Artenol_Fall_flipbook

LAWRENCE WESCHLER
Tree nuptials,
stump vandals
and wood work
FALL 2015
ZINOVY ZINIK
Non-conceptualist
struggles in the
modernist gulag
BILL KARTALOPOULOS
Art in sequence:
Finding MoMA’s
secret comics
‘We think
we are the
doctors,
but we are
the disease’
Read this
issue and
get infected
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g a l l e r y
VOHN GALLERY serves as a platform for exhibitions,
intellectual inquiry and cultural exploration. Though
its name is new, the gallery is a continuation of a
journey that was started in 2008.
The group of international artists that VOHN works
with share a strong conceptual underpinning to
their practices. Their work is in the collections of
MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum and The Guggenheim
Museum. VOHN’s projects/exhibitions have
received critical response in The New York Times,
The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal and Interview
Magazine, among others.
VOHN GALLERY launched in September 2014 as a
re-imagining of a project space that ran from 2012
to 2013 in Chelsea, New York. The new gallery’s program
will include upcoming exhibitions in TriBeCa,
off site projects and Artenol journal.
vohngallery.com
Exhibition space: 45 Lispenard Street, Ground Floor, Unit 1W, New York, NY 10013
Further information: info@vohngallery.com

Inside
8 Arbor Ardor
Tree art and its controversies by Lawrence Weschler
44 Project: The Answer Machine
Build your own Platometer by Artenol’s Tech Staff
17 The Way Out
Escape doom and pestilence with art by Gerald Celente
47 Story: One Year in the Life
A non-conceptual artist takes the cheese by Zinovy Zinik
21 Scene: At the Camel Races
Ships of the desert hitch a ride by David Green
55 Poem: Angels and Ladders
The beauty of language in translation by Gabrielle Noferi
28 Plan: Art Temple
A proposed house of art worship by Alex Melamid
56 Reviews
Essays by David Adler, Alex Melamid, Gary Indiana
4
“Artenol, in other
words, seems very
much like a cross
between The New
Criterion and
Mad magazine.”
29 Sun & Moon Comics
Reading MoMA’s secret narratives by Bill Kartalopoulos
34 Beauty by the Numbers
A mathematician’s take on the sublime by Percy Wong
61 The Visitors
An gallery insider reviews the viewers by Anonymous
63 Closer: At the Easel
A little daub will do you by Nick Wadley
– The New
York Times
38 What Is Beauty, and Why It’s Chopin
One pianist’s definition of great art by Kelsy Yates
Departments From the Founder 5 | Contact 6
Contributors 7 | Where to Find Artenol 14
118605190
A tip of
the top hat
25
An affectionate look at the rise
and fall of millinery’s masterwork
By Edward Tenner

INFECTIOUS
MUSEUMUCUS
From the Founder
n ‘THERE IS ONE INDICATION THAT INCONTROVERTIBLY SEPARATES TRUE ART FROM
FAKE: ITS INFECTIOUSNESS,’ WROTE LEO TOLSTOY IN HIS TREATISE WHAT IS ART?
As Yale Daily News announced in September 2014:
“Contagion Helps to Explain Art Value.”
Tolstoy’s theory presumes that particles, invisible
to the naked eye, are exuded from “true
art“ objects. These particles attach
themselves to our bodies
and penetrate deep within. Today
we might call them “art microorganisms.”
Everyone who has ever visited
Alex Melamid
a museum has almost certainly
been infected by these microorganisms
because, as we all know, museums
show only true art.
This sounds bad. It is common for some art
lovers to get headaches or become nauseated
after being exposed to art, but this has always
been ascribed to simple exhaustion. This presumption,
however, may be wrong. What is
even more worrisome is that, in certain cases,
art microbial infections may be asymptomatic.
That would mean most of us are likely already
infected but remain unaware of our condition.
Obviously, this art “infection” theory is just
that – a theory, akin to climate change. But it’s
one we shouldn’t discard out of hand. What
better explanation is there for art’s contagious
power? Clearly when contagion levels reach
epidemic proportions, lovers of art become incapacitated
and can no longer discern true art
from false. If the infection theory is correct, we
who appreciate art should be careful with how
we consume it. Perhaps we should consider going
on an art “diet.”
Should we avoid infectious museums and galleries
and stick to the cheap paintings found in
big box outlets and dollar stores? How can we
be certain that what they offer is all bad? What
about the fact that our cities and towns have
lately been flooded with public art? These sculptures,
murals and wall hangings could jeopardize
our health. How can we avoid becoming
infected?
Artenol proposes to create art-free zones to
help protect the health of our citizenry.
There was theory put forward by another
Russian, a 19th-century philosopher named
Alexander Herzen. He said, “We think we are
the doctors, but we are the disease.” This, when
applied to the art world, can mean two things.
Either artists have been infected through continual
exposure to true art, and thus there is no
cure for them. Or it could mean that artists were
sick to begin with, and they created art to infect
the rest of population.
Either way, Artenol serves as a purgative. Let
the ideas and opinions presented in this magazine
reinfect you with art antibodies. In its
modest way, Artenol is helping to return artistic
endeavor to its former good health.
5

ATTORNEY ADVERTISING
FALL 2015 | ISSUE 2
The Law Office of
Katya Yoffe, PLLC
International
Business
& Art Law
Rated by
SuperLawyers
for 2014, 2015
PUBLISHER
MANAGING EDITOR/
ART DIRECTOR
BRITISH EDITOR
ACCOUNTS/
CIRCULATION
ADVERTISING
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FOUNDER
Alex Melamid
6
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info@artenol.org
Artenol is published four times annually by the
Art Healing Ministry, 350 West 42nd Street,
Suite 8G, New York, NY 10036. © 2015 Art
Healing Ministry. All rights reserved.
Fall 2015, Issue 2.
Single issues of Artenol are $10; a 1-year subscription
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For customer service regarding subscriptions, please call
845-292-1679. Reproduction of any part of this publication
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All submissions become the property of Artenol unless
otherwise specified by the publisher. Printed in China.
FALL 2015

