Culinary Warfare and Gifts of Spite

Fits of anger. Acts of spite. Unanswered phone calls. Ignored emails. Nasty verbal exchanges. Impromptu trip to strip clubs. Hot, untouched dinner dumped down the garbage disposal. Honey splattered on a windshield with pennies thrown on top. Wedding rings flushed. Unlimited ways to express rage towards a loved one.

 However, trips to and gifts from some of the finest art museums in the world is a rather strange way to express fury. But this is my husband’s preferred way to needle me. Years ago in the midst of long-distance miscommunication, he would go to strip clubs and pay with our debit card to make sure I knew exactly where he was. In my younger days, I would cry torrents but now I just say, “Have fun.” Since gentleman clubs no longer spike my ire, my husband, who travels for work weekly, has taken to visiting the places I wish I could visit and eating the food from all over the world that I wish I could eat, but cannot because I am at home making dinner, washing clothes, doing homework and driving our children to chess and Chinese classes.



Sure, his passive-aggressive method of sending me pictures of New York Style Pizza and New York Style Cheesecake from Manhattan infuriates me and his trips to museums make me yearn for my college days of art history field trips. But, when it comes down to it, I lose nothing in these silly disputes. Instead, I gain a husband who is more knowledge about art and brings me great gifts from top museums, like a canvas tote from the MoMA in New York (which features the museum’s recognizable logo in an ant motif to coincide with The Museum of Modern Art's Dalí: Painting and Film exhibition).

 Whereas, my husband has to endure food that is not his favorite and go to places that do not appeal him all to piss me off momentarily. Brilliant logic.

Wonder what next week’s quibble will bring from San Francisco?

Author's Note: Handsome Husband, thank you for the tote bag. I love it. And when I carry it back and forth to the library loaded with books, no one knows that I haven't been to that museum in 15 years. So, thank you for making me look cultured and well-traveled without enduring a TSA pat down.



Gertrude Stein’s Contradictory Reputation

Gertrude Stein is Gertrude Stein’s best critic. Throughout her writing, she displays a thoughtful comprehension of her reputation as more of a literary celebrity than a literary figure. In Everybody’s Autobiography, she states: “It always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work. And after all there is no sense in it because if it were not for my work they would not be interested in me so why should they not be more interested in my work than in me [?]” Stein’s observations still hold true today. Stein’s fame derives less from her literary achievement and more from her residence at 27 rue de Fleurus with her lover Alice B Toklas, where she collected fine modernist paintings by her friends Matisse, Picasso, Gris, Picabia, and Cézanne, and entertained well-known writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virgil Thomson and Thorton Wilder.

When considering Stein as a literary celebrity, critics tend to consider Stein’s influence on some of the most important artists in the twentieth-century as being far more important than her own writings. Volumes of criticism attest that Stein’s literary persona maintains an enduring placement in the study of literature, but her writing holds only a tenuous connection to literary history. As a result of her contradictory reputation, Stein’s works are both absent and present canonically. Her writings frequently appear in anthologies and in the classroom but usually only the works that are most reader friendly such as Three Lives, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or famous lines such as “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” or “Pigeons on the grass alas.”

The inclusion of her accessible works provides a sampling of the writing that receives concurrent praise and condemnation. For instance, Stein’s contemporary Edmund Wilson, a literary critic, insists: “Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues of numbers…[But] whenever we pick up her writings, however unintelligible we may find them, we are aware of a literary personality of unmistakable originality and distinction.” Agreeing with her predecessor, critic Randa Dubnick states in her book, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language and Cubism: “The pleasures of reading Stein are not easy ones, but they are there. She should be read, at least in small doses, by anyone seriously interested in twentieth-century literature….” Wilson and Dubnick encourage reading Stein the literary eccentric to gain additional insight about her contemporaries and the landscape of twentieth century literature but discourage spending too much time with Stein’s writings.

In the other extreme, some critics prefer to focus on Stein’s expressions of difference and forms of experimentation as a means to make her the literary matriarch for women and gays. Although these readings foster close analysis and expand exposure for Stein’s more complex and significant writings, many of these agenda-laden approaches promote one-dimensional molar readings of Stein that further fragment and isolate Stein’s already fragmented experiments by taking them out of context from the developments and movements in Stein’s work. Agenda-oriented readings under the rubrics of feminism, queer theory, and ethnic studies tend to emphasis Stein as a marginalized writer instead of a “minor writer” (a term that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari explicate in their theory of minor literature).

