CUBA

The rabid dislike of the Cuban government by Cuban-Americans in Miami, as the comments to the following Huffington Post photo article attest to, appears to be intractable.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/28/vintage-photos-from-rober_n_788633.html#postComment

Their attitude gets on my very last nerve, and I try to bring in a fresh perspective when I can. I prefer to focus on Cuba as a model sustainable nation, but there is no escaping the political conundrum in which the island finds itself. Cuba is beset by problems that stem from the US embargo against it. At the same time, were it not for the embargo, Cuba would be overrun by power madness, greed, and profligacy coming from the imposition on it of the American way of life.

One comment went as follows: "People live in very cramped quarters, can't afford new clothes or interesting and varied diets, and are often unable to put their excellent educations to use - all the result of restrictions on entrepreneurial activity and free market enterprise. Cuba provides exhibit A for why democratic socialism - the free market tempered by an active welfare state - is the best system."

But Cuba is also very verdant, as anyone flying over it can clearly see. Is Cuba so beautiful and "green" (it has a very small carbon footprint) because it has not been contaminated by advanced capitalism? One writer stated, as though I would be sure to get the point, that several families share a 40-year-old car. Well? Is that a bad thing?

Both the US and Cuba could benefit by a rapprochement, but that is harder to come by from the US side than from Cuba's. Cuba's ingenuity and adherence to core principles are nothing short of miraculous in the world we have today. It is an educated country (97% literacy) with universal health care, and yet it is dirt poor. This is a miracle. We could learn so much from this small nation. It is one of the world's tragedies that we can't come together and take the best that each has to offer.

It would be nice if the embargo were lifted in so thoughtful a way that Cuba wouldn't be consequently overrun by capitalism gone mad. There is the (unavoidable?) danger that the American way could destroy the resourcefulness, the conservation ethic, the egalitarianism, and other positive attributes of the Cuban system, even as it provides the missing qualities of entrepreneurial enterprise and freedom of speech. But we can't control everything. The choice has to be Cuba’s.

I don't wish to live in Cuba. I'm too much of a rebel and individualist to fit in there. I don't wish to live in Iraq either, despite the US presence there. The cards I have been dealt have not relegated me to those places, but I try to be as understanding as possible about those who live there.

WHAT NEXT?

After “attending” the Santa Fe Flash Flood view-from-space art project last week, I experienced a flurry of ideas as to how to ride the coattails of the event in a beneficial way. I wondered: Are we now at a view-from-space era in art?, where thousands of people hold up pigmented materials to make images to be viewed from 100 miles up? This could be a wonderful confluence of classical, modern and conceptual art. Imagine a huge see-from-space Fragonard so subtly hued as to even include the finest “terminators” (a technical term in realist painting describing the light’s termination point where a form bends away from it). I can envisage global messages, such as that from 350.org—advocating the urgent adoption by nations of greenhouse-gas levels no greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere. No reason, too, why the 350.org message couldn’t be attached to the Fragonard. That could be even more powerful than to separate them.

So what should I do? Do I want to organize thousands of people to do view-from-space art? No. I think somebody should do it, but not me. It seems that I should do more to excel at the tasks that are currently under my control and that I now deal with inconclusively at best.

I would also like to do banners to be viewed, not only from space, but on the sides of abandoned buildings, in parks, or wherever there is still a public space not yet completely gobbled up by corporate interests. I’m contemplating making a giant sign to advertize the Pojoaque River Art Tour.

It could simply read: POJOAQUERIVERARTTOUR.COM Support Local Art and Crafts

It wouldn’t be visible from space but instead from the highway. The Pojoaque artist community is very much in harmony with the laid-back, tranquility of the area’s rural landscape. So, by supporting the art tour, I’m supporting the land. I’m supporting a tiny local module of Earth’s sustainable landscape. This is not the way to save the planet, but it presents a model that, if followed by people wherever they live on Earth, could help save the planet. There are many millions (I suspect) who are doing the same as I. The collective unconscious is probably at work in this as well.

So I guess that for now I see doing art in my own corner, while writing about how what I do might be relevant to the planet as a whole.

METHOD TO MY MADNESS?

