Cat in the Orchard

(originally posted October 13, 2010)

The compulsion to make art has been with us for 17,000 years. For most of that time, the foremost question asked of the artist (perhaps second only to where’s the rent) has been why do you do it ~ where does this unstoppable urge to create come from? It’s a fascinating question especially if you’ve never had the calling, but beware the loquacious artist ~ Picasso pops to mind ~ who can come up with what sounds like a dazzling answer to what is ultimately a goose chasing question.

“You might as well ask me why I get out of bed in the morning,” an artist friend once explained, to this day the most refreshingly honest answer I’ve heard. By and large, art is made by people because ~ excuse the double negative ~ they can’t not make it. Doesn’t matter whether the art they make is good or bad. In your or anyone else’s opinion. They make art because, just like getting up in the morning, there is simply no alternative for them. Even in an extreme case, like van Gogh, anybody out there really think he wouldn't have flicked the switch in exchange for a normal, but art free life? He couldn't, not didn't. And constant use of his messed up mental health by art critics the world over as an explanation of his work is not just a ruse, it’s an insult to his genius.

An infinitely more interesting question is why we need art, what we see in it that is so intrinsically different from what we see just walking around, living our lives. Surely art explains the world to us, but while we can’t argue that context is unimportant, don’t trust history alone for an answer as to why you respond so deeply to one artist’s work, while you are left cold by another’s. In any case, the historical “reasons” we make art change every few hundred (or thousand) years. Since we’ve been keeping track we’ve gone from religion (with God the Über curator) to documentation (Vermeer and the Camera Obscura onward) to a need to explore the psyche (Freud and the Surrealist Movement did a nice tango on this one). For the last few decades art has been obsessed with finding meaning in materialism ~ you can thank Andy Warhol for the soulless Jeff Koons generation. My point is that while context is important, something else is up with our fascination, our need to look at and experience art. Is it finding grace? Is it looking in the mirror? Is it seeing our worst fears exposed?

A few years ago I dragged the family to NYC to see a Gustav Klimt exhibit, 8 paintings and a 120 drawings, at the Neue Galerie, Ronald Lauder’s exquisite private museum on the edge of Central Park. Though one of the most published artists in history, endless squabbles over Klimt’s legacy has made viewing more than one painting at time nearly impossible. The exhibit did not disappoint, but what happened unexpectedly while I was there set me thinking about context in a whole new light. Starting out in poverty, Klimt trained at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, immediately gaining acceptance and public commissions by Emperor Franz Joseph I. But instead of following a proscribed career, in 1887 he founded the Vienna Secession, a controversial group that encouraged unconventional artistic expression, invited exhibits by foreigners, and published a manifesto that debunked the myth that any one artistic style ~ especially what was in vogue at the time ~ should rein supreme. In short, at the turn of a century that would see two world wars change the map of Europe and, not least, the direction of art forever, Klimt helped push the envelope. Even when briefly shunned by society ~ his work deemed pornographic by every quarter that had once supported him ~ he defied conventions of the day, broke from tradition and become one of the most successful artists of all time.

Towards the end of the day I found myself standing in front of Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. The painting, which had been purchased by Lauder for $135 million ~ the highest price ever paid for a single work at the time ~ depicts a beautiful, fragile Jewish woman engulfed in a gilded, intricately decorated world that we know from history was on the precipice of extinction. Lush, subdued color draws the viewer into a universe that cossets yet distinguishes the female form from the fabric of her history. Light skims off the surface of burnished gold leaf, while intricate ornamental detail is eloquently rendered with flowing sinuous lines. Egyptian, Byzantine, Japanese influences, arguably all present, are subsumed by techniques that speak to no known style at all. What seems a sharp edged nod to a Dürer engraving catches in the light and disappears, only to be replaced by a soft tonal mosaic that brings ~ of all people ~ the neo-impressionist Seurat to mind.

As I stood there, a nine-year-old girl who had pulled away from her mother in another gallery came to stand beside me. While all these thoughts were going through my mind, she shifted uncomfortably from side to side. Like it, I asked? Yeah, she said, gnawing at her sleeve, but why is she so sad? Is she, I countered, to which the girl’s eyes, which had been darting around the canvas, looked directly into mine and held for a good five count ~ eons for a nine year old. The only thing free of her body is her mind, she replied. A non-contextual response, to be sure, but she had nailed it. In that moment, somewhere between the two of us, Klimpt’s ghost stirred.

In a few week’s time the question of context will become particularly relevant as the studio mounts Susan Preston’s “One Button Off,” the last show of this exciting and transitional year for us. Susan is one of the most well known and ~ though she would be the last to admit it ~ beloved members of our community. She and her husband Lou have created, in Preston of Dry Creek Farm and Winery, a living agrarian document that eloquently tells a deeply political story which has been instrumental in helping to inform Sonoma County’s embrace of sustainability. The edible gifts of their working farm, which exist so successfully alongside their vineyards, winery and tasting room, have also helped expand a previously limited viticultural agenda for Sonoma that was up to now scarily Napa bound. If you’ve visited the winery, walked the grounds, been lucky to share in their hospitality on any Guadagni Sunday or at any one of a number of public events they host, you cannot have missed how a refined artistic presence infuses everything they do. We live in a county where great wealth has spawned many extremely beautiful wineries, but few speak so fully of an independent artistic vision.

