To answer my own question from the previous blog:

I don’t know…I don’t know whether what we choose to look at makes a difference or not. Do our eyes actually play a role in shaping the kind of person we are or the kind of People we become? Specifically, when we make the effort to look at something because we chose to, are we affected in ways other than those of which we’re aware? To make this question more profound than it probably is:  Is there a relation between seeing and being? I don’t know, but I think so…and I think the relation is imaginary!

Imaginary? …that needs a bit of explanation. By “imaginary” I mean: seeing is what imagination does, but not in the way the eye does. The eye responds to light; imagination responds to meaning. It responds by expressing meaning in a form that makes it accessible. (Caveat: Making meaning accessible is not the same thing as making it conceptual. Meaning is always lived and experienced before it is rendered any other way.)

The imagination constructs what we see. It actually builds the images in mind that our eyes deliver to the brain. The raw material from which it constructs those images comes from the exposure we’ve had to the visual and cultural worlds in which we live.

If we fill our head, then, with some things and not others it seems only reasonable to assume that we’re more likely to be attuned to those things, more disposed to imagine, think, and feel the presence of those things. If imagination constructs forms of meaning and value from the raw materials of experience, what we choose to look at makes a difference in the raw materials available for use. We might say that what we see sets parameters for what we can or cannot see. Why? Because our choices not only reveal our preferences, they create the visual possibilities for meaning to be there. In other words: the visual choices we make do make a difference in what we imagine!

Let’s take a concrete example of how this works. When we choose a movie, turn on the telly, attend an opening…do we think twice about where we put our eyes, or what those images we ingest do? I doubt it. Because we think there is no harm in looking and, furthermore, the last thing we want to do is censor the eye! It’s much more comfortable to believe that what we see makes no more difference than we allow it to make. Images don’t manipulate us; we manipulate them. It’s the same argument the NRA uses: guns don’t kill people, people do. The image, like the gun, is essentially a tool that can be used to either healthy or unhealthy ends. We decide, don’t we? The gun doesn’t aim itself….

So, the images we find appealing and entertaining or repulsive and disturbing only make a difference if we allow them to? When we’re over-loaded, supersaturated, with images of violence and horror, the grotesque and catastrophic…when we pay to be entertained by images of brutality, war, rape, and torture…are we simply a detached witness no more affected by those images than the projector that broadcasts them? We are patrons of our preferences looking in the mirror of self and society. And while we’re taking it all in, we’re filling the reservoir of possibilities for the imagination.

But here’s the paradox: filling the reservoir of possibilities may also drain it of options. The more explicit and intense the image the more likely it is to narcotize our imagination—filling and draining us simultaneously!  Think about it…when it comes to portrayal of the gruesome and grisly for example, increasingly little is left to the imagination. In film, it’s as if each filmmaker must out do the other with such fantastic effect that there is little need for the moviegoer to imagine anything! The hit is narcotic. The more graphic one’s exposure the more graphic the next set of images must become to evoke the same response.

With all of those possibilities spelled out, with more and more visual detail to draw from (“Now in 3-D!”), are we erasing (or trying to at least) the line between what one sees and what one imagines? And as that line thins, does the distinction between what’s imagined and what’s real become easier and easier to confuse?

Another way to think about it: is what’s going on here “visual fundamentalism”? When our images are spelled out in literalistic form with graphic detail and high definition…what’s left for us to imagine? Our eyes become wider and wider taking in all the realism we can absorb while our imagination shuts down. This is a condition Stanley Kubrick described as “eyes wide shut,” we see only what’s there but not what it means. The image has become so intense, so narcotic in its effect that it actually hides what’s going on right in front of our eyes!

(Kubrick’s movie Eyes Wide Shut is a brilliant demonstration of the point. You need only look at the critics’ bafflement about what it means. Kubrick was a genius and regarded this film as his only masterpiece. I don’t believe for a minute that he was just trying to be cryptic for the fun of it. The exploration of seeing and being pervades his work.)

The irony then is this: the more accustomed we become to having everything spelled out, displayed, and rendered with fundamentalist visual zeal, the less we actually see! The more literal an image becomes, the more it conforms to what we already know or could experience, the less imagination it demands and the closer to reality it seems. Imagination, like any other faculty, atrophies with disuse. Over exposure to the same sets of visual representation numbs imagination. The possibilities for new meaning or new experience are diminished. Growth slows and our capacity to discover meaning atrophies. Anything unfamiliar becomes not only unreal, but meaningless.

The stuff we look at over and over again, the places we visit with our eyes to entertain ourselves, acquires a normative quality. That is, it becomes so reinforced in our minds that it takes on the character of everyday life. So?

Think about how “ordinary” severed limbs, spurting blood, and people being blown away has become. When these images are so much a part of our everyday visual life, should we actually encounter them they’re not only likely to be less shocking but unlikely to register as anything other than what they are, a train wreck or a mass murder. C’est la vie. We’ll wring our hands, say prayers, hold memorials, and keep creating and absorbing all those images without ever imagining what they mean or what they say about who we are or what we have become—much less why. Blood and gore and guts are entertaining and exciting to see…they’re art, they’re sport, they’re our way of life—and the more graphic, brutal, and horrifying the better! That’s OK…we know the difference between imagination and reality don’t we?

Lawrence Bowden

Does it matter what we look at?

I mentioned to a friend the other day that I doubted I’d go see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. When asked “why?” I said that I didn’t think I could watch a violent rape as entertainment however “artfully purposed” it was. I hastened to add that my doubts were not a “statement about the movie.” Rather, they signal a feeling I can’t shake, one I’ve had for a long time: that what we choose to look at, how we feed our mind with images is not a lot different from how we feed our body. Diet impacts rather profoundly the kind of life experience we have. And just as some kinds of foods are more healthful and nutritious than others, so, I’ve felt, are some kinds of images. But are they?

