee at the concession and took a seat in a wonderfully padded chair nearby and watched as people passed along some with bags and baggage and others merely with a smile and nothing else and occasionally I did see someone quite interesting to look at but for the most part everything was proper and dignified and quite serious this Jeremy Bentham crowd whose furtherance and reason for being I made a note to check out later and as I did get up to leave a very gracious woman came towards me and said “excuse me but are Winton Bennett” and of course I replied “no ma’am I’m not” and apologetically she replied “oh dear I’m so sorry but you do look so much like him and I really was rather hoping you were him it all seemed so right at that moment” and puzzled still I asked “why do you want to meet him?” and she said “well perhaps you’re not aware but to us here he’s almost a master theologist and I’d heard he was coming by but he did never show and now the entire weekend is over and we’d never even heard from him or seen him and oh so many of us were truly awaiting his presence and are so disappointed” and I nodded and said “well yes I guess I can understand all that but really sorry I am not him” and she smiled and turned and left but I kept my head and let it go and so there I was in the strange middle of both watching all this unfold and still mentally going through the exercise of Hartley whose biography and work was still running through my mind but that’s characteristic too of an art education which builds upon itself and then goes nowhere – instead ending up in the closing end of a Jeremy Bentham convention but I guess stranger things have happened and LIKE WAS SAID ABOUT HARTLEY – ‘no one else would have noticed’ and sorting through my sidebag (filled as usual with papers and end-papers and pamphlets and various tracts postcards and catalogues picked up while walking or stopping at various places) I did finally come up with the Hartley paragraphs which had been bugging me and started reading again – ‘he made what I regard as the world’s best bad painting “Eight Bells Folly - Memorial For Hart Crane” (1933) a farrago of crude private symbols jammed together as if their shelf life was about to expire and Crane the seraphic desperately ambitious miserable homosexual poet who committed suicide in 1932 by throwing himself off a ship in the Caribbean was a natural subject for Hartley whose description of his own painting is worth quoting as it exemplifies his odd spirit of soberly deliberated abandon : ‘there is a ship foundering and a sun a moon two triangles clouds a shark pushing up out of the mad waters and at the right corner a belt with an ‘8’ on it symbolizing eight bells or noon when he jumped off and around the bell are a lot of men’s eyes that look up from below to see who the new lodger is to be’.