I have experienced both these approaches to Stein first hand. The extent of my undergraduate study of Stein occurred during a lecture on Hemingway when the professor told the class that Stein’s “Rose is Rose is Rose is Rose” influenced Hemingway ‘s writing (this was the same professor who only mentioned Sylvia Plath as a student of Robert Lowell’s). Although Stein was not studied in the literature department, her picture appeared on the pamphlets for the student gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans-gendered organization. Looking back on this rejection of Stein in the literature department and at the acceptance of Stein on the sociopolitical front made me question if Stein is a major and minor writer. Arguments can be made for both sides but regardless of which approach is used Stein’s critics return her to the status of literary celebrity or political activist.

My frustration with the classifications and divisions within Stein criticism led me to look for another way to read Stein. After approaching Stein in many formulaic ways that criticism supports, I found that Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature circumvents the criticism that limits the discussion of Stein to a series of binaries such as major/minor, canonical/marginalized, and literary celebrity/literary figure. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature frees Stein’s criticism from previous one-dimensional readings and provides a new framework for reading Stein.

Although from a critical perspective, I prefer reading Stein within Deleuze and Guattari’s framework, no critical school of thought is necessary to enjoy the writings of Gertrude Stein. The important thing is just to give Stein, probably one the most unique, innovative and underrated authors in literary history, a try. If you are unsure which of Stein’s work to start with take a look at the sensual and unconventional Tender Buttons: Objects, Food and Rooms. Here is a link for the full-text: Tender Buttons

Obsequiousness is Not Objectivity: A Few Thoughts on Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World

The beauty of being a librarian is that sometimes I stumble across a book that I did not know that I wanted to read, which was the case when re-shelving a display led me to Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton. I was immediately captured by the brief synopsis on the back of the book, “A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art.” The publisher promises the book to be a heavily researched account that pieces together hours of observation and more than 250 insider interviews, and Thornton claims, in her introduction, that as a researcher she is like a “cat on the prowl…curious and interactive but not threatening. Occasionally intrusive, but easily ignored.”

Much like a cat that preens and prunes meticulously, Thornton neatly organizes her ethnography into seven chapters that represents seven different days and seven different aspects of the contemporary art world: an auction (at Christie’s New York), an art school “crit” (at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia), an art fair (Art Basel), an artist’s studio (belonging to Japanese artist Takashi Murakami), a prize (Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize), a magazine (Artforum) and a biennale (Venice).

Although she intends for the seven chapters to delve deep into the contemporary art world, she provides a surface account of a bizarre world filled with a plethora of air-kissing, trite gossip, a strong sense of self-importance and way too much disposable income that is used to sway the art markets with little regard for aesthetics. Throughout her investigative journey, Thornton follows two different but intersecting paths – money and art. By alternating chapters between the power-players with inflamed egos who buy the art and the progressive artists with inflamed egos who make art, Thornton attempts to show the dynamics and tension between art making, art speculation and art purchasing. But what she gives us is an uneven portrait of the art world with little insight into why someone buys art, what makes one type of art favored over another type, why some startling, innovative contemporary artists are effectively ignored by critics and collectors, and what happens to art works once they are devoured by the status seeking nouveau-riche.

Perhaps Thornton begins her investigation seeking these answers but somewhere in her journey, Thornton loses her resolve, her journalistic verve, her investigative determination, her point-of view and merely becomes a puppet for powerful collectors, curators, critics, dealers, and auctioneers. The chapters on the Christie’s auction, the Art Basel Fair and the Venice Biennale read like a diary of a high school trumpet player who has a crush on the star quarterback and just got befriended by manipulative cheerleaders who have ulterior motives. Thornton becomes so consumed in the universe of money that she fills these chapters with pompous (albeit unwittingly funny) quotes and miniscule, tedious details, making her appear as a gossipy braggart instead of a reporter. Blinded by a whirlwind of glamour and glitz, she feels compelled to share the minutia with her readers with paragraphs such as:

“Back at Cipriani, a British collecting couple are having a dip. He floats; she performs a regal head-up breaststroke. She tells me, in the nicest way, that she finds it irritating when “sporty” Americans insist on pounding up and down the pool. I tell her I am Canadian and she quickly commends this year’s Canadian pavilion as “the best since 2001.” This is Thornton’s general theme: Rich people buy art and too much of this book is devoted to buyers who do not know anything about what they are buying or even why they are buying it. Thornton remains unperturbed by all the gold-lined ignorance and fails to undercover the hypocrisy and artifice of it all. It was no surprise that in her acknowledgements, she admits to allowing certain interviewees to read and make corrections to her drafts; she can’t be an informant if she is going nark on herself. But clearly, she does not want her love affair with the art world to end badly.