Does it make a difference what we see? Or, as a painter, I wonder whether the kind of images we choose to paint or the kind of images we surround ourselves with or select for our entertainment affect us in any sustained way? Of course we all know the striking impact of being moved in a moment by an image that evokes surprise, disgust, curiosity, compassion, etc.—the marketer’s stock in trade. But is there something more than the ephemeral going on? In the main, do images we create and consume function in any way other than just being there as decoration or pastime? Or are they basically reflections, a mirror through which (like Alice) we walk into our culture or (like Narcissus) gaze into our own mind’s eye?

“Oh, yeah,” said my friend, “It’s the old art imitates life imitates art conundrum.” The aesthetic equivalent of the chicken or the egg? Sort of, maybe…. But, you’ll recall, I introduced this thought in my last blog— that the kind of images we have in our mind, the stuff we see that stays with us, does make a difference. But what difference it makes…? I don’t know. Mostly these are questions for which I have feelings but no real answers.

Does what we see make us better or more corrupt, calmer or more violent, healthier or more sick? Are the images we choose to be around and entertained by like the people we choose to hang out with—influential but not determinative? How do we know? How much do they shape our attitudes and behaviors, focus our attention, or affect how we feel? Do they influence our choices not only of what we look at (movies, shows, exhibits, performances, web sites, videos, news etc.), but what we see, virtually effecting our perception and how we think about things? It’s hard not to imagine that they do…at least to some degree. How can we deny that our friends make a difference? Or that what’s in our head, the stuff we’re constantly exposed to, has no influence in how we see or shape the world around us?

Intuitively, this makes sense. But is it true? Is it accurate to say that what we see makes a difference, makes us different? Is it accurate to suggest that the images we surround ourselves with and allow into our head actually influence how we look at other things around us, how we feel or think, and maybe even what we do?  I think so—but I don’t know that. These hunches or assumptions that seem so common sensible are perfect examples of what researchers call “the illusion of validity.” What they mean is that too often the judgments we make intuitively, judgments that just seem natural and right, more likely than not turn out to be wrong under scrutiny. Money Ball, the story about how manager Billy Beane turned the Oakland A’s baseball team into winners in 2002, is instructive. It offers an entertainingly powerful portrayal of what happens when years of conventional, intuitively sound, wisdom gets turned on its head. When the best ole skippers in baseball ply years of seasoned decision making against a new counterintuitive approach using statistics and probabilities, what happens? What happens is that over a season, the intuitive wisdom doesn’t hold up, the numbers do.

Does this mean that intuitive judgments are always wrong or without value? Of course not. But we need to recognize that their power is not in their accuracy, it is in the speed with which they’re made. In a life-threatening situation, e.g., there’s hardly time for statistical research! But to supplant accuracy with speed, or reality with illusion, when the situation does not demand it is naïve. So…wondering whether the images we create or the images we ingest and give a home to in our head, actually makes a difference in our experience of the world or somehow affects the kind of culture we create and inhabit…well…these would not seem to be questions well-suited to intuitive judgments. But consider this: images invade us at the speed of light. They come at us a lot faster than a wild animal in the woods! It may be that we have to decide intuitively while someone’s doing the chi square stuff!

Images are a function of the eye/the mind. The mind is an eye is the mind. The line between percept and concept, between the information our eyes convey and the image the mind registers, is so thin that it is practically indistinguishable. So what we see is actually a construction, a cooperative project between the eye (all the stuff it picks up and delivers as sense perception) and the mind (that assembles all that information, coordinates it with our prior experience, and makes something we recognize—an image.) It doesn’t seem unreasonable, then, to assume that what we see, comes from all of that stuff we hold in our mind’s eye, the raw materials from which we imagine—for better and worse—how things are, or, what they might be. It would seem, wouldn’t it, that the kind of raw materials we use, the information we fill up with, is going to affect the outcome of our imagination?

Isn’t it a matter of fact that we must first imagine something before it becomes real? For example, the atom bomb. Wasn’t it imagined before it vaporized human beings? “The communicator” on Star Trek…wasn’t it imagined before the cell phone had a ring tone? Do these images and ideas just arrive from nowhere? I don’t think so. I think they are constructed. I think that our imagination assembles them from the reservoir of images absorbed by the eye/the mind. If that’s the case, don’t artists have a hand in this? Don’t they produce or manipulate a lot of what goes into the reservoir? Conversely, as an audience, don’t we have some control over what we absorb and hold in our mind’s eye? Don’t we choose in good measure how to fill the reservoir from which we interpret our experience and build the world in which we live? Could the old cliché, “what you see is what you get,” be more than descriptive?! Might it also be determinative?

Doesn’t it make a difference, then, the kind of images we create, the kind of images we consume, promote, codify, and protect? Doesn’t it make a difference not only in the kind of culture we construct, but in the kind of people we become? Maybe what we choose to look at makes a difference not only in what we see but in what we can or cannot see.

That’s next time….

Lawrence Bowden

I recently joined a newly initiated discussion group called “Art Is My Thing.” A former student of mine, now quite an established California painter, was looking for a place to discuss the ideas, techniques, and approaches fellow artists discover to enlarge and enhance their work. Since most existing art discussion groups tend toward marketing, sales, or self-promotion, he decided to create an alternative that made art work itself the focus. One of the first topics to come up was “sourcing”…where do you get your ideas? Where do the images come from? What inspires a painting or triggers the urge to make a photograph? Talking about this—even with other artists—is a challenge! Probably because making the art doesn’t live in the same place as the thoughts or feelings that require it.

The old saws about making something beautiful or provoking the viewer to think or see in new ways or giving expression to one’s thoughts or feelings or framing a moment of time or place with meaning or question…all of these hovered about our conversation. But none of them quite reach into the source of why we do what we do, why do we choose or struggle to create the particular images we do? If we think of our work as an expressive language, a way to communicate or share something that can be offered in no other way, the question of where the images come from is a little like asking someone about the vocabulary they use. Where do your words come from? Why do you use the words you use? It’s not ordinarily something we think much about. But when we do we realize how powerful words can be, how particular words can shape our own perception as well as the way others see, see us, or think about what’s said. It’s not hard to get confused or be confusing in the process! Artists know this well.