The author of a Huffington Post article, Johann Hari of the Independent, responded to my email. To explain this message and my ultimate response, I’ll trace some aspects of the communication, starting with a quote from his article to which I responded:

The article: http://eros.usgs.gov/imagegallery/collection.php?type=earth_as_art_3

1) J. Hari (from the article): “For example, 2.3 billion years ago, plant life spread incrediblyrapidly, and as it went it inhaled huge amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxidefrom the atmosphere. This then caused a rapid plunge in temperature thatfroze the planet and triggered a mass extinction."

Trevor (email to J. Hari): "So here's what this suggests to me: If we plant trillions of trees, we can solve the problem of global warming.

2) J. Hari (email to Trevor): “Unfortunately we're doing the opposite - 20 percent of all carbon emissions come from cutting down rainforest at the moment. In any plan to deal with global warming reforestation is quite high up, though it'd have to be at a phenomenal rate to counter our current emissions. It's certainly part of the solution though.”

Trevor (email to J. Hari): “I know how badly it's going, but see no percentage in being pessimistic. Humankind certainly has the ability and creativity to solve the problem, even if it never does. Being a mystic, I believe that my personal resolve and optimism can be part of a spark that ignites the masses, so I persevere. If I'm wrong, there is no harm done. I simply stay optimistic and leave the rest to a higher power.

One comment asked how what I espouse would get done. My response: "If we could get an infrastructure/jobs bill passed (here in the USA), we could make tree planting a part of the project. Plenty of people need work, and plenty of trees need planting. More trees absorb more CO2. More working folks buy more to revive the economy." I put forward a logical proposition, knowing that there are inherent stupidities in the system that work against its implementation. Not my problem. If even one more person gets the vision, I have nudged the ledger forward on the plus side.

On the practical end: I saw where it's being tried to shoot missiles with seedlings from planes--and billions of trees can be propagated through that means. Otherwise, whether it falls on deaf ears or not, I propose that there be a global works program to plant trillions of trees.

I also keep saying that America will only respond to an impossible task--like putting a man on the moon in 10 years. My impossible task: America will have the lowest CO2 footprint among nations by 2020. I know that what I say sounds like madness, but there's method to my madness.

SLOGANS

A recent article in Huffington Post by Robert Kuttner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/post_1307_b_786612.html?show_comment_id=68299530#comment_68299530 generated tons of comments about how We the People can make a change, whether or not the president will comply. Since the media are largely corporate controlled, we thought of creating our own slogans and getting them circulated in novel ways. I am partial to murals, but favor banners that can be quickly installed and removed--in other words, an art movement.

The following blurbs are by Shaun, whose favorite slogan is "race to the bottom.":

1) It's not fair to the American worker that we be asked to compete against businesses that pollute freely, work dangerously and compensate poorly.

2) We can't compete against Corporations that poison their citizens and maim their workers while paying them a pittance, and we shouldn't try.

3) GlobalCorp wants one thing, to undo a century of hard fought progress on workplace safety and environmental protection and they are trying to break the backs and the spirit of the American worker.

I like 2 and 3 better. But what's GlobalCorp? Just a madeup term? Anyway, these terms should be critiqued--the concept as well as the particular blurb.

Another person said this:

A New Deal for a New Century

FLASH FLOOD ART, SANTA FE, 11/20/10

I arrived just as a thousand participants were leaving. The event was listed in my email from organizers@350.org as lasting from 9:30 – 11:30 AM. I glanced at it and saw only 11:30.

The parking attendant, a teenager, didn’t know the name of the event, but he was encouraging. “You got here, that’s the main thing.” Nice kid. A kind, energetic woman confirmed that the event was over, but pointed to where I could go and sign in. I would be sent photos of the event taken from space, she said. It felt odd to be going in the opposite direction to absolutely everyone else, but I tried not to look too sheepish.

The only noticeably Hispanic I saw was the table attendant, who seemed to be well known by many in the crowd. It was a very white, overwhelmingly middle-aged crowd, with a sprinkling of youth and infants. Everyone wore jeans, and something blue or gray or muted on top. They blended in with the landscape. They had held blue-painted sheets of cardboard over their heads and undulated them from the plain cardboard side (the dry riverbed) to the blue (the flash flood). Their clothes seemed like a blend of the flood and the land.