In fact, the only art world players who do not seduce her are the artists. Either she does not find artists as sexy as art buyers or she remembers that she is a reporter in their presence. In the chapters about the art school “crit” at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s art studio and Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize, Thornton keeps her distance and allows their dramas to unfold naturally. She fastidiously records a smug MFA student saying “Creative is definitely a dirty word….It’s almost as embarrassing as beautiful, sublime, or masterpiece.” And reveals pop-art superstar Murakami ruminating about his idol Warhol, “I am jealous of Warhol. I’m always asking my production team, ‘Warhol was able to create such an easy painting life, why [is]our work so complicated?’ But, the history knows! My weak point is my oriental background.” Thornton does not shy away from revealing artists’ flaws, foibles and eccentricities.

Artistic eccentricities and idiosyncrasies run rampant in Thornton’s chapter on the Turner Prize 2006, which would have made an outstanding standalone essay in an art periodical with its suspense, humor, tension, and rawness. As she introduces the four nominees to her audience, she reveals two artists to be down-to earth and accessible (Phil Collins, a video artist and Mark Titchner who works in different mediums) and portrays the two female artists, sculptor Rebecca Warren and painter Tomma Abts, as media-phobic, self-absorbed prima donnas. Thornton’s interactions with the artists intermixed with the antics of Nick Serota, director of the Tate; the appearance of Yoko Ono as the prize presenter; and, the tempers and temperaments of the jury makes for an entertaining tale. Sadly, the strength of this chapter is not echoed anywhere else in Thornton’s work.

If the chapter on the Turner prize is the Thornton’s strongest than the chapter that examines Artforum is undeniably the weakest. I must confess after being bored by all the rich people bidding on art at Christie’s in Chapter One, I jumped forward to Chapter Five, The Magazine. Admittedly, the chapter on Artforum contributed greatly to me checking out this book. As a person who loves art and also writes, I probably have fantasized a time or two about being published in Artforum, which Thornton describes as “a trade magazine with crossover cachet and an institution with controversial clout.” She argues that “Artforum is to art what Vogue is to fashion and Rolling Stone was to rock and roll.” Her one-line assessment holds the truth, but she fails to reaffirm the sentiment in the rest of the chapter.

Thornton’s investigation of Artforum is her opportunity to reveal the big reveal; spill the big secrets that give insight into the currents and waves that move and shape the art world. She does not do more than obsess over the writers’ clothes , “Dressed like a dandy in a jacket, vest and tie of remarkably well coordinated plaids… “ and “Dressed entirely in black, with a hairless head and solemn manner “ and “Bright-eyed, compact, clad in a vermillion suit” as well as what the staffers eat “…Thai noodles out cardboard take boxes .“ This chapter is made up of polemical tidbits, guarded explanations and rehashed common knowledge. Her time at Artforum reveals nothing revolutionary or even newsworthy other than she had to trade writing for Artforum’s online magazine in return for having access to their offices. Once again Thornton tosses out her objectivity for acceptance from the insiders.

Thornton’s conversion from outsider to insider in her Seven Days in the Art World, made me remember my two days in art world and my conversion from an outsider who desperately wanted to be an insider to an outsider who discovered insiders are bunch of elitists with expensive shoes and no taste. As a commission-only sales assistant at a small-time art gallery in downtown Denver, located beside an adult novelty shop and across the street from two x-rated theatres, I was forced to push overpriced subpar artwork to people looking for the perfect accessory to match their couch. In theory, the idea of working in a room covered in art is as great working in a building filled with books. But unlike the library where my help is appreciated and my education is respected, patrons of the art gallery felt compelled to flash their money and seemed more annoyed than appreciative of any art knowledge that I attempted to share. Knowing how much insurance to buy for their art work was far more important than knowing about the influences present in the work. I did not have the stomach to mix my love of art with other’s people’s money, so I quickly bailed without a two-week notice and started working in more artful, kinder, gentler profession—bill collecting. Having someone call me “a skank” for asking them to make a payment on their past due Discover credit card bill was far less demoralizing than being asked to call an artist to see if he could re-do a painting in hues of pink and burgundy that would be better suited for the client's bedroom.