It’s a bit embarrassing to confess, but there’s probably no one any more mystified about their work, about why they paint what they paint or where the images they paint come from than me. I’d really like to know! I think of myself as an intuitive painter, but not in the stylistic or technical sense of the word. When the eminent psychologist Carl Jung used the term, he understood intuition as a kind of insight or knowledge that arrives by way of the unconscious. (This was just a clever theoretical way of saying he didn’t know where it came from. The unconscious is, by definition, what we’re unaware of!) So when I think of what I paint or why I paint what I do, I have to admit that what shows up on canvas is triggered as much by what I’m unaware of as what I am. That’s how I think about being an intuitive painter. My images arrive to challenge me to understand them. And just as in ordinary conversation, what others have to say about what they see is often as revealing as anything I think. Painting helps me to know about deep rhythms and values asking for attention.

Opticon One

The current series of paintings I’m working on I’ve called “Yesterday’s Tomorrow.” I’ve borrowed that title from a traveling exhibition assembled by the Smithsonian back in the early 1980’s. The subtitle of that exhibition was “Past Visions of the American Future.” Beginning in the late 19th century up through the late 1960s it catalogued a sampling of the ways images and visions of the future played out in a variety of arenas from transportation to community planning and architecture to communication media to industrial design to warfare. It was an amazing celebration of the future as an idea and an act of the imagination. The images, many outrageous or silly by today’s standards, were nonetheless overwhelmingly optimistic and almost utopian in their vision of the human potential and the possibilities for a more humane way of life. Even war was reframed in ways that would make warfare obsolete.

Where this paleo-future grabbed me as a kid were the images I absorbed first from Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Then, when television came into our house, from shows like Captain Video, Captain Midnight, Space Patrol, and Tom Corbett Space Cadet. These images were captivating not just because they portrayed what Gene Roddenberry described critically as “cowboys and Indians in space,” but because, more importantly, they imagined a future I wanted to inhabit, one rich with adventure, one fantastic and fabulous—and fun! These images seemed ubiquitous—broadcasting an amazing future so loudly that they muffled the noise of annihilation coming from real world fears.

Gone.

Opticon Two

What happened? Did I grow up? When did we decide the future was not something to dream about but a nightmare to be avoided? The world clearly was no safer then than now…. Something life sustaining is absent when the images we imagine entertain our fears, when our hopes are to avoid catastrophe rather than to aspire for tomorrow. What’s missing is not a childish naivete that smothers the facts with fantasy or draws a smiley face on evil. What’s missing is that imaginative spirit that launched Buck Rogers in the midst of the Great Depression or built a World’s Fair in 1939—on the brink of global war—on the theme: The World of Tomorrow.

So…in the series I’m calling “Yesterday’s Tomorrow” I’m playing with what I imagine as iconic and fantastic images molded from an era when our fears were held in check by the fabulous rather than cultivated by dystopian disillusionment. There is a place for dystopia just as there are reasons to fear. But if the only future we can imagine is degraded by fear, yesterday’s tomorrow is, quite literally, only today. There is no future, just what happens next. By contrast, today is the place to imagine things differently. The future now is in the difference we make today. And the difference we can make depends on the images we entertain, on what we choose to see…and Imagine!

[If you’d like to learn more about the ways the future has been imagined, check out this blog from The Smithsonian: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/]

Lawrence Bowden

I’m dreaming of winning the raffle prize to Paris (though as an employee, I can’t buy a ticket…) But there are some similarities between the art scene of Montmartre in the 20s and Riverviews…. not least of which an appearance by Larry Bowden at 1:15. –Mary Ann

One thing about small-town America: it teaches you to know your place.

I’m from one of those: a small, mid-western, farm town…big enough that you didn’t actually know everyone, but small enough to feel like they knew you. You knew in what part of town which people lived, who belonged to the country club and who did not, and where and how far you could ride your bike and still feel at home. Our town had a modestly sized liberal arts college, half a dozen churches, a grain elevator, and the red granite courthouse with its imposing clock tower anchoring the northwest corner of the town square. There were banks on each of the other three corners. The monumental, turn of the century courthouse housed the county jail and signaled our claim to fame, being the County Seat. No museums, galleries, or concert hall. Our Town was not cosmopolitan but neither (thanks to the college I suppose), was it particularly parochial.

As a child, the semi-circular sanctuary of our little Baptist church seemed vast. The pulpit was front and center. It surveyed a congregation that fanned out from its place on an elevated, carpeted platform above and behind the altar. Sloping toward it like spokes on a wheel were two wide aisles with pews between them and on either side. These were the runways! Starting from the elevated rear of the sanctuary, you could build enough speed racing down the aisle on one side to jump onto the pulpit platform, launch off the other side and tear heart-pounding up the opposite aisle. Then you’d roar around the rear of the sanctuary and back down the runway to plop, an exhausted human offering, onto the platform. Great sport! The slope of those wide aisles just invited take off and landing…as long as you didn’t get caught!

Mom was very clear the moment she first witnessed one of my take offs and landings. Gently but firmly she instructed: The sanctuary is not the place to run, yell, jump, or play. But why, I wanted to know? It’s not appropriate behavior. Huh? What does that mean? It means that you’re not being respectful. But…there’s no one there but us kids? Who are we not being respectful to? God wants us to be happy at His House, isn’t that what you’ve always said? And this is fun, Mom! Yes…but here we need to respect what this place is for and we do that by behaving properly whether anyone is watching or not.

I didn’t get it. But whatever it was she meant had evidently an adult consensus. They all seemed to gang up on this kind of behavior disapprovingly. There weren’t exactly “rules” that, ignored, deserved punishment. It was more implicit—like an “understanding” or convention that, by observing it or not, said something about you. Appropriate behavior signaled that you knew where you were and understood the demands of the space. In other words, your behavior mirrored your sense of place thereby respecting the presence of others sharing it with you—whether they were there or not. Behavior that belonged or behavior that was out of place showed what kind of person you were.