Contributors
• David Adler | Mr. Enwezor Speaks ... (page 56)
Adler produced the BBC documentary “The People’s
Painting” about Komar and Melamid’s paint-bynumbers
project. His most recent video is “Potlatch,”
about a ceremony that takes place in a prison.
• Gerald Celente | Finding the Way Out (page 17)
A renowned trends forecaster, Celente is the publisher
of Trends Journal. He founded the Trends Research
Institute in Kingston, NY, in 1980.
• David X. Green | At the Camel Races (page 21)
Green is a London-based, travel and portrait photographer.
His projects for magazines, charities and
various clients have taken him around the globe,
most recently Cuba, Thailand and Oman.
• Gary Indiana | The Maestro, Seagrave (page 60)
A long-time art critic at The Village Voice, author, film
maker and playwright Indiana currently covers art,
literature and film as well as politics and the media.
• Gabriele Noferi | Poem: Angels & Ladders (page 55)
Noferi is a translator of literary and scholarly works
into Italian, including “Caravaggio: A Life.”
• Edward Tenner | A High Art, a Higher Hat (page 22)
The author of Our Own Devices and Why Things Bite
Back, Tenner is a former college teacher and book editor
who is now speaks and writes on technology and
society for newspapers, magazines and websites.
• Lawrence Weschler | Arbor Ardor (page 8)
A staff writer for 20 years at The New Yorker and director
emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities
at NYU, Weschler recently launched “Pillow of
Air,” a monthly column in The Believer.
• Nick Wadley | Untitled (page 63)
Wadley is a cartoonist and illustrator who has numerous
graphic books, including “Nick Wadley’s Guide
to British Artists” and “Drunk with Pleasure.”
• Percy Wong | Beauty by the Numbers (page 34)
Wong has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and is
fluent in English, Chinese and Yue (Cantonese). He
is currently employed as an expert in quantitative
analysis for a hedge fund.
• Kelsy Yates | What Is Beauty ... (page 38)
Yates has worked in advertising, wine making and
interior design, and has written for The Writer’s Chronicle.
She is currently at work on a short story collection
and a novel.
• Zinovy Zinik | Story: One Year in the Life ... (page 47)
Zinik, a Moscow native, is the author of eight
books of fiction and short stories. He is the London
editor for Artenol and is heard regularly on the
BBC’s The Forum.
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7

Opener
Arbor ardor

By Lawrence Weschler
Tales of controversy
amid sylvan splendor
don’t know, maybe it’s something
in the air, but when it comes
to my interactions with the art
world these past several years,
I’ve been being dogged by trees
(which, granted, is far better than
its Django alternative, but still). Some of
you may remember Houston’s great Art
Guys’ tree wedding kerfuffle of a few seasons
back − in November 2011, to be specific. Oy, do
I remember it, because, dear reader, listen, I was
the rebbe.
Earlier that year, I’d been interviewing the
Guys about something else altogether when
they told me about how a couple years before
that, at a time when Texas politicians were lashing
themselves into a righteous lather over
the prospect of gay marriage (how, in
the inimitable stylings of Gov. Rick
Perry, if you sanctioned gays marrying
each other, the next thing
you knew you’d have people demanding
to marry their dogs), the two
of them had decided to marry a tree. They
insisted, tongues lodged distinctly somewhere
cheekward (though it was not
entirely clear how deep), that their gesture
had nothing to do with Perry or
gay marriage or anything like that –
that, if anything, it nodded in an ecological
direction.
Anyway, they explained how back in 2009,
since the sapling of their desires was still under
age, they’d only gotten engaged (what kind of
deviates did I take them for?), but that now that
the tree in question had come of age, having
reached sufficient height (i.e., theirs), and now
that they had secured the Menil Collection’s
commitment to lodge the bride as part of its collections
in its own lush groves, they were now
intending to hold a full-on wedding ceremony
that coming November, and would I be willing
to help officiate? I informed them that I only
entertained such official functions in my some-
9

time-somewhat role as rabbi, and to their credit,
they did not blink.
10
Paper plane protest
Little did I know, and probably little did any of
us know, but by the time November had rolled
around, the impending ceremony had taken
on the trappings of a full-blown PC meltdown
scandal, with several members of the local gay
constabulary having taken it into their heads
that the Art Guys were making fun of them.
The Houston Chronicle’s art critic at the time
hyperventilated about the way the Menil had
allowed its hallowed name to become involved
in an assault on what was, after all, “the human
rights issue of our time.” At a sort of rally the
night before the Menil ceremony, gay rights advocates
and their supporters gathered at a local
gay strip club, where the critic in question (just
to register the sheer extent of the outraged community’s
umbrage)
By the time November
had rolled around, the
impending ceremony
had taken on the trappings
of a full-blown
PC meltdown ...
subjected himself,
in the time-honored
spirit of civil
disobedience, to
the ultimate sacrifice,
as he put it, to
“marry a woman.”
The celebrants were
thereupon invited to
fold that marriage’s announcements into (very
sharp) paper airplanes and to reconvene the
next morning at the Art Guys’ event.
This is the scene into which I, as rebbe, now
found myself lumbering that gray and drizzly
morn, as several hundred officiants gathered
on the Menil’s grounds, several dozen of those
armed with (very sharp-looking) paper planes.
In any event, things went off quite peaceably.
In my role as rebbe (nobody even noticed how in
the spirit of the festivities I had taken to wearing
a Palestinian kafia in lieu of the traditional Hebrew
tallit), I noted how powerful a thing it was
to be re-consecrating this particular tree in the
wake of the previous season’s record-shattering
heat wave which had decimated a truly dismay-
UP A TREE The Art Guys, Michael Galbreth, left, and
Jack Massing, and their betrothed pose for a formal
portrait in 2011. Everett Taasevigen photo
FALL 2015

LAWRENCE WESCHLER, right, speaks during the planting of a live oak on the grounds of The Menil Collection in
March 2011. The tree was formally accepted into the permanent collection on June 2. The Menil Collection photo
ing portion of the city’s other mature trees. I went
on to invoke the wisdom of my fellow Rebbes
Donald Barthelme (from the dryad-man love story
in his short-tale sequence “Departures”) and
Rabbinahs Denise Levertov (her sublime poem
“A Tree Telling of Orpheus”) and Kay Ryan (her
crisp, short heartbreaker of a lyric, “Tree Heart/
True Heart”), after which the wise-and-wizened
veteran Houston art honcho, James Surls, got up
and asserted quite simply that he’d known the
Art Guys in question for decades and they were
obviously not homophobes. He added that the
art world was way too small and itself way too
threatened for this sort of thing and couldn’t we
all just get along, at which point it seemed that
those very sharp paper planes got stuffed back
into pockets, the wedding ceremony proceeded
to its conclusion, and blithe sanity seemed to
have returned to the garden.
Until a couple of days later, that is, when
someone (no one ever found out exactly who)
went and assassinated the tree.
Or anyway, tried to. (The local media at any
rate immediately took to referring to the Art
Guys as “the widowers.”) And yet, somehow,
the stunted plant survived. The Menil Collection,
for its part, however, apparently freaked
out by this latest turn of events, deaccessioned
and now evicted the blasted tree-now-shrub,
which had to be transplanted to a new home
on a lot behind the Guys’ studio compound −
though look at it now, three years on.
So: maybe that was one of those sorta happy
“life-(and the life of art)-goes-on” sagas after all.
n A woods wounded
Not so, alas, the next one. For exactly one year
later, in November 2012, a disconcertingly similar
series of incidents played out in England.
Earlier that year, David Hockney had been the
subject of a record-breaking exhibition at London’s
Royal Academy of Arts
surveying his prior decade of
work. He had been documenting
the passing of the seasons
in the immediate wheat field
and forest copse surrounding
Hockney
his new home in the small resort
town of Bridlington on the Yorkshire
coast, facing out toward Holland. These
were the very fields and forests across which
he had traipsed as a youngster and then as a
teenaged summer worker on outings from his
See a brief video
about the wedding
at artenol.org.
11