The mail person I flagged down for directions to San Ysidro Crossing—the site of the event-- gave excellent directions. The crossing is a solid sunken road that has an arched opening underneath where water can pass through, while its sunken formation allows for water to flow over it in case of floods. Unfortunately, its construction is almost never challenged. The river bed is usually dry.

I hope to redeem myself by doing artwork on the several sheets of blue-decorated cardboard I retrieved from the great pile left behind by the participants.

KINGSTON, 3/13/02 (My notes as I waited for the bus)

KINGSTON, 3/13/02 (My notes as I waited for the bus)

Slow deliberately metered music while I wait for the minibus to leave. I got a taxi at 6:30 AM, sure that I would get an early start for my ride to the country, but I must have just missed the early bus, and the one I was to take waited for hours till it was jam packed. So I tried to make the best of the wait in this old-train-station depot, observing with interest such features as the part-circular, partly paved-over rail turnaround point.

“Oh, you sweet man,” somebody said. To me? I don’t recall. People in downtown Kingston are starved for a polite gesture, and I might have made one to a woman on the bus.

Kingston early in the morning. I leave the house at 6:30 AM. Johnny, the taxi driver, is a friend of Stonewall. Lives near the stadium. At the bus depot, there is ganja everywhere. Are even the drivers smoking? The toilet was opened at seven. Before it opened, I came across a man taking a pee in a superbly private courtyard. He and I exchanged a pleasant greeting. I buy 20 “peanut brittles” from a boy.

American T-shirt, Wrigley’s gum, pepper mint, icy mint, reggae, orange juice. Strong rhythms out of sound systems, sunglasses, reading glasses. Vendors come by in five-minute intervals.. The minibus radio is on. KLAS. Mugabe has been returned to office in Zimbabwe. Pushcarts, revival music on the sound system. Or has revival music been co-opted by popular music?

Doughnuts, washrags, towels, a woman with a large facial scar. A knife wouind? Anthony B’s powerful rhythms. Orange juice, spring water. This is convenient short and long term shopping for country travelers. The pen I write with was given to me by a female attendant of the men’s restroom. A vendor in harness from which scores of vertically arranged belts and other items are suspended.

We’re well on our way. The beauty of the green before and after Flat Bridge. The rocks look precious. A metaphor for the beauty and preciousness of life

TOWARD SIMPLICITY

TOWARD SIMPLICITY

A number of progressive groups recently put out a plea for support. If people voted to make them the most highly supported, they would win a total of $600,000 from the Pepsi company. The groups involved in the effort are Center for Progressive Leadership, the White House Project, Young People For, ProgressOhio Education, Campus Progress, Elementz, and the American Constitution Society.

This group reads like mom and apple pie, and not to support it feels almost criminal. But yet I demure. I've been letting the request to vote every morning to support this consortium settle in my mind, and, for the moment, I have decided that there are higher priorities for my woefully underproductive and disorganized brain.

The problem I see is the incessant "chatter" of the Internet. Everybody has a good cause and needs help, but there is very little strategy or measurable progress on any front. The dolphins are saved in one place only to be gobbled up by an accelerated consumerist culture elsewhere. Economic growth, aligned to population explosion, is BY NATURE, destructive to the planet.

On speaking with realist artist Tony Ryder today, I felt a sense of corroboration. Tony is one of the nation's leading draftsmen, and is featured on the cover of the latest "The American Artist Drawing" magazine. He believes that "within mundane visual reality dwells the holy, transcendent presence of God." It is not typical artist talk. And with this big truth he is firmly rooted in his practice of making light, and nothing else, dictate the outcome of his drawing. He is not moved by fashion and the buzzwords of the art world. He is dedicated to celebrating--in his teaching and his own practice--the miracle of light

My big truth is the land. It is similarly dependent on the acknowledgement of a great moral truth. Like light in its totality of scope, land, including the seas and the rivers, is the unified whole that defines the marble in space called Earth. Just as Tony will not be distracted by this, that and the other fashion--seductive as they might be--I am unimpressed with any movement that does not rest on the acceptance of the unified field of Earth's landscape.