Knowing your place is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it can be a euphemism for oppression; on the other it conveys a deeply profound and necessary sense of recognition and belonging. Knowing where you are means not only being oriented in space and time, but recognizing the connections you have both with the place and with others who belong there too. Those connections of recognition and belonging not only determine who you are, but also imply the behavior appropriate to where you are. Absent that awareness of what’s appropriate, you are out of place…literally, a displaced person. Being in the vicinity of an event is not the same thing as the experience of belonging there. Objectively, being someplace without recognizing or picking up on what’s appropriate is like having someone try to reach you when your cell phone is off. You’re oblivious to the signals.

Last week a painting crashed to the floor in the Craddock-Terry Gallery shattering the glass and springing the frame from true. A visitor leaning onto a gallery wall had evidently caught the frame with his clothing and pulled the painting from its mooring. The noise awakened a somnambulant apology but little else from the offender who, of course, had no idea that sharing the gallery wall with the art was inappropriate.

Homage to Duchamp?

The Curator of the Gallery reports that cleaning up following a recent Opening she retrieved a partially filled plastic cup of punch from its perch atop the frame of one of the works in the show. The frame, evidently, was at just the right height to hold the visitor’s drink while his hands had other things to do than mind a drink.

At yet another Opening, a large and tactile work filling much of the wall proved irresistible to a mid-life blossom from the new age. So she moved, literally, atop the painting and began to cop a feel, pawing its surface with both hands as though, in another age, she’d been cleaning wallpaper.

It's the wine

And then there was the too-well lubricated wannabe—Artist? Critic? Sophisticate?—whose pronouncements were about as insightfully appealing as the volume at which he pronounced them. Reception wine needs to be more discriminating about the tongues it loosens. Maybe the wine should be sold with a reminder that patrons are not purchasing a license to annoy?

Stuff like this makes you wonder. Pecca Fortier!?

Where are these kid’s parents? OK, then, where are the adults? I used to think that “being an adult” meant you knew how to behave appropriately. I used to imagine that an adult would assume some social responsibility, a role that asked for more than just personal accountability. I used to believe that if you were sophisticated enough to want to go to art galleries and museums you’d know that they were not the same as the high school gym.

Disrespect is no less disrespectful for being naïve, unintentional, or ill informed. In fact, unintentional disrespect is even more alienating because the conduct is largely unconscious. Unconscious behavior is the hallmark of doing what comes naturally! It’s action unaffected by our higher faculties. People this unaware of their behavior, were you to call it to their attention, would either be offended or assume that you are the one who doesn’t get it.

“A GPS can direct you to a destination, but it can’t tell you where you are.”  A gallery that is open to the public is, well, “public.” Anyone can enter. But being in a gallery is not the same thing as belonging there. Belonging is not about “membership” nor is it necessarily about elitism. It’s simply the observation that not all who enter know where they are! Protocol oblivion is a pretty reasonable indicator that someone—in spite of what got them there—has lost their place. Running your hands over the surface of an artwork (unless instructed by the artist to do so) is simply out of place; leaving your refuse in a gallery, much less on an artwork, is out of place; frustrating with gauche behavior the corporate solitary engagement of the art by others is out of place, etc.

These and numerous other examples of dysfunctional, inappropriate, behavior are only partly a matter of “just not knowing any better,” of somehow missing the chapter on propriety and social convention. It’s also about perception. Were it only “knowing better,” signs and information would fix the problem. But you can’t have a sign that anticipates every inappropriate act. The problem is perceptual, one of recognition, of seeing where you are, who’s there with you, and responding appropriately. We can’t assume any longer that the behaviors appropriate to a place—be it a gallery or the landscape itself—are acquired implicitly. The capacity to recognize where we are—not just our physical location—or to know who we are and how we are to act seems to have all but disappeared. To experience the deep sense of belonging that elicits appropriate behavior has been eclipsed by an aggressive self-absorption that makes of even our social networks an extended projection of our own needs. You have to care about others—even when no one’s watching—to do what’s right. Maybe that’s just a small town notion?

Lawrence Bowden

A thing of beauty is a joy forever,

said John Keats. Really?!  Forever…really? Or did he really mean, “only as long as it lasts?” If not…if Keats is right…does that mean that once you’ve had the experience of beauty the joy can never be destroyed?

So…let’s see if I get this:  If we can believe Keats, the thing may fade or disappear altogether, but what it’s beauty evokes or creates is there even in the absence of the thing that gave us the experience…right? There’s something comforting in that…hopeful…. It may even be transformative to know that however ephemeral our life, however harshly time may treat things, what is created in beauty is neither ephemeral nor merely temporal but true and worthy of practice.

The Whirling Logs, Navajo sand painting image by Frank Martin

In the Nightway ceremony of the Dineh (Navajo), there is a refrain in one of the songs that says:

With beauty before me, I walk

With beauty behind me I walk

With beauty below me I walk

With beauty above me I walk

With beauty all around me I walk.

In beauty I walk.

What is immediately evident in this refrain is where the prayer locates the singer: at the center of the beauty through which s/he moves on a daily basis—the sacred universe defined by the four directions, nadir and zenith. In other words, by becoming conscious of the beauty in which one is found, the experience one has of the world gets centered, balanced, made whole. One’s being is literally restored to balance and health by participating (a participation made conscious by the Nightway chant) in the beauty, order, and harmony of our true nature and the true nature of creation.

The Monks of Tashi Kyil

Last week a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks from Tashi Kyil Monastery in Clement Town, India, presented many in Lynchburg with the opportunity to see (if not experience) how this works. Over a period of four and a half days working eight hours a day with colored sands, the monks—sometimes as many as five working at once—created a painting (a square within a circle within a square) ofapproximately 25 square feet. The sand was meticulously and painstakingly dribbled a few grains at a time to create an elaborate, esoteric, design rich with symbolic and contemplative meaning. The concentration and focus required for this kind of painting was a moving meditation, one whose outcome took the form of a mandala, literally, “a sacred circle.” One can think of a mandala as a spiritual blueprint, a visual tool from which the sacred order, harmony, balance, and health of our true dwelling can be constructed in mind.