HOCKNEY’S
‘TOTEM’
12
TOTEMIC David Hockney’s painting of the Woldgate Woods, “Winter Timber,” showing the stump that was later
cut down and painted with obscenities by vandals, below. The Associated Press photo
hometown, further inland, of Bradford. Among
the deliriously colorful oils, watercolors and
iPad drawings were all manner of sketchbooks,
and pencil and charcoal drawings − the same
scenes returned to again and again, at different
times of day across different seasons in different
media. One series of these last in particular
stood out for many people: a sequence of charcoal
drawings documenting the thinning out
of a particularly beloved stretch of woodland,
the sort of clearing activity taken up every few
years by the local foresters to ensure the continued
health of the forest. One couldn’t help but
glean a deep sense of mortality across the images
that poured forth across Hockney’s witness,
however − especially when one kept in mind the
terrible swath among his own cohort that AIDS
Hockney had
himself asked the
foresters to spare
the stump, which
he now took to
referring to as
the ‘Totem.’
has scythed over the preceding decades.
And even more moving, in
this context, was the stalwart survival
of one particular tall stump,
which Hockney had himself asked
the foresters to spare, and which
he now took to referring to as the
“Totem” and began portraying
again and again, across all manner
of other media, in the months that
followed, a sort of stand-in, one
couldn’t help but
feel, for his own
weathered self.
In the months after
the Royal Academy
show, increasing
numbers of tourists
began trekking out
to the two- or threesquare
miles outside
Bridlington that
some people thought
of as a sort of “Hockney National Park,” so immediately
recognizable were that swerve of
road, this specific hedgerow, that fold of wold,
this forest path, and of course, that Totem. One
day toward the end of November, Hockney was
felled by a minor stroke and ended up spending
the first night of his 75-year life in a hospital for
observation. During that night, as it happens,
vandals attacked the Totem, slathering it with
pink graffiti, the words “cunt,” caricatures of a
cock-and-balls, some of the imagery arguably
homophobic in nature. When David returned
home from the hospital (his linguistic abilities
temporarily somewhat slurred, though his artistic
ones were completely unscathed), his studio
assistants were afraid to tell him of the vandal-
FALL 2015

ism. But when he finally heard about it, he was
surprisingly unfazed, noting that the coming
winter’s storms would no doubt wash away the
damage. A few weeks later, he traveled down
to London for a minor follow-up operation, and
that night the vandals returned − it is assumed
there were at least two, given the mayhem they
wrought − and completely chopped down the
already-defaced stump.
This time, returning to Bridlington and getting
told of the attack, Hockney was completely
devastated. He couldn’t get over the sheer
gratuitous meanness of the act. “The meanness
of it all,” he kept muttering. He retreated to his
bedroom for two days of grimly defeated desolation,
after which he roused himself and asked
his crew to drive him out to the scene, where
over the next several days, he recorded a suite of
five gorgeously devastated charcoal drawings
as a kind of commemorative tribute. Getting
wind of the attack, the editors of The Guardian,
one of Britain’s premier newspapers, contacted
Hockney for comment. He told them of the
drawings and agreed to let them run a selection,
which they proceeded to do, on page 1, above
the fold.
News that stays new …
n Into the forest
I suppose trees have been back on my mind
these recent days though because of a terrific little
way-out-of-the-way show I happened upon
this past spring, indeed one of the most memorable
I saw all year (this being the time of year
when we’re supposed to start toting up such
nominations, after all).
It was a student show, or rather it was the
product of a graduate exhibition-practices curatorship
seminar at the University of Illinois,
Chicago, and was lodged in the university’s
Gallery 400. I suppose I shouldn’t have been
surprised at the enterprise’s quality, given the
fact that even though the curatorial process had
been exceptionally collaborative (as the catalog
detailed), it had been led on an adjunct basis by
Rhoda Rosen, one of the most dynamic and creative
curators around.
The UIC exhibition was entitled “Encounters
at the Edge of the Forest,” and set out to survey
the work of a range of contemporary artists
who’ve recently been taking up trees as their
subjects. But not trees as conventionally portrayed
− that is, as pastoral emblems of nature
unsullied by man − rather trees as they have in
fact become: contested foci for nationalist assertion
and state formation. As Rosen explained in
her catalog essay:
Modern scientific forest management,
first established during the 18th century,
functioned to connect all aspects of
colonial power. Although its origins lie
in Germany, it is no coincidence that
Dietrich Brandis, whose name is synonymous
with the birth of forestry, worked
for a decade for the British colonial
administration in India where, as Dan
Handel shows, the widespread implications
of forest management for the
colonial agenda were first played out. As
Lord Dalhousie’s superintendent of teak
forests in the Pegu region of east Burma
and, later, as his first inspector-general
of forests, Brandis was directly implicated
in Dalhousie’s project to modernize
India in order to bring it more efficiently
under British control. Further, he was
implicated in Dalhousie’s expansion of
the area of British rule through the largest-scale
colonial land grab to date and
to his endeavor to centralize communications
in order to facilitate the military
and economic exploitation of India’s
natural resources.
Rosen goes on to note that the British brought
similar politico-forestry zeal to their administration
of Palestine, zeal which continued into
the Israeli period (think about the millions of
incongruously Northern European pine saplings
which were brought in, often to cover over
evidence of once-vibrant-though-now-evicted
Arab villages, and the generations-old indigenous
olive groves which ironically were often
being eradicated in the process).
The show’s name derived from the title of a
novella by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua, Facing
the Forest, in which a failed Hebrew scholar,
unable to find meaning in his studies, assumes
the position of a watchman in a remote forest
Learn more about
the exhibit at
gallery400.uic.
edu/exhibitions.
13

14
where he is supposed to be on the lookout for
arsonists. The only other person he encounters
is a mute Arab farmer whose tongue was cut
out by Israeli forces in the 1948 war and who,
by the end of the story, starts a fire. The student
decides not to intervene and instead watches as
the forest burns to the ground and reveals the
ruins of the Arab village it had concealed.
The genius of the show, however, was the way
Rosen and her students were able to uncover similar
sorts of tree deployments by artists working
all over the world. Thus, for example, Ken Gonzales-Day’s
gorgeously composed, Ansel Adams-like
color photographs of magnificent solitary
tree stands from all over the United States.
These turn out to have been the
actual trees from famous earlier
lynching incidents and their
resultant souvenir photographs
− an especially effective way of
solving the problem of alluding
to those photographs without
engaging in the ethically suspect
activity of displaying the actual
dead body.
Elsewhere in the show, Rosen
and her students displayed the video of a truly
haunting 16mm film by the Israeli artist Ori Gershi.
Taken in the Moskalovka forest in the Kosov
region of Ukraine, one of the last great primeval
forests in Europe, the film describes how Jews
had hidden out there from the outset of the Holocaust
until 1942. That year, 2,000 of them were
discovered in the forest and murdered. In the
film, the engrossingly serene beauty of the present-day
forest is repeatedly sundered by the
sound and sight of slicing, crashing trees.
The South African photographer, David Goldblatt,
was represented by his photograph called,
“Remnant of a hedge planted in 1660 to keep the
indigenous Khoi out of the first European settlement
in South Africa,” an image of a hedge
which has in the meantime been transplanted to
and flourishes in one of South Africa’s most renowned
botanical gardens in Capetown, at the
The genius of the show
was the way Rosen and
her students were able
to uncover similar sorts
of tree deployments
by artists working all
around the world.
LINES Andreas Rutkauskas’ “Stanstead Project”
documents the “Cutline,” a clearcut space that
demarcates the boundary between the United
States and Canada. Andreas Rutkauskas photos
FALL 2015