Although my foray in the art world was brief and disconcerting, my love of art remained unscathed. So it is with sadness and disappointment , I return Seven Days in the Art World to the shelf. But, I still hope that one day I will walk out of the library with the book that truly tells me how and why the art world spins.

Ted Hughes’ “Last Letter”: Raw and Unfinished

There are just some things that are not meant for public consumption. A man’s suffering. A man’s grief. A man’s guilt. These things should be kept private. But unfortunately, greed or personal glory prevails over privacy sometimes, especially when there is a captive audience waiting for any delicious tidbit of confession, gossip, or proof. It is true that the literary world’s ravenous appetite for anything and everything related to Sylvia Plath afforded Carol Hughes the opportunity to expose the personal torment of her late husband, Ted Hughes. There has been no shortage of critics, scholars and poetry readers ready to consume and scrutinize not only Plath’s work but also the work of Hughes in order to comprehend her tragic life that ended so abruptly when she gassed herself on February 11, 1963.

Thanks to scholar Melvyn Bragg with the assistance of Carol Hughes, the followers of the Plath/Hughes saga have received the most important document to date, “Last Letter.” This poem was published in the New Statesman recently. The poem was intended to be a part of the Birthday Letters, an award-winning collection of the poems that explores Hughes and Plath’s relationship. The collection was published a few months before his death and is considered to be his masterpiece. Critics and scholars are describing the “Last Letter” as the “missing link” that completes the collection.

Although it is may be the missing link, “Last Letter” is not exactly a poem and not exactly a diary entry. “Last Letter” exists within the menacing shadows of the confessional poem. This work is confessional but not in the confessional style seeped with the dark metaphors that Plath helped make famous along with Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and John Barryman. Hughes’ poem is part diary entry, part biographical sketch, part remembrance, and part admission of guilt. It is confessional in terms of actual confession. It fully recounts the horrendous missteps and horrific oversights that occurred during the days leading up to Plath’s suicide. According to the poem, Plath mailed her estranged husband a suicide note that was intended for arrival after her death. As Hughes explains:

Your note reached me too soon---that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning.
The prevalent devils expedited it.
That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office

After receiving the note, he rushed to her home where they had some type of argument. She convinced him that she was no longer suicidal and she burned the letter, according to Hughes, “with that strange smile.” Based on his poetic re-telling of events, she begged him to leave and promised to call the doctor. Hughes did not bother to put up a fight. He left Plath and his two children that day to meet his lover, poet Susan Alliston. Hughes and Alliston travelled to Rugby Street where Plath and Hughes were married; they stayed in the same hotel and in the same bedroom where Plath and Hughes honeymooned, according to the poem.During his weekend with Alliston in the Hughes/Plath marital bed, he claims to be haunted by imagined phone calls from Plath. His imaginary is haunting:

Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver---
At both ends the fading memory
Of a telephone ringing, in a brain
As if already dead. I count
How often you walked to the phone-booth
At the bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turning
Out of Fitzroy Road, crossing over
Between the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.
In your long black coat,
With your plait coiled up at the back of your hair
You walk unable to move, or wake, and are
Already nobody walking
Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill
Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.

She never did call for his help, and his worry was never enough for him to leave his lover in order to rescue Plath. Instead he stayed in the arms of his lover while Plath suffered through her final days. On her final morning, Plath taped the doors of the bedrooms where her one-year-old son, Nicholas, and her three-year-old daughter, Frieda, slept. She placed biscuits and milk beside their beds and then proceeded to use the carbon monoxide from her oven to end her life. Hughes remained unaware of the situation until the phone finally rang and he answered. He writes: 

Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’

This is the ending that we all know but have never seen in such detail from Hughes. This is the document that has the Plath/Hughes community abuzz. But, it is hard to be exuberant about a work so raw and tragic. It is stated that Hughes excluded this poem from the Birthday Letters because it was too personal. This poem has an unfinished feel to it. Moments in the poem are glorious and evocative, but it is clear that he grappled and struggled with every line. How does one convey their darkest hours in exquisite artfulness? Hughes really does not create high art with this poem and, therefore, this work should be examined more in terms of a biographical document than poetry. So, the question becomes: Are there some documents just too personal to share?

