March 2002
State of State Art in America
Iwas as as confused as Jim was when he described that peculiar sense of discomfort he got when he discovered his nemesis, a highly marketed glass maker showing in the same gallery as Jim’s sculpture. I had just returned from a stay in San Diego and that same master of gewgaw had his own flaming exhibition of exuberance in glass on the ground floor of the San Diego Museum of Cultural History. The man’s show wasn’t more than thirty feet from the gift shop entrance. I had to walk past it to get up the stairs to where the region’s native and pre-Columbian displays stood, which is why I paid five bucks.
On the way out of the museum two guards, college kids, walked towards me and asked what I thought of So and So’s exhibit. I forget his name. He’s got wild hair, a patch over one eye that he lost to exploded glass, and he cultivates the attitude of a wound-up Salvador Dali grabbing market share in a harem of fashion hogs. He’s the ubiquitous wonder in the field.
“Quite the industry,” I said. “He’s got factories all over the world pumping that crap out. I just find it odd to see it here. That’s not what I paid to see, some one-eyed clown’s circus act in glass.” They both took a deep breath in, eyes widened into surprise, and then chuckles of gratitude and relief. And then again, this time in Seattle, in the very gallery as Jim’s exhibit. Like a disease, like smog.
An hour away from me is Palm Springs, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the world. Their galleries are completely blank of everything but decor. All so harmless, so abundant, so pretty, and so ready for sale and immediate delivery. I met an artist, one of those unique seers of our times who did just that. A gallery step van arrived every month at his suburban home, backed up to his garage studio, loaded the art, and handed him a check. Three-bedroom home, kids in college, bills, alimony, what’s a man to do, he said. It’s all so reasonable, so necessary. Art by the truckload selling for thousands like watermelons off the back of a sweltering flatbed. Esthetics thus established, values determined, and the course of lives, culture, and civilization lived.
This is my milieux, the climate in which I breathe as an artist and man. I need to write about it because it’s time to cry out in terms that might be useful to any dear reader who wonders what it is like on such boundaries, at such crossroads where fates are forged.
I intended this to be an essay of some sort, but don’t know what sort. I also thought of making a letter out of it, a letter to the author Bohumil Hrabal whose book, Total Fears, I recently read. He writes letters to his young American muse, Dubenka, who teaches Slavic languages at a university in America. He describes how totalitarianism leveled his once spring-like society into the drab ghost of obedience it had become. It was a tale of anguish, a description of slow, suffocating death not by tanks but by language and its symbols.
Its tool was the monotony of Social Realism, the overriding esthetic for political and economic aims. The crudity of its propaganda drove it home all the better: pictures of tanks, portraits of Lenin, made-up stories of happy factory and collective farm life, and all the symbols of unity, loyalty, obedience. Against this, Hrabal exuded praise and excitement over Andy Warhol, not only held by many as the greatest of all American twentieth century artists, but as a child of his Czech Republic. Warhol’s parents were born there. Warhol was like a savior to him, personally as well as nationally, lauded him even as a redeemer of the Slavic people. Warhol’s brilliance, his freedom, his star in the world of pictures and symbols absolutely enthralled poor old sad used-up Hrabal.
And then, all at once, everything I ever thought about American art and my own struggles made sense. Warhol simply did what was in his thick apparatchik nature to do, gave America its Social Realism. Look how trapped, determined, and insidious it all is! It begs a deeper question. If Hrabal sees Warhol’s Pop as freedom, then what is the real nature of freedom, where does it come from, and how do we get it? At least in me it does because I’ve always thought of Warhol as the foulest enemy collaborator of our times, the rat that brought the plague. The plague of tyranny that shrank the creative imagination down to products on a store self, that hypnotized with beauty portraits of vacuous icons, and that reinforced it all with news frames exhibited with the authoritative pomp of Mona Lisas, all en mass for the masses.
To me, it’s always been an insane horror. His fifteen minutes of fame continues to be the standard of meaning in the cultural mind of America. On the surface its all so pleasant, even funny, and so ridiculous that it can’t hurt to hear it again and again everyday of our lives to exclusion of all else. But it’s not that simple. Excluded is the search for eternity, simply a fraud. Gone too is the quest for self, ludicrous and irrelevant. Unique is obsolete. Reality, genuine, authentic are now brands in the effluence of things. Glossy proliferation, bulk art, anything and everything to keep the mind spinning off topic, off itself. It’s not a tyranny of suppression, but of surfeit, blind to consequence, made deaf by the decibels of progress.
Hrabal touched on it, unwittingly, when he described a night on his first book tour in America. It happened in a hotel room, in Washington D.C., late at night, all alone, except for the whirl of the building’s air conditioner. It kept him awake all night in a terrifying insomnia. He couldn’t imagine how in the midst of all that comfort there wasn’t any quiet in which to think or apprehend his dreams. He said it was infinitely worse than knowing the room is bugged as it was in his dictatorial homeland. There, he boasted, a man can choose to not talk, but to be excluded from one’s dreams was utterly excruciating. He drank, as I recall, himself to sleep.
I see newsreels of uprooted and deported populations, all gray, grainy, torn and misused. And I hear the slogans of commercial products ringing in my ear. No money down. Come on in and buy today! And how casual we are, how willing to depopulate our own minds — the efficiency.