foot of Table Mountain (talk about the pastorally
oblivious).
Borders and barcodes
The Canadian photographer, Andreas Rutkauskas,
trains his lens on the bizarre “Cutline,”
a clean slash of cleared-out forest that now, in
the wake of 9/11, runs the entire length of the
US-Canadian border, often to quite surreal effect;
while the Brit, Philippa Lawrence, in her
photographs, shows trees swathed with the
very barcodes of the lumber for which they are
industrially destined.
Other instances got referenced in the show
and its catalog as well, everywhere from Afghanistan
to the demilitarized zone − or DMZ
− separating North and South Korea. There,
in 1976, a joint US and South Korean mission,
code-named Paul Bunyan, broached the DMZ
in an attempt to “assassinate” a poplar tree that
was blocking the view from an observation post,
a mission which resulted in the death of two US
soldiers.
But arguably the most affecting piece − and
here we come full circle − was a videotape documenting
the Israeli artist Ariane Littman’s intervention
on the Palestinian side of the separation
wall. Starting at dawn, the artist approached the
stunted remains of a once-thriving olive tree in
the middle of a traffic roundabout and proceeded
to wrap it in surgical bandages, an achingly
caring and evocative process which lasted until
evening. The next morning, the catalog informs
us, the bandages had all been stripped away.
Rosen’s essay invokes “Unchopping a Tree,”
W.S. Merwin’s remarkable prose poem from
1970, the year of the first Earth Day. In it the
poet begins the “unchopping” process by suggesting
we “Start with the leaves, the small
twigs, and the nests that have been shaken,
ripped, or broken off by the fall;” he goes on
with truly haunting rigor to lay out all the
steps, one after the next, that would prove necessary
if we were to succeed in righting the
felled arbor. All manner of fixatives and heavy
machinery are adduced across three pages of
densely imagined prose, until
finally the moment arrives when the
last sustaining piece is removed and
TREEAGE Ariane Littman wraps an ancient specimen at the Hizme
checkpoint located at the northeastern entrance of Jerusalem in her
performance called “The Olive Tree.” Rina Castelnuevo photo
the tree stands again on its own. It is as
though its weight for a moment stood
on your heart. You listen for a thud
of settlement, a warning creak deep
in the intricate joinery. You cannot
believe it will hold. How like something
dreamed it is, standing there all
by itself. How long will it stand there
now? The first breeze that touches its
dead leaves all seems to flow into your
mouth. You are afraid the motion of the
clouds will be enough to push to over.
What more can you do? What more
can you do?
But there is nothing more you
can do.
Others are waiting.
Everything is going to have to be
put back.
Put back indeed. Or at the very least toured:
it would be nice if someone would find a way
to travel the University of Illinois students’ remarkable
little exhibit. It deserved a far wider
and longer place in the sun than it got. n
ARTHOPOX
POLLENUS
15

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IMAGINE
growing up in a culture of fear,
where your every action and
every written word are recorded, tracked and stored.
IMAGINE
growing up in a world that, while going about
your daily routines, you encounter heavily
armed police officers peering through armored visors as you walk by.
IMAGINE
growing up in a world of such moral
decay that you have abandoned all faith in
your leaders and the governmental rights and processes they
manage – so much so, in fact, that you don’t even know their names.
IMAGINE

Finding a way out
By Gerald Celente
IMAGINE growing up in a world
where war is endless, where images of death and
destruction are so pervasive, you don’t even pay
attention to them any longer – if you ever did.
Imagine growing up in a world where the populous
is so muted, worn and disengaged that it
allows – over and over – its leaders to drag the
masses into brutal wars based on flagrant lies,
repeating the same failed history over and over.
If you were growing up in such a world, how
would you cope? What would you do?
Perhaps you would bow your
head, plug your ears with headphones
and peck away endlessly
on your smart phone. You would
listen to fabricated music, or even
create it on your laptop and call
yourself a musician. You would
dress and present yourself like
your peers, being just fine with
the sameness that prevails around
you.
Your powerlessness would be
reflected in the poor state of your
physical, psychological and emotional
health.
You would rise up against abusive
power when motivated, but it
wouldn’t last long. You’re so beaten
down and defeated by the chronic deception,
lying and self-serving guile of your leaders that
your own self-respect and trust in your leaders
are now counted among the casualties. So
immersed are you in a world where too many
have allowed themselves to become packaged,
processed and homogenized like so much of the
food, fashion, music and media shoved down
Fear consumes the
post-9/11 world just
as it did in the days
following the attacks
– only on a deeper,
more subliminal level.
their throats, your yearning for true, genuine
expression is too difficult to hear.
This is what fear has done to us.
The epidemic of fear
Fear consumes the post-9/11 world just as it
did in the days following the attacks – only on a
deeper, more subliminal level.
As the United States and much of the world
prepared to mark the 13th anniversary of 9/11,
American President Barack Obama addressed
the nation on September 10, 2014.
Obama promised to “degrade,”
“destroy” and “eradicate” the terrorist
Islamic State “cancer” that
posed a “growing threat to the
United States.” It took him a mere
14 minutes to declare a war that
would be fought, in part, in Syria,
which, like Afghanistan, Iraq
and Libya, was innocent of committing
crimes or acts of aggression
against the United States but
were nevertheless attacked and
destroyed. It was the start of what
some said would be a 30-year war.
Thirty years!
I wrote in the summer 2014
edition of Trends Journal, while
dissecting President George W. Bush’s 9/11 addresses
to the nation, “Only a madman would
speak such words. Only frightened people
would believe them. And believe they did.
Scared to death, Americans were dumbstruck
with terror.”
What has changed between Bush’s 9/11 speech
in 2001 and Obama’s 13th anniversary declara-
FALL 2015