What I advocate is an artist-led program to promote ORDER. All the fractured efforts out there need to coalesce into an orderly, coherent and systematic whole. I'd like to get behind a national infrastructure program that addresses all the million issues that scatter about like space junk. An infrastructure program connects one place to another in an orderly way. It also connects issues. Infrastructure is at once quantitative and qualitative.

The unity--the common landscape--should come BEFORE fractious groups get to play on it The unified-landscape determinism is totally different (and takes place at a different level) from the fields of endeavor taking place on it. If a benevolent, all-powerful dictator were to prescribe this unity, then various groups would have to think about something they don't begin to consider now. I think it would change the status quo. If it is clear that what happens in one corner affects what happens in the opposite end, the dolphins saved in one place won't be gobbled up elsewhere. I throw out a sprinkling of issues--infinitely preliminary, like an "envelop" in which a drawing, with all its details, will later be contained. Below, are a few areas of activism that could be subsumed and synchronized under an ambitious infrastructure program.:

Energy: an intra-national circulation system, promoting walking and bike trails, and maybe some rail, would get people moving around more where they live and depending less on driving or flying to distant places. (While I don't support big-grid energy distribution, I can compromise around it as an infrastructure issue.)

Animal Welfare: See a huge system of highway and road underpasses for animals, to drastically reduce road kill and enable animals to migrate as they need in order to survive and thrive in the wild.

Environment: Billions of trees are planted along circulation paths and elsewhere, absorbing CO 2, preventing erosion, etc., etc.

Education: See kids researching the ecology along trails.

Jobs: Every individual who doesn't mind breaking a sweat gets work.

Immigration: If the vision behind the infrastructure is grand enough--like the interstate highway project of the 1950's--the horrible bigotry against a guest worker program to help
build it might be (politically) neutralized.

I could continue, but won't bore the reader further. This is only meant to point the way to discussion and thought.

DIXON ART TOUR 2010
By Trevor Burrowes
trevoroche@aol.com

The heart of Dixon is a sloping main road bordered by old adobe buildings that have been doctored up to fit various architectural fashions. There are vast amounts of land at the backs. Even with a crowd it is peaceful.

As always, Sandi and I try to keep our studio visits to the minimum. The first stop is always the community center, and buying a meal prepared by elderly volunteers. The building is old and basic, curiously plain despite the white-painted ceiling vegas that fit in staggered formation over large beams.

We started the tour with nearby Marie Coburn of Floramania. Someone says that her work had been exhibited at the Smithsonian, and it was easy to see why. Her life-size flower figures were extraordinary--sculptural renditions of c. 1600 Italian paintings of fruit and vegetable arranged to portray people. She had someone else deal with the visitors while she stood on the porch making a large wreath, clipping the dried plants and sticking them into place by means of a glue pot. In front of the porch was her garden, a wild place, bisected by a walkway, that had gone to seed for the fall. The garden continued, terraced, on either side of the steps leading down to the street.

Walking up the road from Floramania, cars pass by with inches to spare, the shoulders being lined with parked vehicles. We crossed the road to see Robert Brenden’s stone carvings, abstract sculpture and pencil drawings.. One gets the sense that his oeuvre--stone capitals and pillars, etc.-- is meant to be applied to expensive architecture. Although his studio was small, his work had a quality of grand scale. His stone carvings appear to be based on classical forms, while his assemblages are boldly abstract.

Backtracking, we casually meandered off the main down a dirt road that led to Al Terrell’s graceful, clean pottery forms. Pots with lids, often. Al partnered with Sarah O’s "Studio Examino, painting and sensing workshops to cultivate mindfulness." She paints on paper modularly put together and affixed to cardboard panels on which is absorbed the excess paint. The first impression is of delicate horror vacui imagery, almost a sort of doodling. On later examination, one sees monstrous scenes that somehow don’t horrify. (In that way they remind me of Henri {le douanier}Rousseau. Amazingly, she does not sell these fine works, but uses them as teaching tools for her workshops.