What we haven’t yet seen, though it has been much anticipated, is a full viewing outside the framework of their family endeavors of Susan Preston’s work as an artist.

The one-woman show will consist of 14 pieces. The hallmarks of past work will be there ~ the use of wordplay and talisman; the almost mystical transformation of the most common materials ~ but there is a great deal more here as well. A sense of universal themes with rousing, if slightly disturbing narratives. Susan Preston has what I can only describe as a lovers gaze for the animal/people that live in her world, an understanding of sensuality as distinct from gender, a belief that a battered nature is still capable of rocking us to sleep at night. This is a world where fools are kings and art has all the power of the confessional.

The greatest thing about starting with the premise that art need not document anything other than itself is that it enables the viewer to cauterize the aesthetic experience, allowing all the blood to flow back into what you have in front of you. This, at the end of the day, is really all you need to react, feel, reject, or love a work of art. While it may be hard to separate the Susan Preston for whom all actions have consequences (the better to eat you my dear) with Susan Preston, the artist, go for it. The exhibit, which opens on November 10th will run through December. Oh, and don’t forget to bring a nine year old if you happen to have one lying around.

Valentine's Day at Barndiva

(originally posted February 3, 2010)

The most amazing Valentine's present I ever gave or received was the very same gift: a healthy, unbelievably gorgeous 8 lb baby daughter born February 14th, 1989.

You can't plan something like that. Like love itself, it just happens.

Even when you aren't blessed with cosmic chance, Valentine's can still feel like shooting craps. Unlike birthday or Christmas prezzies, Valentine's Day is nothing less that a litmus test on what got you to love that person in the first place. It should be a present that no one else IN THE WORLD would have the insight to surprise them with.

The secret to figuring that out has something to do with really paying attention, a fact I was reminded of last week when a well dressed gentleman came into the shop searching for a Valentine's gift for his wife of 44 years. After roaming around lifting glass vases, cradling wooden bowls, holding jewelry aloft to catch the light, he marched up to the sales counter carrying, of all things, a huge bolt of un-dyed hemp.

I had to ask him why. I love the hemp we sell ~ beautiful product, incredible story ~ but a bolt of limp fabric doesn't exactly jump out at you for it's color, form or narrative the way, say, a nice painting, a wire sculpture, or a 100 years old butterfly collection does. (hint hint)

Turns out he didn't even know it was hemp. Had no idea and didn't even care what his wife was going to do with it, if anything at all. I just love the feel of it, he said. She will too. The woman sees through her fingers.

In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh once wrote that "...small emotions are the great captains of our lives." A pretty good thought to remember as you head out to forage an object of desire for your sweetheart this Valentine's Day.

Our Decisive Moment

Originally posted May 19, 2010)

When life at the Barn gets too intense, which it has a built-in tendency to do, I walk down Center Street to the Plaza and plunk myself down on a bench. I highly recommend it ~ find a bench, ostensibly with a view of something that has its feet firmly planted in the earth, and just sit. After a half-hour of seemingly doing nothing, you will find your personal universe begin to shift ever so slightly.

Sometimes I think great thoughts, but mostly I don’t, I’m alone with them no matter how mundane they are. Our thoughts are like our children, we always seek some redeeming feature in them. For physical health a run would probably be a better option, for speedy energy a shot of caffeine, but for an instant and refreshing change in perspective very few things beat a park bench.

he secret to this particular form of self-medicating is to leave your cell phone ~ blackberry, ipod, laptop, singly or in any combination ~ behind. This is not as easy as it may sound. We all appear to be increasingly addicted to our techno toys, more than we care to admit. Sitting on the bench this week I counted, in the first 50 people who ambled by on their own, 34 who were walking while texting, talking, or listening to something other than the birds in the trees. This was not even counting the groups of people in which someone seemingly “in” the group was simultaneously engaged in a conversation with someone not even there. We go on and on about how little quality time we are able to find in our oversubscribed lives; where once the mantra for our culture was ‘knowledge is power’, now we moan and groan about ‘too much information.’ Why then, do we find it so hard to turn off convergent technology? We are sensible people, right? Where does this insatiable desire to be connected ALL THE TIME at the expense of our and everyone else’s privacy ~ and perhaps our sanity ~ come from?

My first thought sitting on the bench was that digital social mediums wire directly into the part of our brains that bows to a social hierarchy where not much has changed since High School ~ if you aren’t in, you are out. Nobody wants to be left out. The rise of twitching twittering facebook communities seems to support this theory ~ digital popularity as the new religion, documentation of even the smallest details of our lives, as the new confession.