tion? Absolutely nothing.
Now, 13 years later, while the United States
and much of the world still suffer from these
9/11 wounds, they’re still victimized by the
mad men and women banging war drums. The
western world’s vulnerability to terror attacks is
greater today than it was on September 10, 2001.
In the post-9/11 era, fear drives everything.
Barricades, video surveillance, police in armor,
metal detectors, cyber hackings, X-ray machines
at airports, and armed guards and terrorist
drills in office buildings just skim the surface
of describing a world in lock-down. The surveillance
state has arrived. And the density and
coldness that abound in our world – from our
music to our architecture, to our craftsmanship,
and to our standards for what passes as creativity
– reflect the effects of living in a state of fear.
The inner spirit
We have to ask ourselves: How low have our
moral standards sunk? When did it become
routine, expected and business-as-usual that we
are led down such destructive roads with so little
accountability and no regard for the history
that’s so obviously and indisputably repeating
itself?
Who’s to blame? How did it happen?
Them, you and me. We all do our part to create
the conditions that exist. And at the heart of
it, at the very core of our collective despondency
and dejection, lies a simple question: What is the
way out?
Art is the way out.
Not the soulless, mass-produced facades of
so-called “art” consuming popular culture, but
genuine art borne out of equal parts vision,
heart, skill and labor. Power-hungry leaders
who govern by lies, stupidity and indifference
– while never being held accountable – are defenseless
against art. They are incapable of finding
it in their hearts. They are powerless in its
presence.
What will it take to reverse negative trends
and replace them with elements of joy, beauty,
grace and prosperity? It begins and ends with
the inner spirit, the sanctum where courage,
purpose, self-awareness and the passion to create
– and appreciate – beauty lives.
Today, a sustained poor global economy, endless
war, immorality among world leaders and
political polarization have compelled us to seek
refuge in technology at our fingertips. Human
embrace, engagement and experience are too
often overwhelmed in this techno world. But
those qualities aren’t lost; they are just muted.
The world will grow tired of the sameness. It
is ready to awaken.
A trend worth tracking
Unique, powerful art movements born in
response to the dreary sameness of the world
that pervasive fear has created are beginning
to emerge. Analysts are tracking how unique
galleries, restaurants, music clubs and creative
gathering spots are clustering in big
and small cities, attracting patrons seeking
reprieve from the homogenized
world. There is growing evidence that
movement is afoot to alchemize entrepreneurism
and creative expression as
a means to inspire a community – and
make a living, too.
Stanley Blum, an artist and poet who lives
in New York, is a fine example of the enduring,
timeless and transformational power of art in
dark times. For the 95-year-old Blum, 9/11 unleashed
“the angst and the creative energy that
lay dormant for years.” Living through the horrors
of that day awakened him to an insight that
changed his life: “It takes courage to accept the
chaos and mindlessness around us. We have to
reach inside ourselves, depend only on the creativity
inside of us, to combat those forces.”
So, at age 80, Blum began expressing himself
– in paintings, poems and by inspiring others of
all age groups. Now, five books later, Blum feels
the ground shaking. He sees it coming.
“The First American Enlightenment movement
is coming,” said Blum. “Periods of growth,
freedom and morality will come to life when
creativity is unleashed, and we have no choice
now but to unleash it.”
The great Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav
Jung stressed that changing the world begins
with finding, expressing and celebrating one’s
own uniqueness. “Individualism means deliberately
stressing and giving prominence to
some supposed peculiarity rather than to collective
considerations and obligation,” he wrote
AESTHETE
GAMETE

CURRENT TRENDS IN ART
Overcoming fear and hate as more discover the beauty of the creative impulse.
ARTS AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS
In the past decade, the number of nonprofit arts organizations has
grown 49%. The breakdown of all arts groups in 2010:
Museums,
galleries
6%
Performing arts
Source: US Census
All others
15%
18%
61%
Arts associations,
councils, collectives, etc.
Total: 113,000
ARTISTS
The number of artists continues
to grow, increasing by
15% from 1996 to 2010.
3M
2M
1M
1.9
million
2.2
million
0
1996 2010
Source: National Arts Index
SALES
$150B
UP
31%
SOLD
Over the last decade, consumer
spending on the arts, a discretionary
expenditure, has climbed to about
$150 billion, increasing from 1.45%
in 2002 to 1.88% in 2010.
Source: National Arts Index
20
See more of
Gerald Celente’s
trends at trendsresearch.com.
INVOLVEMENT IN THE ARTS
Arts involvement began to rebound after the 2008 downturn. In 2013, 32 percent of the adult population attended a performing arts event (up from
28 percent in 2010); 22 percent visited an art museum (up from 12 percent). These are the first strong increases since 2003.
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Source: National Arts Index
Attended an arts event
Visited a museum or gallery
Purchased an artwork
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
in The Function of the Unconscious. Jung referred
to the purest, highest-quality forms of art as
“supra-personal,” destined to be “constantly at
work educating the spirit of the age.”
That translates into change.
Internationally respected painter Eugene Gregan
described the coming change this way: “The
antidote to fear is beauty. To have satisfaction in
your life, you must have grace. Grace gives life
to creativity. Grace grows out of the discipline
of the self. Discipline gives one dignity. Without
dignity, genuine depth is not possible …”
The sameness I speak of is borne out of a world
consumed with fear, where we hide from it in
our technology. The discipline Gregan speaks of
relates to our ability to express our own creative
impulses, to live outside of the control of others
by embracing true creative expression.
“Without art, the crudeness of reality would
make the world unbearable,” wrote George Bernard
Shaw. One hundred years later, the news is
filled with fear and hate. There is no talk of joy or
beauty. The “crudeness of reality” has made the
world unbearable. As its leaders join in a march
to war, can “the people” give rise to a passion to
live in peace? Where is the music to soothe the
savage breast? Where is the art to bring beauty
to the eyes and meaning to the soul?
The world is ready for a renaissance. If 85 people
can have more money and the power it brings
than 3.5 billion people, or half the world’s population,
then there’s a Medici among the masses.
That’s all it will take. In the absence of the one,
it will take the many who unite in the belief that
art is the way of finding the true meaning of the
human spirit.
n
FALL 2015

Scene
IN KEEPING WITH
my commitment
to travel to a new
country each New
Year’s, this year –
my 33rd such trip
in a row – was to
Oman, where I
managed to locate
one of the surprisingly
elusive camel
races. Although a
widely popular national
event, these
races are rarely on
the tourist itinerary.
The race itself
is a blend of the
magnificent, as
the lean, racing
camels gallop full
speed through
clouds of sand glittering
in the baking
heat, and the
surreal, as they are
guided not by the
recently outlawed
child jockeys but
by tiny “robots,”
operated remotely
by the owners
blazing alongside
the race course in
SUVs parallel. The
two camels in this
image may have
been purchased at
auction that day. I
wonder if Toyota
ever envisioned
this cargo? I did
find it rather
incongruous to
see camels – these
graceful ships of
the desert –
loaded onto the
bed of a pick-up.
David Green
www.davidxgreen.com photo
21

Head Gear
A High
The brilliant career
of the top hat
By Edward Tenner
ROYAL
MARINE
22
Bell Crown
Topper
wikimedia.org
1The top hat took shape in the aftermath of the French
Revolution, a variant of the practical “round hat” worn
by country gentlemen for riding and hunting. One of the
best representations is Jean-Louis David’s portrait of his
brother-in-law, Pierre Sériziat, in the Louvre.
It began its
2 urban life as an
emblem of everything
progressive,
as worn by the
new democratic
era’s leading feminist
author, Mary
Wollstonecraft,
in the National
Portrait Gallery.
National Portrait Gallery, London
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Though an international style,
3 the top hat became a favorite of the
English, known throughout the nineteenth
century for the finest craftsmanship. In this
painting, based on an actual shipboard visit,
Charles Eastlake records a Royal Marine
probably assigned to guarding Napoleon
on his voyage to St. Helena. The top hat
was replacing the bicornes and tricornes of
the old regime, announcing the rule of the
British seaborne empire.
FALL 2015

