Waiting for Spring

We spend a fair time waiting, waiting for this, for that, for them and those to come and go, to start and end, to rise and fall, full and eclipse. And for Spring to spring, our world coiled like hair in plastic curlers held in place with bobby pins (see F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”).

We don’t wait in Winter, when we freeze in place and live in the cold moment (waiting is Samuel Beckett’s dry theme), but as the great slow thaws finally come we start to wait for a stronger sun and almost believe again in Spring and Spring does come slowly over the horizon and up the sky climbing a ladder of weathered trellises where last year’s climbing vines still cling frozen in place.

We anticipate Spring with its cartoon-like colors unfolding:

Think Again

I thought once again
and again and again
and still the nagging
thing rang an alarm
clock in an assembly
line repetitive factory
too much time on my
hands think again our
Supervisor said again

I thought twice thrice
four to the bar again
with my factory wife
any number of numb
clock ticking times X
and after time was up
the world no more in
need of time clocks
we laid off thought

thought again and again
of my time on the line
spent thinking not off
the pieces clicking by
but on some other
think I can’t now seem
to remember again
lost as I am to thoughts
again and again and again

Laconic Cartoons

Simple doodles with few words

You can subscribe to “Laconic Cartoons,” which promises to be fun, free, with no ads, and no AI! If you do subscribe, you’ll get an email with each new cartoon I post. So a subscription keeps up-to-date. The cartoons will go directly to your inbox, where you can view them, delete them, or print one and tape it to your icebox! Or you can visit Laconic Cartoons at the Substack website anytime you’re looking for a smile.

There won’t be much to read – explains the “Laconic” in the title. Of course, cartoons are noted, even with captions, for using few words – short, economical, crisp. So maybe the title, “Laconic Cartoons” with subtitle “simple doodles with few words,” is superfluous, but that’s what doodles are, and gratuitous. And doodles are spontaneous, improvisational, which is something you can’t quite aim for. A good cartoon is thrifty. Like this one:

Laconic Cartoons! Subscribe for free!

Field Notes: 9.18.23

Substacking: Messing around with Substack again. Tried out songs with video (which I ended up using here in post previous to this one), deleted the songs (“More Modern Songs”) substack, started a poetry substack, deleted that one too, settled on cartoons. “Laconic Cartoons: simple doodles with few words.”

Substack format seems busier than when I previously gave it a trial go. More social media characteristics. “Notes” page, for example, that seems to work like the old bluebird site (see cartoon, “This Bird has flown”).

Listened to a short podcast this morning on a cartoonist’s substack I’m following. Two and a half minutes in which she reads all the captions from the cartoons in this week’s New Yorker. It’s Liza Donnelly, who is herself a New Yorker cartoonist. Clever idea, captions without the drawings. Sounded like a John Ashbery poem as the captions ran together randomly as if they were connected by some logical narrative thread. Flight of the bumblebee. I was going to leave Liza a comment, only to find I couldn’t – only paying subscribers can comment on Liza’s substack. Clever idea that, too. And there were two captionless cartoons in the issue, which of course she could not read, but I was reminded of John Cage’s 4’33.

“Laconic Cartoons” has no paying option, and no plans of such. All free, and feel free to comment, such as, “Dude, seriously? You can’t give these away!” Something like that.

Decluttering: Have now filled a dozen grocery bags with books, eliminating the need for several bookcases. Vietnam Veterans will pick them up, along with some cool items recently discovered in the basement. What books did I keep? Might want to save that for a future post.

Guitar: Working on more original songs. “More Modern Songs”: that title, btw, suggested from Dylan’s latest book. Planning more videos. Had not tried to post a video on WordPress before. Easy. Songs are different from poems. Though you can usually read a song a lot quicker than you can listen to it, but you can listen to music while doing other things, though vacuuming the living room presents challenges, while poems should be read aloud to achieve their full flavor.

Cartooning: Here’s a cartoon (captionless) for readers unwanting or unable to visit the Laconic Cartoons substack:

Old Pic of the Day: Venice Beach Around 1970

We walked out one morning to find an art installation up from the water, large paper wraps spread across the beach. They looked like sea creatures, dinosaurs, giant lizards of some kind. I asked Susan to stand in front of one to put an idea of their size into the picture. Susan has never liked having her picture taken, and she’s showing that in her pose here. We walked down the Strand for some breakfast, and Susan snapped a picture of Joan and Terri and me. I think we were using slide film in an Instamatic of some kind.