But I had another thought a few hours later, as I watched a man leave the warm and beautiful dining room in Barndiva to go outside in the rain to reply to a text, despite the candlelight, the music and what seemed like an engaging conversation he was having with his girlfriend and another couple. Perhaps our fear of ‘turning off’ rises from a deeper genetic imperative, an urge to know what’s coming before it arrives. Digital Media is our Paul Revere: if we listen closely we will have time to lock the doors and gather the muskets. Or maybe it goes back further still, all the way to our cave dwelling ancestors, where “knowledge is power” really did mean the difference between life and death. You eat the bear or the bear eats you.

In which case this unquenchable desire for information is a rather cool, if subconscious, form of self-protection. The question then becomes, protection from what? What, in modern times, is the bear?

Probably the same thing it’s always been, (when it wasn’t an actual bear), we are, deep down, desperately afraid we’re living unexamined lives and that we will die without ever figuring out what the point was. But trying to find out what the point is, much less finding a point worth living for is an increasingly quixotic challenge. We exist in a world where global warming is touted as a myth, Sarah Palin is considered sartorial, Monsanto “helps farmers learn to be sustainable,” and the oil slick soaking the coastlines on one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world, is, according to a “pre-eminent” scientists quoted in The New York Times, “not as bad as you think.” We live in a world where verifiable truth is taking a beating ~ let's face it ladies and gentlemen, truth gets the shit beat out of it every day. Which makes it awfully hard to follow the real storyline of history anymore, much less how our lives might intersect, and even be reflected, in it.

I get all that. What is deeply worrying is that instead of shifting our search for insight elsewhere, using these astonishing media tools and outlets to develop critical wherewithal, we choose to drop the pro and dity in the search for profundity and just go all out for FUN. It's fun to document the minutiae of our lives, and if anyone laughs at us, so what? We, in turn, through the wonders of tweets, facebook, youtube, twiddish, etc. are laughing at them as well. As for traditional ports of call ~ Art, Film, Music ~ where we once sought and found meaningful narratives that reflected a whole range of human values, the work that now gets produced has become, by and large, contrived product placements in-filled with perishable and disposable information. We are manipulated, pandered to, and infantilized from virtually every medium where sales, not enlightment, is the driving force.

Of course Will Shakespeare wanted people to attend his plays as a testament to his genius, but can we assume he didn’t need product placement to get the bard mojo working? If Jean Luc Godard had to track first day ticket sales, would the French New Wave have survived? Where are the Van Goghs and the John Coltranes, who never made a dime out of painting or playing their hearts out? As Thomas Wolfe knew (another example of a crazy art for arts sake guy) you can’t go home again. But where, exactly, are we going?

If everything we are and everything we love, need, and desire, issues from a personal set of values that can only start its engines when our eyes or our ears engage, it's probably a good idea to take a critical look from time to time at how we form those values, what feeds them, and, crucially, what we need to do to keep them humming. When we lose control of the intricate plot of our lives, even for a little while, we lose the linkages that connect one thing to another ~ before you know it you are inside the mouth of the bear.

The great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson believed “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment." By decisive he meant personally verifiable. Bresson wasn’t out to prove things only happen because we see them, but that with patience and perception human beings have the power to visually organize the world so it fits a pattern that means something, and from that pattern a blueprint for living can emerge.

Two years after the second World War ended, when Bresson was, in his own words, “completely lost,” he threw in with fellow photographers George Rodger, Robert Capa and David “Chim” Seymour” to found Magnum, “ a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually."

It seems to me, even If you never pick up a camera, that these are words to live by today ~ curiosity and respect for and about the human condition, fueled by a desire to create a community of thought based upon shared human values. Decisive moments occur in all of our lives, you don’t need to be a Magnum photographer to find them. You do need the time to look and process, in your own mind, the meaning of what you see. You need time to find the artists out there who are still committed to telling a human story of struggle, for only in that kind of story will we also discover the tools to survive.

The technological sensory overload we all suffer from does not encourage this process. Just having more information at our fingertips does not make us smarter. And we need to get smarter, really fast, because what all our wonderful social media and popular entertainments aren’t telling us is that the bear is gaining.

RESOURCES Museums, libraries and bookshops with more re-prints than top sellers are still the best places to experience art that has transforming powers. Dance and Opera are two art forms which, for very different reasons, have both proved artistically resilient and deserve your patronage. Both are great value (Opera only if you watch it via satellite feed).

To watch great cinema, which is still being made (but you won’t find at your local 12 plex) check out www.filmmovement.com. Not a bad film in the bunch, join or risk them being checked out at Blockbuster.

To hear stimulating music and life affirming conversation, check out programs offered at the Herbst Theatre, especially the City Arts and Lectures Series. One of the best nights I had last year was sitting with Geoff and Lukka, listening to Wendell Berry talking with Michael Pollen. Two human beings sitting on a stage just having a chat and it was riveting. How about that? I missed Frank Rich and Mark Danner in April and I’m still kicking myself.

Intersection 5M- a satellite art space, screening room, and event space in SF worth keeping track of. 5M features local exhibitions focused around arts for change. The inaugural gallery exhibit includes our friend Laura Parker: Let's Talk of a System