Art, a Higher Hat
My quest for the top hat began over 25
years ago, when Harvard Magazine
displayed a photograph of a magnificent
silk specimen, still worn by
a member of Harvard’s Honorable and Reverend
Board of Overseers, as a cover illustration for my
essay on headgear, “Talking through Our Hats.” I
had begun the piece by invoking this object, and
shortly thereafter, a
woman in Michigan,
wife of a Harvard
alumnus, offered to
send me a
silk hat from her attic. It arrived soon thereafter, in
its original box, with the label of a shop in Albany,
New York in 1846. I began to investigate its riddles.
How was the silk manufactured? What made
it so popular when it was often impractically high?
Some day I hope to organize an exhibition that will
at last do justice to this uncannily durable object.
Meanwhile, here is a preview of its spectacular
metamorphoses.
4
What would
Isambard Kingdom
Brunel, architect of
the colossal steamship
Great Eastern, and his
colleagues wear at her
launch in 1866 but the
high-crowned model
that contemporaries
compared to chimney
pots and factory
smokestacks?
23
BRUNEL
London’s first Metropolitan Police
5 also wore top hats and middleclass
frock coats. To early recruits,
uniforms still carried the demeaning
stigma of domestic servants’ liveries.
Photos provided

24
Perhaps because the
6 silk hats that were replacing
felt and fur models
by 1840 revealed the ability
to pay for special care and
could show off proper bearing,
they were as popular
among upper-class and bohemian
dandies as among
bourgeois professionals.
From the 1840s to the
1890s, not much changed
in the headgear and demeanor
of Count d’Orsay
(likely prototype of the New
Yorker’s fictitious mascot
Eustace Tilley) and of Count
Robert de Montesquiou
(said to be the model for
Marcel Proust’s Charlus).
D’ORSAY
Abe Lincoln
Top Hat
DE MONTESQUIOU
wikimedia.org
Rowdy young urban
7 tradesmen, immortalized
by the actor Frank Chanfrau in
Benjamin Baker’s hit comedy,
“A Glance at New York,” in
1848, parodied middle-class
Photos provided
costume. Here Mose the “Bowery B’hoy” wears his trademark “plug”
hat with studied swagger. The B’hoys’ Philadelphia counterparts were
called “The Killers.” One of them, in a poster of the same year, could
have been the later Abraham Lincoln’s evil twin.
BOOTH
wikimedia.org
FALL 2015

As the silk plush
9 covering decayed,
hats were sold down
market until even the
poorest – deserving
and otherwise –
could afford them, as
illustrated by William
Makepeace Thackeray’s
Book of Snobs (1848)
and an 1860 ambrotype
of a veteran of
the Peninsular Wars
Library of Congress; wikimedia.org and his wife.
Lincoln’s stovepipe hat is the most revered
8 headgear in American history; he appears
to have chosen it in part to look even taller, and
bought a new one from one of New York’s leading
hatters, Knox, for delivering the Gettysburg
Address. John Wilkes Booth’s hat, worn in one of
the carte de visite photographs that he distributed
to his many admirers at the peak of his career, was
the mark of an affluent and fashionable young
man: low-crowned beaver, always costliest of hat
furs. It was headgear with attitude. Lincoln once
owned a similar model and wore it at his first
inaugural address, but interestingly the only clear
engraving on the web of Lincoln and outgoing
President James Buchanan in their carriage shows
Lincoln bareheaded.
Victorian
Top Hat
25
LINCOLN
wikimedia.org

With the decline of the frock coat
10 and the morning coat in the 1870s
in favor of the “lounge suit” (our present
men’s suit) and the bowler, the silk hat came
to represent self-conscious formality and old
school ways, especially in England. An 1887
advertisement in the Century Illustrated Magazine
is typical of the new image.
Photo provided
26
Mid-Crown
Top Hat
A new negative stereotype of the top hat
11 was also emerging, as an emblem of plutocracy,
trusts and financial manipulation. In 1908, following
the panic that was to lead to the creation of
the Federal Reserve and a hundred years before the
Great Recession, the founder and chief cartoonist of
the satirical magazine Puck, Joseph Keppler, reflected
Wall Street’s reputation following the crisis.
Library of Congress
wikimedia.org
While mostly a ceremonial accessory rather
than everyday attire for the most of the
12
wealthy by 1900 or so, especially in the U.S., the
top hat became an indispensable signifier of capitalism
for progressive and socialist satirists. Soviet
poster artists loved to hate their top-hatted villains,
as in this image of “The Final Hour” from the Bolshevik
Revolution’s early years. Since John Bull and
Uncle Sam were traditionally drawn with top hats,
both Russian and Nazi propagandists reveled in the
synergy of stereotypes.
FALL 2015

The Associated Press
Despite or because of its prominence in
13 left-wing propaganda, and more gently in
the 1930s game Monopoly (worn by the dapper
Rich Uncle Pennybags), the top hat has never lost
its magic. John F. Kennedy may have declared in his
1961 inaugural address that “the torch has been
passed to a new generation of Americans – born in
this century ...,” but contrary to urban legend, he
wore a traditionalist silk hat to the ceremony, reversing
his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower’s choice
of a homburg (the talk of an already ailing hat
industry) in 1953 and 1957. Eisenhower and other
dignitaries followed Kennedy’s lead at the events.
Lyndon B. Johnson was the first president hatless at
a public inauguration four years later.
New York Public Library
TOP TOPPER
Hatter Max Fluegelman ran America’s
largest top hat plant from his operations on
6th Avenue in New York City. Commissioned
by the American corporation, H.J. Heinz,
Fluegelman created an enormous shiny silk
top hat to be featured as a visitor attraction in
the Heinz exhibit at the New York World’s Fair
in 1939. Measuring several feet high with a
7½-inch-wide brim and an 18-inch-diameter
crown, the immense top hat covered half a
human’s height if rested atop a person and
was large enough around to sit on four or
more men’s heads.
From Hats and Headwear Around the World:
A Cultural Encyclopedia, by Beverly Chico
Deadman
Top Hat
27
wikimedia.org
By the time the song “Frosty the Snowman” appeared in
14 1950, it was plausible to find an abandoned top hat that
miraculously animated the title character. But vintage models are no
longer discarded casually. It is now impossible to make a genuine
new silk hat; the special plush cloth, always costly to produce, has
not been manufactured for nearly 50 years. Since satin and other
substitutes cannot duplicate the original silk luster, which the French
call “eight reflections,” demand for wear on formal occasions far
exceeds supply. Restored used examples in today’s larger head sizes
can cost thousands of pounds. What Mary Wollstonecraft evidently
considered a radical gesture is still de rigeur, by personal command
of Queen Elizabeth II, in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.
n