Loose sand trickled into a beautiful, brilliantly colored design free of any bonding agent, is by its nature vulnerable and impermanent, like life itself. And precisely because it is ephemeral, the painting, i.e. the act of making, is more significant than the sand. In creating this mandala the monks give spiritual matter form to be sure…but just as important, they are bringing the living Buddha of healing and compassion to our community. These sand paintings are never private acts for personal gain. Even if we fail to comprehend the ritual context or the language of the chants surrounding the event, we participate with our presence as an essential ingredient. The value of presence as participation is easily overlooked (and easily abused—but that’s another blog!). Making the painting recognizes how deeply inter-dependent we are and how universal is the need for healing and compassion of one for another.

As laboriously and mindfully as it was created, even so swiftly is it swept away once the painting is done. After days of watching the monks devote love and care to their work, the relative abruptness with which it turns to dust is poignant. Sweeping the sand away is not a rocker’s act of nihilism. Rather it serves to emphasize how inter-connected we are when we pay attention, sometimes by just showing up, to watch by being present…a presence honored by participating in the process of disillusion. [When practicable, the audience actually does the sweeping.] Seeing and feeling the image dissolve before our eyes also illustrates our vain desire to cling to things that by nature change. And (perhaps somewhat paradoxically) as the mandala disappears we awaken to the awareness of just how deeply we mind, pay attention to, what’s there before it’s gone.

The sand is brushed into a pile, it’s myriad colors like the painting itself not lost but now invisible to all but mind. Then small portions of the sands are distributed to those present who wish to have a material reminder of the event. The remainder of the sands were then poured into the moving waters of the James River, returning all things to their source, carrying the image of healing and compassion as far as the waters will.

Crassly accounted, we witnessed beauty created for the purpose of dissolution. But that’s not exactly right. The religions of Asia, indeed traditional oriental art forms, differ from our dominant Western approach in at least one essential aspect. That is in the emphasis placed on practice over belief. What we witnessed was not a means to an end but a way of being in the world. When the emphasis is on practice, the practice is a way of living that shapes not only your character but also how you see and experience the world. The manner in which you create and conduct your daily affairs is of far greater substance than what you say you think or believe. In fact, the way you live your life reveals what most truly is in your mind and heart. It matters very little for us to love beauty and create ugliness with every step! It matters very little for us to love peace and be angry at the world! The Buddha smiles.

So, the beauty we see in the work of these Tibetan monks, the healing and compassionate Buddha in the sand painting, the beauty that is a joy forever, is not a thing swept away. It is a way of being devoted to walking every step of every day with the awareness that the beauty we see is equal to the beauty we make. Without uttering a word the art of these simple monks help me to realize: We need to change our mind about things.

Lawrence Bowden

Dylan is at it again. Not another album…but another controversy. This time it’s not about plagiarizing in his music, not about selling out to Victoria’s Secret, Cadillac, or Pepsi, and not about on whatever cultural edge he’s skating to keep forever young. It’s about his art, i.e. his painting—specifically, the work presented as “The Asia Series” by the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in New York.

Dylan knows what he’s doing. Painting is not something he’s come to in the autumn of his life. He’s studied painting and has been painting almost as long as he’s been singing. Of his paintings at Gagosian he says with typical Dylan ambiguity, “they are from real life,” work that the gallery announcement promotes as “a visual journal” of Dylan’s travels in Asia. However much “real life” is portrayed in these paintings, much of it appears to have been copied (without attribution) from other artists’ work.

The Monk (Dylan 2009 from an 1880s photograph)

He’s obviously copied someone else’s photographs. So? Does the copying diminish the painting? Or is it the work of his hand for better or worse? Regardless of how you feel about appropriation art or re-purposing, regardless which of the judicial arguments about plagiarism and fair use you side with…after the questions about money and integrity and social cachet drop away, there is the image. The image and the artfulness of its presence or lack thereof remain. Is it not the image and the magic of the artist’s craft that presents it what makes art art? Isn’t it the image we most care about? …seeing what’s there? Should not the image rather than who owns it or who did it or how it was done determine its value? Too often it does not.

Take a look at this image:

As found at a yard sale in Virginia, 2009

How would you value it? What would you be willing to pay for it? Here’s the story about this still life image: As you notice, it has several puncture wounds and two serious tears along the top and bottom just above the stretcher bars. AND, it’s filthy. Any brilliance it may once have had is long submerged beneath the film of age and carelessness. There’s no signature evident. It’s not a pretty picture.

This painting was found at a yard/estate sale in Rockbridge County (VA) in 2009 and purchased for $3.00. The antique hunter who bought it was delighted when he could sell it for $35.00 to a friend who handles estate auctions and liquidation. He realized more than ten times what he paid for it and was delighted!

Then the friend who runs a Virginia auction house had it cleaned and decided to list the painting in one of his online auctions. He identified it as a “Virginia Folk Art Still Life from the second half of the 19^th century” in “as found condition.” The estimated bid price, now cleaned but un-repaired, was $400 – $600. The hammer price realized? A stunning $18,400! For a $3.00 yard sale damaged canvas?! Go figure….

Well…suppose as a bidder on this piece you happened to be aware of images like these:

Raphael Peale, 1822

Sarah Peale, 1825

These are just two from a plethora of watermelon still life paintings by various members of the Peale family. Now, if you saw this three-dollar painting in an online auction and knew something about the First Family of American art, would you make the leap that this might possibly be an early, undiscovered, work?

The last we heard about the find from Rockbridge County was that the painting had been restored and sold at auction in New York for $38,000. Meanwhile, the still life itself, other than for repairs, didn’t change. The image at $3.00 and the image at $38,000 are identical.