This poem is infinitely fascinating and revealing but incredibly personal. I felt like a voyeur reading this work, and I couldn’t help but think of the effect that the release of this poem will have on Frieda Hughes. Over the years, she has given many interviews to change public opinion about her father. She speaks highly of her mother as poet, not as a parent. Frieda was just toddler and Nicholas was an infant when their mother abandoned them through suicide. Hughes is the only parent that they knew and for that reason Frieda vehemently defends her father. She has pointed out that Hughes was not the only volatile and difficult figure in that explosive marriage. Plath, who suffered from mental illness, destroyed Hughes’ poetry on two different occasions. Their marriage was complex, passionate and hostile. Their marriage was not as simple as the critics, scholars and readers would like it to be. She was hardly the dutiful poet/housewife who tolerated his constant cheating. But unfortunately, this guilt-ridden poem portrays their marriage in exactly those terms. This poem will be damning to Hughes’ already sullied reputation. It does not show him as a great man or a great poet. This poem is personal art and private ruminations. It is does not congeal in either style or tone with the other exceptionally polished poems in Birthday Letters. Although it may be caused for celebration among biographers and scholars, the tremendous tragedy that devastated the Plath-Hughes family resonates in this poetic confession. 

Author’s Note: This poem along with two early handwritten drafts of this poem appear in the October 11 issue of the New Statesman. Many unreliable versions of this poem appear on the Internet. For an authoritative and legal version of the poem, I recommend purchasing the periodical or going to your local public or academic library to access it in print or electronic form. I found the full version of the poem, from the comfort of my office chair, by using my library card and remote access to the EBSCO Database, Academic Search Premier .

Skip the Creativity Training and Head to Your Library

No reading for a week can help you become a more creative person. I highly doubt it, and I am skeptical of this proposition put forth by several “creativity trainers” in my community and across the country. Of course, the whole concept of people building their careers on the fragile dreams and passionate desires of aspiring artists seems unsavory. But even if creativity trainers are legitimate and are not charlatans taking advantage of people’s hopes and aspirations, the proposal to restrict reading is simply cockamamie.

Art inspires art. Artists should devour work by other artists. Visual artists study the works of artists past and present in all different genres. Musicians absorb all types of music. And of course, writers read or at least they should. (Stephen King has admitted to never reading Tolstoy or Austen. Perhaps only a best-selling horror author would have the gumption to boast about his literary ignorance.)

Most creativity classes focus on inspiring and cultivating ingenuity and imaginativeness in everyday life. So when they are looking at influences that could stymie productivity, why just look at just reading? Although this is not an idea that I would ever endorse, why not just eliminate exposure to all types of art for a week? Simply ban books, magazines, newspapers, television shows, movies, theatre productions, museums, galleries, sculpture parks, music, and dance events for a week or month or however long it takes to nurture creativeness out of artistic depravity. I suppose this type of cessation does occur at writing retreats, where all kinds of writers recoil into an Emersonian environment, stripped of all distractions. Participants shed all their baggage and influences to find their own voice. It is not just a random purging of one type of influence.

Not only does the ban on reading seem random but it is absolutely counterproductive. When I am writing regularly, I read habitually. As a librarian, I do not read near the number of books as my colleagues who tend to finish more than one novel a week. In fact, my monthly book completion rates are so low I fear that the American Library Association would take back my Master of Library Science if they knew discovered what a bibliographic slacker I am. But as a writer, my reading habits are voracious with daily consumption of multiple essays as a sampling of poetry, plays, and fiction (more short stories than novels.) Each time I start reading a work of literary fiction, influences start appearing in my writing. Perhaps only I can see Colum McCann and Ian McEwan bleeding onto my page, but I know that their works give me the courage and motivation to push my style and intent. If I shield myself from those influences, I do not grow. Therefore, “creativity specialists” should be encouraging an equal regime of art consumption and art production. It is true that imitation will occur at first but eventually mimicking will transfer into originality and fecundity. Art begets art, and art begets creativity. Save yourself some money. Skip the creativity training and head to your local library and nearby art museum.