Art from The Arc

I paint for the same reasons I write: it’s a physical activity that is peaceful, happy, and all about light. Though for some time now I’ve not been painting much. When I do paint, the images come from some underground reservoir, the same place many poems come from, a vision from the inside, if I can say so without sounding too psycho, as opposed to en plein air, painting what one sees on the outside. I read recently that Monet painted dozens of scenes of the River Seine – the same scene over and over, but each scene in different light. I’ve never seen a Monet painting in person, only pics of them, often the light different in each photo, and I’ve often wondered what Monet would think of that, the light in his paintings changing with each reproduction. The light in a parlour or museum likewise might change the scene as it was seen and painted. That effect is not unlike sound effects, where the splendid, carefully practiced arpeggio heard on the radio is accompanied by static, a dog barking in some distant yard, or a trash truck picking up the street cans and noisily dumping them into the void.

I did see some Rothko paintings in person, some time ago, at a show at the Portland Art Museum, and I was surprised by how thinly he applied the paint to the canvas. You could easily see the warp and weft of the canvas. Of course you’re supposed to view from a distance – the same distance for everyone? One’s eyesight too changes the light. Way back in my school days, I once tried to argue that Monet’s impressionist style was the result of cataracts, but I was struck down by an art student who argued that the work of the impressionists was the result of an art theory they had invented and implemented as a complicated statement on reality and vision. I still think it might have been cataracts.

I started painting with my two granddaughters when they were little and liked to play with paints, unconcerned with talent or any kind of “I can’t draw” self-criticism. We all three painted for the same reasons mentioned above: peaceful, happy, and light. And fun! At first I bought new canvases from an art supply store, of modest size, 20″ by 20″ or so, but I then started to find large canvases at garage sales, priced cheaply enough, far less than I was paying for the new ones at the art store, and I bought them for us to paint over. The garage sale finds were not Monet’s or Rothko’s, so no harm was brought to the art world by our painting over them.

Recently, over at The Arc, a non-profit thrift store not far from us, out on the sidewalk, against the wall, behind some smaller items, I spied a large canvas, 26″ x 60″ x 1 & 1/2″. They wanted $10 for it. A great find. The visions of what I might paint over it started drifting in like a slow moving moon, the light in a park changing by the minute. But when I got the painting home, a canvas print of some sort, the kind used to decorate hotel rooms or small business lobbies, I began to have second thoughts about painting over it. Something about it said no, put me up as is.

So I did, and here it is, for your critical review. Please leave a comment! Is it art? Is it good? Why, why not? …B, care to comment? Ashen? Dan? Bill? Barbara? Lisa? Susan? All you artists and art aficionados out there?

The pic in the bottom right corner shows one of my basement paintings, sitting on the piano, which I took down to hang the Arc find.

F/Z 2: Doubt & Surety

In part 3 of his encounter with Zizek’s “A European Manifesto,” Jeremy Fernando returns to the question of the picture we have of another’s picture of us that is not the same picture we have of us. In other words, the question of art, tinged with doubt, the opposite of faith (62). We all have a particular picture of ourselves, more than one, perhaps, but, in any case, seldom the same picture others have of us. This is of primary concern to the artist who realizes his lack of vision inhibits the transparency that informs nature (i. e. the primordial picture). The painter of the still life bowl of peaches fails to see the molecules drifting off the rotting fruit, but captures the glossy black fly attending to the rusting red peaches with verisimilitude the critic who likes this sort of thing calls ultra-realism. Of course it’s hardly real at all. It’s a painting, oils that never completely dry.

To have put down yesterday a few of my thoughts on Fernando’s recent book (S/Z Jeremy Fernando: A European Manifesto Slavoj Zizek, 2022, Delere Press), this morning, upon reflection, causes me to pick up the book again and open to:

“…one cannot be sure not only if one has mis-read, over-read, or under-read, one cannot be certain if one has even read.”
63.

An “illegitimate” (63) reading, then. Well, after all, this is a blog:

Thus we can only impress upon our readers (all dozen or so of them, if we are a best-teller) our impression of what we’ve read. My impression is that we’ve no need to fear the monster. And to keep in mind always that the monster is precisely not Frankenstein. All art is science fiction. In fact, all science is science fiction. What do we think we are seeing when we look at these new photographs of scenes taking place in far far away space?

“Where what << Europe >> is, might be, could be, might well already be, is both from yonder, perhaps even beyond the pale, but at the same time – since it is named such – within its possibilities. Where, in response to ‘Was heibt Europa?’ [What is Europe?] one might posit, un pas au-dela [a step beyond].”
39.

The artist (the surety, the guarantor) assumes the responsibility for the debt of the reader who brings suit (calling upon his solicitor – i. e. the critic), as he surely must, for he can never get to the bottom of it on his own, yonder his own limits, beyond the pale, outside any jurisdiction. For the artist, who stands alone, is both surety and principal, the one who performs the obligation and the one who guarantees the performance, and the one who defaults, all three parties to the contract. What became of the reader? Lost in space.