Or, how about this:

Rembrandt Laughing, 1628

For more than 100 years this painting of Rembrandt Laughing was assumed to have been the work of a Rembrandt imitator or, possibly, one of Rembrandt’s students. When it came to auction in 2008 the auction house listed it as a 17^th century knock-off valued at $3,100. But not everyone was so sure…. When the hammer came down a British collector paid $4.5 million for the imposter. He must have been looking at something the auction house wasn’t.

Turns out, the poseur in this painting is not an imposter at all. After scrupulous examination by the Rembrandt Research Project, the image is not only of Rembrandt, but by Rembrandt himself. Utterly unique. “It has an incredible presence,” said Ernst van de Wetering, head of the Project. Suddenly the appraised value for the 9.5 x 6.5 inch painting jumped to nearly $40 million. The presence has always been there, even at $3,100. Nothing of the image has changed since 1628 when it was made.

Stories like these frame the substantial mystery of art, the eye/the mind. How easily we recall artists like Mondrian or van Gogh or, for that matter, our own Willie Shouse who could barely interest anyone in their work while they were alive. Or conversely, look at

from photo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1948

someone like Bob Dylan, a Kennedy Center Honoree, an unquestionably prodigious musical talent and cultural prophet who likes to paint pictures. When Dylan plies his pleasure to copying a photograph, is it the painting that matters or his copying? Or is it the fact that it’s “a Dylan”? What about the image itself?

However ideally we might like to distinguish the image itself from all that surrounds it, in the so-called real world it’s nearly impossible to do so. Provenance, personality, and politic get fused to a work of art to such a degree that we ordinary people hardly know anymore what it is we value or why. The way we engage an image is always determined by more than meets the eye. But here’s the thing: What meets us there, image to eye, says as much about who we are as it does about what’s there.

If we’re more concerned about it being unoriginal, being a copy of someone else’s work, than we are about the presence an image conveys (or fails to convey) …what does that say? If we’re more concerned about what a painting might be worth, what price it might bring, than we are for the real value the image holds…what does that say? If we’re more concerned about who painted it than what is…what does that say?

What after all are we looking for?

Lawrence Bowden

It was the first time that I’d been so captivated I had to buy the painting! I was a sophomore in college. The painting was called “Sailboats.” It was an interpretation (i.e. a copy…or, shall we say, “appropriation”?) by a senior art major of a work by Lyonel Feiniger.

Lyonel Feiniger, Sailboats (1929)

Retrospectively, I can’t be sure which came first: did I see this painting in the Senior Art Majors Show before I chose Feiniger for my term paper in Art Appreciation? Or had I chosen Feiniger to research before I made the connection with this painting in the Senior Show? Whatever the order, there was a meeting, a convergence of the eye/the mind/the heart. For a kid from a small town whose only exposure to painting was working for a General Contractor, that meeting was less a signal of the growing maturity and sophistication of a 19 year old than it was awaking to another dimension in life. Honestly…it felt like what I imagine painters must have experienced when they discovered (or, more accurately, invented) what we now take for granted in a painting: the 3^rd dimension. Oh, sure, it was “there” all along…but where was it in visual renderings, before it began to show up on paper or canvas? (I wonder…can an artist paint something s/he doesn’t see?)

Lyonel Feiniger, Spiller Day on the Sea

I can’t say any longer what it was about Feiniger that so captured my attention back in the day. It clearly wasn’t a prior exposure to art; nor was it a body of knowledge telling me what I was seeing. The best I know how to say: it was a meeting, a face off with my nascent perceptive, aesthetic and critical skills. And why was it Feiniger I was facing? Well… maybe a “second tier” artist was about as far as I could reach…who knows? But in that moment I felt like a curtain was lifted or some protective film was peeled away to reveal an inside that was now out there, right before my eyes. You don’t forget moments like that…even, and maybe especially, when they go unarticulated. They are felt deeply and personally and profoundly even after they are gone.

So… as I was reading a review of the current show at The Whitney Museum, Lyonel Feiniger: At the Edge of the World, I began to hear echoes…echoes about how Feiniger’s “glassy perfectionism” was void of “the spiritual,” or that in his quest for “harmonic balance” and “cosmic structure” he gives us an art of excessively sharp-edged, intersecting planes with titles like “Broken Glass” that can stand as an emblem of the tenor of his characteristic work. And what is most characteristic about the creator of these pictures at the Whitney? …That he is a master of technique, but one whose feeling for an art of order and balance is not emotionally engaging however much it may have gripped him profoundly. In other words, his mastery of the technical skills of artistry has succeeded in

Lyonel Feiniger, Mill in Spring

delivering to us only works that are cool and un-engaging? Competent but not compelling? Distinguished but detached? Yeah, that seems to be it. They may express something that was profound for him, “but, frankly, it leaves us cold.” (Ouch!)

At this point as I’m reading, it’s like some old nostalgic urge wants to enlist me in Feiniger’s defense. But then a comment pops into mind from one of my own blogs… I wrote: There’s nothing wrong with the elegance of technical brilliance. It can be stunning in its execution. But if that’s all it is—stunningly executed—it’s just empty…of life. With Feiniger, as with Mondrian, technical mastery is not all there is. Sharp, defining forms illumined by planes of colored light open an inner eye to forces, mysteries, shaping and directing each life in a profoundly impersonal, universally spiritual way. (Were Feiniger Chinese, we might accuse him of trying to portray the Tao!) Warm and fuzzy or firey and furious is fine, occasionally even necessary. But the passion of the private and personal need not disqualify being engaged by the poignant and piquant presence behind the curtain of appearances. That a feeling for harmonic order and balance fails to be emotionally engaging may say more about our numbness to feeling than it does about anything true.

What’s troubling about my own comment is that I link it to the comments about Feiniger, how he’s just not connecting however profoundly he poured feeling into his art. (“Nice try…I’m just not moved, Mr. Feiniger.”) And then, I cannot help but wonder whether these observations aptly characterize my own work as well? I mean, maybe what first captured my imagination so many years ago was actually a recognition…seeing not an unfeeling, detached, stranger but a friend I had yet to meet…someone whose lines and planes of light I could recognize as familiar?