Art Not Rags: Why Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Over the River Project Should Proceed

Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © Christo 2007

Dear Residents of Southern Colorado:

Now is the time to rejoice. The time to be elated. The time to look forward to having your communities on an international stage. A time to feel honored that a great living artist selected your homeland to be the site of a large-scale environmental art project that will attract worldwide attention and garner big tourism dollars. You should be delighted that Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude (who died in November 2009) spent 18 years fighting bureaucracy to bring your communities Over the River, a massive public art work that will feature 5.9 miles of silvery, luminous fabric panels suspended high above the Arkansas River along a 40-mile stretch between Salida and Cañon City in south-central Colorado . The art will stay erected for two weeks in the Summer of 2013, pending approval from the Federal Government.

As of right now, Christo does not have permits to begin installation and without approval from the Federal Government the project could be stymied permanently. If you live in Colorado, now is the time to speak in favor of this project that will have your state chronicled in art history books and recognized worldwide as the location for the incomparable Christo’s final large-scale art work. This is a crucial time for the project. The Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) draft is now complete and available for public review and comment; the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will accept public comments until Tuesday, September 14.

Supporters must offset the negative and wrongheaded criticism that the opposition group, Rags over the Arkansas River (ROAR), espouses. The concerns generated from this group, which focus largely on traffic and environmental issues, have been addressed by Christo’s team with the project plan being rewritten multiple times to minimize short-term inconvenience and to mitigate lasting adverse effects on the Colorado communities. When examining the nature of the project, many positive aspects exist that supersede any type of temporary nuisance.

• During the fabric panel installation phase and exhibition period, Christo will hire between 300 and 400 workers, with preference given to local residents, according to the official Over the River website.
• It is estimated that Over the River could attract over 300,000 to Colorado, according to the BLM.
• The BLM projections indicate that the public art work could create $121 million in revenue for the state.
• As the location for Over the River, Colorado becomes of a significant part of art history. Since Christo will be 78 years-old when the project is installed, it is assumed that this will be Christo’s last large-scale art work. This is a project that will be sited repeatedly in art history books with Salida and Cañon City frequently mentioned internationally for many years.
• Colorado taxpayers will not have to chip in a dime for this $54 million project. Over the River is being funded entirely by Christo and his private donors, so all of the economic benefits will occur without public subsidy or taxpayer support. This includes expenses to the community during the two-week exhibition period, such as additional law enforcement or trash collection, according to the project website. The Centennial State will experience financial gain with no financial pain.

Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © Christo 2007

 But in addition to financial benefits and international recognition, this is Colorado’s opportunity to be part of Christo’s creative process. Christo’s art amounts to more than just the end product; it consists of more than the fabric, metal, anchors, bolts, cables, and pulleys. Bureaucracy, public opinion, and controversy are all part of the process. The “getting to the completed art work” is as significant as the “completed work,” which means every person who reads about the project, forms an opinion and offers a formal public comment is part of the process. People and process are synonymous. People question Christo’s process and purpose: Christo’s process and purpose spark the questioning. The artists’ methods and outcomes make people ask: Is this art? Is it worth twenty years of hassle to have something that lasts two weeks? Are the risks to the environment too great? Who benefits from these temporary works of art? What is the meaning behind the couple’s art?

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works are largely spectacle and flamboyancy, and the artists have consistently claimed that their works have no deeper meaning other than the immediate aesthetic impact from re-figuring and briefly transforming an everyday landscape. Arguments have been made that the pristine and stunning Rocky Mountain terrain and roaring Arkansas River need no enhancement and should not be transfigured even momentarily. Although the landscape stands alone on its magnificence and splendor, the Over the River project allows for the comingling of nature and art; the merging of natural beauty and formulated allure. For a short moment, we can ponder the exquisiteness of the natural world in relation to synthetic constructs. Two weeks later, the moment will pass; the overlaying artifice will be removed and the environment will return to its previous state – only the pictures and memories of the transitory piece will remain.

As a Colorado resident, I hope that I will have the opportunity to share in that fleeting moment. If the project is approved, my husband and I will travel with our four kids over 200 miles and approximately four hours to see the results of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s vision. We will travel to Salida where will we dine, shop and lodge. We will become part of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s process. We will become part of the moment called Over the River. We will take the fleeting moment with us as we make the four hour return trip to Northern Colorado. If you too would like to be part of a ephemeral but important artistic moment, I recommend that you learn more about Christo and Jeanne-Claude; examine the Environmental Impact Statement; and, let the Bureau of Land Management know that you support this novel and significant public art work. You can discover more about Over the River and offer public comment at the following website:

http://www.overtheriverinfo.com/.