Art
detox
Art meditation
Art
Health
clinic
Art
Army
28 Art Art and
Army Politics
Artist of
the month
Art
diet
plan
Art Army
Art
Army
Art
Dating
art of the day
portico
Celebrities
on art
Visual
prayer
circle
Art
Sentries
Art bishop’s garden
Art Temple
Client: Artenol
New York, NY
Plan View
Architect: A. Melamid
Fall 2015

Although it has no comics
collection, no comics department
and no comics curator,
the Museum of Modern Art
is absolutely full of comics. I
must stress that I do not refer
here to the museum’s few
anomalous holdings from the
history of “comics” proper.
Lyonel Feininger’s 1906 Kin-
Der-Kids newspaper comic
strips, for example, sit in storage
as part of a larger collection
including the Bauhaus
instructor’s paintings, prints
and drawings. The museum
is also strangely in possession
of two original Batman comic
strips from the 1960s, erroneously
attributed to Batman
co-creator Bob Kane and donated
to the museum by Kane
himself (presumably to burnish
his prestige as a kind of
Pop artist avant la lettre at the
height of actor Adam West’s
fame as the TV Batman). No,
the best comics in MoMA’s
collection are typically works
that exist outside of the disciplinary
orthodoxy of comics.
Scattered throughout multiple
areas in which the museum
specializes – drawing,
photography, printmaking,
painting, etc. – these works
perform the essential structural
operation of comics,
even if they’ve never been identified as such.
Comics in North America have frequently
been strongly identified with their most commercial
manifestations and with the now ostentatious
fan culture that has developed around
them. Even self-described comics scholars and
critics have often implicitly accepted and ratified
the self-proscribed boundaries of the discipline,
wherever those boundaries might stand
at any given moment. And yet the artists who
have moved comics forward at every stage —
Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware,
SUN &
MOON
COMICS
Uncovering MoMA’s
hidden narratives
By Bill Kartalopoulos
KIN-DER-KIDS One of the few examples
of conventional comic art in
MoMA’s collection. There are others, if
one knows where to look. Library of Congress
to name a few obvious examples
— have always understood
comics to be more
than a tradition, more than
an accumulated history, and
certainly more than a professional
field.
These artists and many
more have understood that
comics represent an elegant,
neutral formal approach
— like collage or assemblage
— that can incorporate
all manner of visual
styles, materials, approaches
and meanings into its
method. At the most basic
level, comics are nothing
more nor less than interrelated
images in sequence,
a conceptual practice that
has functioned without a
name for millennia, from
the cave walls of Lascaux
to the tombs of Egypt; from
narrative tapestries to the
pages of countless illuminated
manuscripts; from the
broadsheets and bilderbogen
that are the forgotten wallpaper
of early modern European
life to the celebrated
18th century print sequences
of William Hogarth, and
beyond. Comics may in fact
have been our first conceptual
art form, whose status
derives not from any material
medium or technology but from a core theoretical
strategy.
Sequence and composition
Comics have sometimes been described as
words and images, but that’s not entirely correct;
at the very least, it’s far too literal. The
comics medium rests upon a linear, syntactical,
language-like arrangement of images (regardless
of whether or not they contain language).
But comics begin to function most powerfully as
art when the global, compositional arrangement
INFECTIOUS
COMICOSIS

of these images produces an ultimate meaning
beyond the expository meaning apprehended
in a step-by-step reading. Great comics derive
their most profound meanings from the dynamic
between the linear, propulsive, expository, typographical,
industrial, Apollonian order of sequence
and the compositional, reflective, global,
pre-modern, Dionysian experience of overall
composition. Comics-as-art are, in other words,
the product of the interaction between the structures
that underlie text and image.
Seen in this light, comics are everywhere in
MoMA’s collection. Artistic works of sequence
BAY WATCH
“Untitled,” by
Jan Dibbets
and Shunk-
Kender, 1971
Photos: Shunk-Kender ©
J.Paul Getty Trust. The Getty
Research Institute, Los
Angeles. (2014.R.20) Gift
of the Roy Lichtenstein
Foundation
in memory
of Harry
Shunk
and
Janos
Kender
held by the museum include many wonderful
pieces by Jennifer Bartlett. These include her
“Drawing and Painting” (1974), which in its
very title, speaks to a dual status. This installation,
consisting of 78 12x12-inch carefully arranged
and painted steel plates, performs a dual
sequence. Arranged in a triangular grid, the
piece articulates, step-by-step, the drawing of a
line in its left-to-right procession, while demonstrating
the variation and application of color
and tone in its vertical dimension.
Peter Halley’s brightly colored 1992-1994 “Cell”
prints, depict, in various permutations, the stages
of a mysterious box-like building or object overheating
and exploding, all flowing from a germinal
1992 iteration simply titled (of course) “Narrative.”
Sol Lewitt’s 37-foot-long colorful abstract
comic strip, “Wall Drawing #1144, Broken Bands
of Color in Four Directions” (2004), is currently
on permanent view on one wall in the entrance to
the museum’s film theater. The sequential linearity
of Lewitt’s piece ushers the museum visitor
from the composition-oriented space of the main
galleries to the expositional world of cinema in
the building’s lower level.
Does this sound like a bit much? Here is Lewitt
talking to Saul Ostrow in a 2003 interview
for BOMB magazine:
Serial systems and their permutations
function as a narrative that has to be understood.
People still see things as visual objects
without understanding what they are. They
don’t understand that the visual part may
be boring but it’s the narrative that’s interesting.
It can be read as a story, just as music
can be heard as form in time. The narrative
of serial art works more like music than like
literature. Words are another thing.
FALL 2015

Sunset semiotics
These abstracted, poetic visual narratives are
everywhere in MoMA. In my most recent visit,
I was struck by two pieces in particular, both of
them photographic sequences. The first was part
of the temporary exhibit, “Art on Camera: Photographs
by Shunk-Kender, 1960–1971,” which
examines the collaborative photographic work
of Harry Shunk and János Kender. The bulk of
the exhibit features photographic documentation
of conceptual performance pieces from the 1960s
and ’70s. These include a presentation of the Pier
18 project first organized by artist and curator,
31 45
Willoughby Sharp, in 1971. Sharp invited a group
of 27 artists (including John Baldessari, Gordon
Matta-Clark, Michael Snow, Lawrence Weiner
and William Wegman) to produce performances
and conceptual works at the then-disused
Manhattan dock. These performances were all
photographically documented by Shunk-Kender.
Needless to say, many of these documents
of time-based physical performance pieces, arranged
as serial images, necessarily present as
photo-comics (as does the duo’s earlier collaboration
with Yves Klein, “Leap into the Void”).
There is much to visually read in this exhibit.
But the piece that drew me the most was
Shunk-Kender’s untitled collaboration with
Dutch artist Jan Dibbets. Unable to physically
participate in the Pier 18 performances, Dibbets
sent Shunk-Kender a note with instructions: He
asked the photographers to set up a camera at a
point on the pier from which the sunset would
be visible. He then provided instructions for
two specific sequences of photographs. The first
would produce a simulated sunset, progressively
darkening the sky using a series of f-stops that
limited the amount of light exposed to film over
the course of 12 images. The second series of images
recorded the actual sunset, the disc of the
sun visible and setting in 12 roughly parallel images.
The paired sets of images were hung in a
two-row grid, progressively going from light to
dark, with the simulation of each phase of sunset
above a consonant image of actual sunset.
The two rows of images present a fascinating
grid. The top row, with its manipulated light,
calls into question the illusory nature of apparently
diegetic sequence while affirming the viability
of a structural approach to sequence. This
recalls various structural comics, including experimental
early work by Spiegelman (such as