When I employ hard line, color planes, asymmetrical (harmonic) balance and esoteric forms…pouring feeling into them (just as

Lyonel Feiniger, Yachts

Feiniger did)…there is no guarantee that they will engage anyone else. And, in fact, hard lines, sharp edges, precision, pure color free of the brush’s mark on the picture plane…these all are associated with impersonal, technical distance. I use them like film.

It remains a fact, a stubbornly infuriating truth, that no matter how cleverly articulate you are, how passionately or eloquently you affirm its presence: feeling cannot be engendered from second-hand experiences. The form feeling takes in any work of art is not and cannot be engaged declaratively any more than one can laugh genuinely on demand. It may be there in the process of creation; it may find its way into the form creation takes. But if there is no look of recognition, there is no feeling. When nothing puts the heart in motion, the head hasn’t got a chance. Experience begins with recognizing what’s going on. It takes a measure of cultivated sensitivity to respond—not with apprehension or indifference, but interest—to something we neither recognize as familiar nor understand. And it takes courage…the courage to care about anything other than ourselves, to realize that sometimes a stranger can be the friend we did not know we had. What an amazing experience when that happens!

Lyonel Feiniger, Marine Blue

“So, Lyonel…a big shout out to you for that experience way back when! It’s made all the difference in the world.”

Lawrence Bowden

Lyonel Feiniger (1871 -1956) is getting some recognition. You’ve probably never heard of him because for most critics and art historians he’s considered something of a “second tier” artist. The typical take on Feiniger often goes like this: more substance than Jacques Villon…but less scintillating or forceful than Dufy or John Marin.

Jesuits III

Feiniger was one of the first to be appointed as a “master” at the Bauhaus and yet, while we hear much about Klee, Kandinsky, and Albers, his work is rarely seen and even more rarely admired. Nonetheless, three major exhibitions of his painting, drawings, and photography are underway in Germany, the United States, and Canada through next summer. (Does this mean that you can’t have an orchestra without the second violins? Oh, never mind….)

When I was in college, “Art Appreciation” was required for graduation. I wasn’t eager about enrolling in anything “required,” but, fortuitously, I loved this class. It was part art history, part aesthetics, and all passion for the language of art—vivaciously and seriously impressed upon us by our professor, who, by the way, was one of the few on the faculty without a Ph.D. (Many classes with many Ph.D.s since has convinced me that there is no substitute or equivalency for passion when it comes to knowing one’s subject enough to convince anyone else it’s worth caring about.)

When we got to the Bauhaus and Modernism it was as though I had found a place that felt familiar while, at the same time, didn’t quite feel like home. I had been introduced to something beyond or outside of my own personal history, something that was clearly novel, foreign even, and yet there it was expressing what I could feel and recognize without really understanding why. When it came that time for the obligatory “term paper” in Art Appreciation, the more astute of my classmates chose an artist or subject for their papers about whom there were actually entire books written. Being a naive contrarian, I chose Lyonel Feiniger…only to discover in my research that I was lucky if I found a paragraph or two about him within a book.

What I learned by choosing one of the “second violins” was that I couldn’t rely on someone else’s thinking to tell me what I was supposed to see or how I was supposed to feel about Lyonel Feiniger. If I wanted a paper long enough to avoid disaster I’d have to discover and write those things for myself. I was forced into a lot of looking hoping to find something to say other than, “Oh, I like that,” or, “That’s a piece of crap….” Mrs. Hamilton (the professor) had little tolerance for opinion in lieu of substance. That much I knew. What I didn’t know was anything else—how to speak about what I was actually feeling and seeing in Feiniger’s painting. I did poorly.

Only later, a good bit later, did I realize that my problem was not that I was just an inarticulate intellectual light-weight. Staring into Feiniger, I naively had placed myself face to face before the mirror of Art itself. The aim of art is in-sight, understanding the essential life of feeling. Having never been taught to see, having no appreciation for art as a language, and having few textual materials to fall back on…I barely knew what to think, much less how. I’d chosen Feiniger because his art struck some kind of chord. But while the heart must have had its reasons for that choice, my head was dumb about them. What initially was an appealing, even familiar feeling

The Green Bridge

was turning into something that registered more like oafish stupidity. Face to face and I couldn’t understand.

If we look at a work of art and it fails to register, when we don’t know what to think or we have no feeling for it…is it that what we see simply isn’t to our taste? Is it that the artwork itself has no feeling in it; it’s just bad art? Or is it that we fail to recognize the feeling being expressed? Maybe that feeling we miss is like an anonymous face in the crowd—human by definition but not yet a person because we just don’t know them.

If all thinking begins with seeing, when we don’t know what to think about a work of art, it’s likely we’re not seeing it. There may be something in our visual field, but it is not yet an experience when we don’t know what to think. What’s there in the absence of experience, what registers in the visual field when we don’t know what to think, is an opinion. Opinions are very democratic; everyone has one…no experience or thought required. To be other than opinionated is to be educated.

Knowing what to think about a painting (or, better, how to think about art) does not—as I have said before—reduce it to so many words. Putting any work of art to words is merely an act of recognition, seeing a person you know in a crowd of faces. Just as a rest, a deliberate silence placed on a musical line, helps create the melodic line…finding the words to help us think about what can only be felt rather than said enlarges our capacity both to experience and know what’s going on.

Art is the form feeling takes when it is most elegant. For example, music is the form sound takes when it is felt; dance is the form movement takes when it is felt; poetry or literature is the form words take when felt; and one might even say that architecture is the form we give light and space when they are felt. Sometimes these forms are subtle and refined; sometimes they are blunt and brutal. But art is always felt thought. Not knowing what or how to think about art is a symptom of not knowing how to recognize or think about feeling. At best feeling may simply be confused; worse, it may become dangerous.

Art educates feeling. To neglect artistic education is to neglect to educate our feeling. To most people (especially politicians and

Sunset

ideologues) the idea of educating feeling, developing its scope and quality, seems absurd. And yet without that education feeling becomes an emotional stupefacient and runs easily into mob-headedness over which thought and reason have little, if any, control.  More than fifty years ago the philosopher Susanne Langer summed it this way:

Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is the corruption of feeling. This [corruption, the failure to educate our feeling] is a large factor in the irrationalism which dictators and demagogues exploit.