 Sincerely,

Garbageman’s Daughter
Art Enthusiast and Resident of Northern Colorado

Not Sexy, Sweaty or Pretty: Get Over It

If I want to learn how to make minestrone, chicken cacciatore and spinach frittatas, I can pay $44 and head to the local recreation center for a three-week class on Italian cooking. After ingesting an abundance of carbohydrates, I could take a clogging class, throw some pottery, or learn the basics of cartooning. If I was looking for a low-cost outdoor adventure, I could go hiking, break out the bow and arrow for some archery, or tackle my fear of heights with rock climbing. If I was an athlete looking for a team sport, I could play basketball, flag football, softball, or kickball.

However, the one thing that I cannot do at the recreation center is take a writing class other than “How to Be Travel Writer.” It is true that short story writing, poetry creation and playwriting classes do not result in a bunch of sweaty guys drinking bottled water or culminate with cheesy watercolor paintings of sailboats and wild flowers configured with a poor sense of perspective and illogical proportions, but the end result of a writing class is no less than dramatic than a good kickball game and no less creative than fusing glass or making a mosaic in a day.

Sure, the administrators at the recreation center can blame their exclusion of writing classes on a lack of instructors and limited participation. This is the excuse they gave me last Fall when they canceled the playwriting class that signed-up for in order to have some guidance to complete the my one-act play. Their bureaucratic and pleasant response to pacify me and to subdue my outrage actually was just an attempt to conceal the fact that writing classes are not sexy or marketable. E.B. White was absolutely correct when he asserted that essayists are second class citizens, and in my town all writers are dismissed. We are unappealing to recreation planners because writers are mostly grumpy and moderately crazy. Our craft is horribly laborious and tiresome. There is no instant gratification as in the case of swimming, bingo playing, and belly dancing.

It also appears that our community college has adopted the same discriminatory attitude against writing classes on their roster of non-credit continuing education classes. I could learn how to improve my digital photography, pick up some conversational Spanish, or enroll in a motorcycle riding class, but I will not be learning anything about plot or setting in a junior college environment that should want to promote communication. With both affordable outlets blatantly ignoring “writerly types” in the community, I am left with the option of taking classes with the local writers group (which I think consists of scam artists who prey upon people’s dreams of becoming bestselling authors), or enrolling at the state university down the street and subjecting myself to high expectations, stern demands, tough criticism, a heavy workload and grades. I was looking for cheap and easy, not an expensive commitment that will just result in self-loathing.

So kids, here is the lesson to be learned from my dilemma: pick a hobby that either results in body secretions or pretty works of art.

The Next Best Thing in Contemporary Art

The two-year-old art prodigy who has recently come under my tutelage (well, two years ago by the process of birth) has strayed away from his traditional medium of crayon scribbles on the wall, which are comparable to Cy Twombly’s but much better. Since he has managed to cover all our walls, door, and cabinets with his etchings and has even managed to get a few scrawls on my checkbook, the artist known as Chubby Curls has discovered new places to put his art.

Today, he experimented in a very swift manner (while I was breaking up a fight between his old brother and his old sister in the basement) with chocolate syrup and paper towels on ceramic tile floor. His work is a little Dada, a little Surrealist, somewhat reminiscent of Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings” in the 1960s and is far more innovative than the work of Vik Muniz, a gimmick artist who works in chocolate.

Could it be time to call 60 Minutes for a story about my child art prodigy, or should I see if Planned Parenthood would like to use this image in their next ad campaign?

Separation of Art and Life

When Michael Jackson was accused of pedophilia for the second time, I donated my copies of Thriller and Bad to the Friends of the Library. I removed him from our family playlists and changed the radio stations on the first beat of his songs. I do not watch Roman Polanski's movies and my husband has a firm stand against anything by Woody Allen. When I turned 30 and realized I was the same age as Sylvia Plath was when she abandoned her children, I stopped re-reading her work and started reading Ted Hughes. She was the better poet, but he was the better parent. Child abandonment through suicide is tragic, not artful or romantic. Plath’s crime is not necessarily her suicide, but instead her confessional poetry that dwells in depression, self-loathing, blame, and anger. These are not places that I want to visit anymore, so her art no longer captures me.