To be clear: Frankenstein is the artist; the book is the monster.

Thus, while Fernando starts part three with questions about the artist, he quickly moves to a discussion of Adam and Eve and the question of the tree of knowledge, of good and evil, and wonders how either (Adam or Eve) could have possibly made an informed decision to eat of the forbidden fruit, since before that act they had no knowledge – they didn’t know what they were doing; as innocents, they could not make an informed decision – they had not reached the age of reason: thus their plea of nolo contendere. And they plea guilty to a lesser charge, that of being human.

Dolling Down

Some folks like to dress
others down for a night
on the town to be seen
or to mingle in the pile

to start a scene walk
the prowl talk the chat
say a prayer to the folks
at the top of the stares

go-go with the up-flow
the effluvium of the
affluent dressed
in advertisements

ads in fashion zines
Fellinists puttin’ on
the style the smile
all the while they

used to say it was
a young folks way
but we can put on
the style any while

doll it up or doll
it down the grin
showing couth
or clown frown.

Notes on Earliest Parietal Art

A Science Bulletin article, available online 10 September 2021, titled “Earliest parietal art: Hominin hand and foot traces from the middle Pleistocene of Tibet,” provides an opportunity to consider definitions and purposes of art. The article discloses and describes what appears to be the discovery of the oldest known evidence of human art, from over a million years ago, much further back than any previous find, and probably made by children.

To ask the question what is art and attempt an answer is to engage in an argument of definition. The scientists involved in the recent discovery outline a kind of argument of stipulation; that is, in the example being discussed, for something to be considered art, it must include mimesis. It must be “a copy of something else.” And that copy is taken out of its natural context and given a new birth:

The Tibetan art-panel meets this basic criterion, but with its own flourishes. The placement of the prints is not as they would naturally occur, with tracks spaced by movement, or hands placed to stabilize [4]; rather, the artist has taken a form that was already known through lived experience (i.e., the artist presumably having seen their own footprints), and took that form (the footprint) and reproduced it in a context and pattern in which it would not normally appear. This is made even clearer by the addition of the handprints, which are not commonly seen in lived experience.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scib.2021.09.001

According to the definition of art built into the article, the object of art need not be something an audience bows to in reverence. The skill required to make the artwork is not as important as the intention of the maker that the work be “received as art.” The purpose of the work might be “enjoyment, fun or decoration.” The article uses the example of contemporary parents displaying a child’s work as art, even if “tentative artistic endeavours as art.” The authors argue the prehistoric art panel satisfies all of those conditions.

There are other important implications and conclusions of the discovery and analysis of the hand and foot prints (a human presence not expected on the Tibetan Plateau so long ago, for example). But the insistence of calling the panel art seems to distinguish this discovery from that of some other remote relic or fossil find.

What is art that does not free us from the existential cages into which we are born – distraction, deceit, knickknack; advertisement, marketing, sales? In short, propaganda. The artist deviates, moves on, leaves, wanders, wonders, is born again, an outsider, without a comfort zone. Even to just want to be an artist might suggest a kind of alienation, isolation, irrelevance – playing an instrument out of time and pocket. To turn art into a practice is craft, which is fidelity. Art is what is born again, a reassembling of experience, a repurposing of predicament. A pastime, when we had time on our hands.

The word primitive does not appear in the “art panel” article of foot and hand prints. This may be read as a sidestepping or a deliberate absence from the definition. Seen as art, the prints develop their own place of permanence and value without reference to a hierarchy of skill level, training or education, or complexity of instrument. The body parts are at once the form and content and implement of the art work. And it is the arrangement of those parts, the rearrangement in an unexpected pattern or rhythm or placement, that fulfills the necessary characteristics of a work of art.

I’ve been making art with my granddaughters since they were toddlers. I’ve put together a collage here of pieces, adding a few other pics on topic:

Out of Key

“Out of key with his time,” Pound wrote, recognizing what might be said, regardless of form, is relegated in time, if not immediately, to the dustheap of the wasteland of the “botched civilization.” What was he trying to save? He had fallen out, had a falling out, and now has fallen even further. “Wrong from the start,” he said. Not to mention the end, the end of ages.

Only as commodity does art (music, poetry, sculpture) find its audience which values what the gatekeeper says. While art that is profane, outside the edifice, plays in the pocket, in key with its time.

We thought that had all been resolved by the Beats, where jazz and oral poetry, improvisation and play, not in big halls or while wearing wigs of beauty, but in the dive bars and rundown cafes in the skidrow of literature.

“…brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back…” (Joyce, FW).

Category Archives: art