After Sarah O, I was basically through. It would be hard to top that experience. But we did swing by the museum (gallery?), where an assortment of tempera, watercolors, and woven throws and vests were displayed. My favorites were two tempera landscapes with Mexican workers by Eli Levin. I call Levin a modern old master, so deeply immersed in the art of the masters is he. The later works, one each from 2004 and 2005, were fresh and filled with light.

We ended up stopping by the two sites along the highway toward home: At site 2, Lou Malche showed digital, snapshot-like photographs while Kay Weiner, an obvious professional, showed work that was truly “fine sculptural jewelry” in silver, gold and stones. She lives on at least 10 acres of idyllic grassland with huge trees, right up against the Rio Grande. One fenced acre or so of flat low-cut grass was dedicated to a brown-black horse, intent on grazing. A stout, old brown dog slept soundly in a corner outside the studio.

The last stop was at Steve Ebben’s studio, sandwiched between the highway and the Rio Grande. Steve looked like a sophisticated cowboy, very trim and neat, his chiseled face crowned by a brown hat, his teeth pearly white. He advertises himself as artist/blacksmith, displaying sculpture, hardware, copper fish and mobiles. I asked him if he was influenced by Calder--some of his mobiles could have been Calder replicas-- and was surprised when he demurred, favoring Miro and Klee instead. I couldn’t quite connect with his exhibition. His yard sculpture was so magnificent, with so much gravity and presence, that I could hardly bear to leave. Meanwhile, near the studio, were myriad small, shiny replicated pieces, the copper fish series most prominently, most of which hung as mobiles. It was hard to understand how the creator of those spare, elegant rusty-metal yard sculptures could adjust to producing such obviously commercial objects —“I have to make what people will buy,” he said. The aesthetic wonder that I saw in the rusty yard sculpture was cut off from everything else in his studio environment.

JAMES CASTLE IN ARTFORUM

JAMES CASTLE IN ARTFORUM

One of my landlords is an established artist (as opposed to “emerging” ones like me) and hugely knowledgeable about the contemporary art scene. He bequeathed me a number of thick, slick Artforum magazines, and I’ve just recently begun to read bits and pieces of them. Tonight, unable to sleep, I read about James Castle’s retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2009.

James Castle was born deaf in 1899 in the Boise region of Idaho. He was illiterate, and never learned to speak, read lips or sign. He was, however a prolific producer of art.

Reviewing the exhibition, Lynne Cooke, chief curator and deputy director of Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, had this to say about his oeuvre: “…(it) includes intimate tonal drawings of the farmland and the homestead where he grew up; sculptures of human figures, animals, and objects made by stitching together pieces of paper and cardboard; hand-sewn books containing alphabets, syllabaries, calendrical schemes, and other data laid out in grids; and myriad copies, on fragments of used paper, of texts and images culled from illustrated magazines and commercial packaging.”

Like the other articles I’ve read in Artforum, the scholarship is awesome, the language is high-tone, and words are bandied about that I don’t know the meaning of. I concluded my reading without being at all clear what the author is trying to say. I’m left only with a deep feeling of kinship with Castle’s work.

He makes tonal drawings that blur the distinction between drawing and painting, using charcoal and spit. These works have a dark sepia tone, and are both dreamlike and a bit melancholy. The headline picture shows a group of people, all dressed alike, perhaps children, standing in a row, the tallest grading to the shortest. Slightly apart stand a couple who are dressed differently. The faces are rectangular and surrounded by a neat, reverse-u border of hair. While this image is schematic, he also draws architectural scenes like porches that are deeply satisfying in composition and in the loose but convincing use of perspective.

His sculptures/objects are full of the pleasure of found materials ingeniously cobbled together with twine. A crib has rectangular wheels, just as the faces in drawings are rectangular. His books have a grid layout which orders and beautifies the distressed paper , collage-like, that make up the pages. The gentle geometry mixed with the ecstatically understood (“seen”)makeshift materials that could be any scrap of paper others would burn or discard is very close to my heart. One figure made from cardboard boxes fitted with a green dress of printed paper looked exactly like something I have been dreaming of constructing myself.