Plath as well as her contemporaries Anne Sexton and John Berryman, who all committed suicide, are great examples of how artists aren’t known for their stability. Substance abuse problems, divorce, adultery, spousal abuse, child neglect, mental illness and suicide run rampant in the art community. Unfortunately, the more tragic an artist’s life is the more appealing he or she becomes to the masses. There has been a longstanding belief that good art can only be born out of great tragedy, simply not true. But, are there tragedies so sad and crimes so awful that the artist’s work should not be separated from the artist’s life? Is there a point that you should say, “You are not a good person and I will no longer support your art,” or does art always supersede life?

An Art Intervention: Saving the World's Hapless Anime Artists

Clearly, the artist of this drawing has never been with a woman or stepped foot in an art school. I am not sure if his grossly disproportionate rendering should be blamed on his lack of sexual experience, bad artistry or unreal expectations that will inevitably land him in jail when he realizes women typically do not have booties made out of steel or lasers in their breasts. This guy is predestined for sexual fetish therapy or divorce court even before he earns enough money to pay for a woman or cons an artist groupie into believing he has talent.

Sadly, an intervention did not take place before this man created such an offensive travesty that will neither help his career nor his sex life. There is no hope for this artist, but I am here now to help future anime and magna artists and their readers.

Let's start with the magna readers because their reconditioning is as simple as replacing all their magna graphic novels with issues of Playboys and switching out their anime films with soft-core porn. If these boys are going to have unrealistic sexual expectations, they should be the kind of fantasies fashioned by plastic surgery and minor air-brushing instead of fetishized pen and ink drawings. Although not fully based in realism, at least, Playmates exist in this realm of Earthly disappointment and unfilled desires. Keeping your son physically, emotionally, socially and sexually connected to a brick and mortar reality may be the first step in preventing Magna expectations from destroying his relationships and never giving you the grandchildren that you desperately want.

Now that I may have saved a few boys from spending an asexual life in their mom's basement, dreaming about busty, big-bootied, bug-eyed bubble heads that would tip over or deflate upon contact, I can focus my attention on the wretched artists, who create these ill-conceived fantasies and repugnant mockeries of the female body.

There is no better way to re-educate pseudo-artists than with the history of art. With many lessons to learn about female anatomy and so many beautiful depictions that can be used for didactic purposes, it is difficult to choose a starting place. But for today, we’ll start with the “nudity isn’t always best" lesson, demonstrated by comparing Francisco Goya’s Nude Maja to his Clothed Maja.

The brazen sexuality and aggressiveness that confronts viewer in the Naked Maja becomes more coy, subtle, mysterious and appealing in the Clothed Maja. Anime artists should take note that there is nothing wrong with stirring up a little mystery and desire to see more later. (Also, a good lesson to teach your daughters about not putting out on the first, second or tenth date).

If you are going to show the female form in its unbridled beauty, try to learn the correct anatomical proportions for a female body before you twist the form to meet your lustful urges. A good place to start is Alexandre Cabanel's The Birth of Venus (pictured below). This example of a well-received, exceptionally conventional but meticulously rendered painting from the 1863 Salon shows academic painting at its finest. This painting is aesthetically pleasing in its traditionalism.  While not breaking new ground, it teaches a valuable lesson: You need to know the rules before you can break them.  

Once you know how to render accurate proportions, it is time to start breaking the rules through the subject's pose and gaze as exemplified in two Édouard Manet's most famous paintings: Olympia (top) and Déjeuner sur l'Herbe or Luncheon on the Grass (bottom).

  

The use of the unconventional color and unexpected geometric shapes can also be used to challenge traditional renderings of the female body without objectifying it as in the case of Henri Matisse's Blue Nude, or Souvenir de Biskra (below):

After studying the unembarrassed, confrontational glances of Manet and the sensual distortions by Matisse, it is time to study an artist who puts all together to produce glorious sensuality. Amedeo Modigliani's moderate distortions and models with provocative and confident expressions produce sexy and appealing images that do not establish unrealistic expectations of superpowers in the bedroom, as seen in the Reclining Nude.

So, all you anime and magna artists out there, I encourage you to go art school and learn the established techniques of academy and incorporate touches of modern art into your work. Knowing art history and art theory will improve your renderings, make you appear smart and help you appeal to those hordes of artist groupies. And if you are lucky, learning how to draw a woman’s body both artfully and respectfully may gain you privilege of touching a boobie or two someday.