(In Part II of this blog post I’ll come back to feeling and the question of its absence in Feiniger’s artwork and mine.)

Lawrence Bowden

“You know, I’ve spent my whole life going to school, taking classes, doing shows, trying to follow the rules and get it right…and look! WTF?!”

Magic

The exasperation I heard this artist expressing at the opening of the Willie Shouse Retrospective currently on view in Riverviews’ Craddock-Terry Gallery was not so much professional jealousy as it was genuine, quizzical astonishment. Here was a respected, talented, widely collected and established Lynchburg artist who has invested years of time, money, and energy cultivating skills that are generally required for such recognition. And now here s/he was: in the middle of the Craddock-Terry Gallery surrounded by an audible buzz of enthusiasm for another Lynchburg painter who, in his lifetime, was hardly recognized as an artist—and yet, in barely a decade’s activity, with no formal training or refined materials, Willie had created a body of work that was flying off the walls and into the cash box! WTF indeed?

Untitled

Willie’s craft is crude, or maybe “rough-hewn” would sound more polite. He painted on whatever he could find for nothing or next-to-nothing…motorcycle crates, construction refuse, bed sheets or whatever available fabric could be drawn across a scrap wood frame to hold it. We’re not talking sophisticated stretcher bars here! There is no uniformity to the size, shape, or weight of the completed paintings. (In fact, I’m told, one of the pieces about the size and shape of a small kitchen table weighs over 100 pounds!) The materials that contain them are unrefined, purely functional forms…places to paint.  Onto these surfaces he’d apply house paint, latex, acrylics, dyes or (if he needed burnt umber) tobacco juice.

Willie had an eye for color, perhaps the most striking feature of his images, and probably composition. I say “probably” because in the pieces that work there is an internal cohesion that is something more than merely aesthetic. In his best work one sees a story and not just the suggestion of one. By contrast, in other of his compositions all we get are random fragments, broken chunks of a dream declared over by affixing his signature to them, probably because that’s about all he could do. Just the same, these are paintings with a purpose. Like so much of self-taught art, they serve a function for their creator that has little or nothing to do with money as their driving force. Rather their purpose is highly personal, insistent, and as intimate as the pages of a diary. And yet even though the details of the purpose they express remain enigmatic, one has no problem accessing the rich feeling and emotion they contain. The felt work is energetic and immediate. And this may be part of what makes them, as a body of work, both compelling and disturbing. Color not with standing, there is darkness and there are demons here that live side by side with  holy spirits, comic capers, gentleness and Love. They’re playing together—kind of like real life.

Memory Bank

Minstrel

What intrigues me about this show is that it has an almost charismatic attraction. It generates enthusiasm in both the more sophisticated—aficionados of folk as it were—and those less self-consciously attentive to trends. What accounts for that? The discovery (or the invention) by the Art Establishment of “folk art” is a 20^th century phenomenon that dates to the 1930s. But interest in this area of the human arts has literally exploded in just the last decade or two. Ginger Young, who owns and operates a gallery in Chapel Hill devoted entirely to self-taught artists, reports that in 1990 fewer than 10 museums included contemporary folk art in their collections; today there are more than 50…. The annual Outsider Art Fair in New York has marked its tenth anniversary, and Atlanta’s Folk Fest routinely attracts 10,000 collectors, dealers, and artists every August. Clearly, this art has an audience. And just as clearly, having been given the imprimatur of the Art Establishment with its cadre of sophisticated curators, collectors, and dealers there’s money to be made. Now it’s easy to find a plethora of manufacturers who mimic a folk or naïve look in order to capitalize on the interest. (Just do a quick “folk art” or “outsider art” search on ebay and you’ll see what I mean.) But such a cynical view cannot account for its appeal any more than it can account for this work being made in the first place.

I rather imagine we are drawn to these arts by something that has more recently disappeared from so much in the sophisticated fine arts. I’d call it “presence.” In the sixties we called it “soul.” Presence is hard to define because it’s a quality we recognize only when it’s there—in the same sense we recognize that a “person” is more than a human life form. There is reciprocity when there is presence, a relationship awakens that makes a connection of one with another. In place of presence conventional and contemporary art has become more interested in impressing us with technique or technical brilliance. There’s nothing wrong with the elegance of technical brilliance. It can be stunning in its execution. But if that’s all it is, it’s just empty…of life. The marvel of art is that it brings form to life, it does not take the life out of it. When one’s skill and technical mastery wring from its presence any evidence of human touch or any intimacy an artist may have had with their work…this is not purity, it is sterility.

Fly & Jump

Among self-taught artists there is no dissociation of art from life. This, I think, is what lends an authenticity or genuineness about it, something we seem to yearn for these days. It’s almost as though the absence of those conventional artistic skills signal something real, immediate, and sincere. It’s like there is a raw charm reflected from work that has been created without fear of reproach, with a kind of strength drawn from the courage to bare one’s soul without regard for rules and conventions. Good self-taught art is nothing if it is not honest and heartfelt. Ginger Young put it this way:

This “raw charm” you mention is precisely what makes self-taught art so arresting and compelling. The years of rigorous training undertaken by legions of fine artists may in fact drain their works of power and immediacy. Obviously, everyone is different; but I cannot imagine that Howard Finster would have kept the same sharp perspective on the world — and the hereafter! — had he earned an advanced degree at the Corcoran or the School of Visual Arts.

Can Willie’s work hold its own with the likes of Nellie Mae Rowe, Mose Tolliver, or Purvis Young? You’ll have to decide…that’s part of the appeal. Regardless, Lynchburg is fortunate to have had Willie Shouse. And we are fortunate to have Riverviews Artspace recognize the contribution he made to the life of the arts in our community. How sad he couldn’t have enjoyed that recognition while he was with us.

Lawrence Bowden