“Little Signs of Passion” and “Don’t Get Around
Much Anymore”) inspired by his contact with
filmmakers including Ken Jacobs and Stan Brakhage.
More globally, the two rows together can
be read horizontally as a sequence of vertically
paired images that underline the work’s investigation
into truth and illusion, maintaining a dynamic
balance between artifice and nature.
But the comics-trained eye finds a third reading.
Reading the first row in isolation, with its
apparition of false sunset, from light to dark, the
eye is drawn downward to the tonally connected
final image in the bottom row. The disc of the
and setting in the same westward sky. Where
Dibbets and Shunk-Kender artificially impose a
natural cycle onto a sequence, the second narrative
piece that caught my attention artificially
imposes sequence onto a natural cycle.
Necessary and arbitrary
“Lunar Alphabet II” by Argentine artist Leandro
Katz, is permanently on display in the museum’s
Painting and Sculpture gallery. Approximately
2.5 feet wide and 9 feet tall, the gelatin
silver print presents a 9x3 grid of images of the
moon in consecutive phases, each labeled with a
sun, invisible above except by implication, finally
becomes visible, and the iconic subject draws
the eye from right to left. Step by step, the sun
now rises and illuminates the sky, ending at the
left hand side of the bottom row with a bright,
washed out image nearly identical to that above
it, leading the eye upward again to repeat the
cycle. The two parallel sets of images prompt a
surprising circular reading order, evoking the
endless cycle of sunrise and sunset. But this image
of a celestial rotation is the artificial result of
a process, and quickly startles the mind with its
impossibility: the absurd image of a sun rising
letter of the alphabet, from A to Z (including the
Spanish diacritical Ñ for 27 characters).
Katz’s piece addresses the arbitrariness and the
necessity of both semiosis and sequence. Each
alphabetical character functions like a caption in
a comics panel, and its association with each assigned
phase of the moon is arbitrary, imposed
only by intentional juxtaposition. The harmonious
disjunction between text and image here
brought to mind the détourned comics of the Situationist
movement, which substituted political
texts in the word balloons of banal comic strips,
subverting social messages while pointing out
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semiotic fault lines in hybrid texts. The sequence
of moon images in this piece is both necessary
and also arbitrary; necessary because each subsequent
phase follows that which precedes it,
and arbitrary because the linear representation
of a cyclical pattern must choose beginnings and
its endings that have no correlation in nature.
Katz’s piece further highlights the arbitrariness
of the alphabet itself: the first contrived sequence
we ever learn, perhaps, and one with no inherent
meaning or pattern whatsoever. But it must
have an order, both as a mnemonic device and a
lingua franca. Further, its own order helplessly
resonates with the linearity
of language, in which words
build upon words to develop
new contextual meanings.
“Lunar Alphabet II” is wise
about sequence and text-image
hybridity, both core elements
of comics.
Secret art
For a comics critic, touring
the Museum of Modern Art
— or any art institution — is
a thrilling adventure. We are
not led by the hand, there are
no infantilizing departmental
divisions or didactic labels to
guide us. Our art is secretly
woven throughout the world
of art, and we see our comics
where we find them. But
there are as yet relatively few
comics artists and critics possessed
of such broad-minded
comics-consciousness (let alone art critics), and I
must confess that it gets a little lonely sometimes.
I insist that it is time for arts professionals and aficionados
to recognize sequence as a formal category
of art that cuts across all other categories.
Such a perspective will enlarge our concept of
comics, and will enrich the museum by formalizing
a critical dimension that helps us further
understand what some of our already-celebrated
great works of art are doing.
n
TIME TO GET
WHOOKID.
WHOOLYWOOD
WITH DJ WHOO KID SHUFFLE
ON SIRIUS SATELLITE RADIO
Saturdays Noon-5 PM
Sundays 11 AM-4 PM
justwhookid.com
PHASES Above right, “Lunar Alphabet II” by
Leandro Katz, 1978-79. leandrokatz.com photo

Beauty by the numbers
34
Aesthetics from a mathematician’s perspective
n IF YOU EVER chance upon a mathematician and strike up a conversation,
you might be surprised to find that a lot of us have a penchant
for describing certain work in mathematics, be it a concept, a theorem,
or a proof, as beautiful or aesthetically pleasing.
What do we mean by that? Most of the time,
when people talk about beauty, they are associating
that notion with arts: painting, sculpture,
music, poetry, photography, etc. So have
we mathematicians as a group hijacked these
words, “beauty,” “aesthetics,” and turned them
By Percy Wong into homonyms that have entirely different
meanings from their traditional
usages? I would like to make a humble effort
to answer this question in the negative. More
ambitiously, I want to show that what we call
“beauty” can be appreciated by someone with
very little formal training in mathematics, similar
to how one can enjoy a painting by Monet or
a mazurka by Chopin without ever having lifted
a paintbrush or laid a finger on the ivory keys of
a piano. While very few mathematicians, other
than the most vainglorious, would ever consider
themselves “artists,” our perception of what
is considered beautiful is perhaps less alien than
what it appears to be prima facie.
Symmetry
Not every single piece of artwork that displays
symmetry is considered a masterpiece;
conversely, not every single masterpiece needs
to display symmetry. However, it is undeniable
that there are artworks that derive their beauty,
at least partially, from the symmetry they display.
Similarly, not all theorems in mathematics
that show symmetry are considered beautiful,
but the history of progress in mathematics is
rife with examples of mathematical work that
possess symmetry and also turn out to be both
beautiful and influential. Let us look at one such
example: the Fourier transform.
Imagine a sound, say the concert pitch of A,
which is a pure waveform of 440 Hz. This can
be represented graphically as a sound wave:
Fig. 1: A440
Amplitude
1.0
0.5
0.0
-0.5
-1.0
-0.1 -0.05 0.00 0.05 0.1
Time
The reason it is called A440 is because in one
second there are 440 periods (cycles) of this
wave. Analogously, a different pitch, say middle
C (261.6 Hz), will have a different waveform,
and will be represented graphically as:
Fig. 2: Middle C
Amplitude
1.0
0.5
0.0
-0.5
-1.0
-0.1 -0.05 0.00 0.05 0.1
Time
There will be 261.6 periods in one second. The
Fourier transform, in the simplest sense, is a
way of summarizing the frequency information,
i.e., the numbers 440 and 261.6, in the examples
above. More precisely, the defining feature of the
graph in Fig. 1 is that there are 440 cycles in one
second, and the Fourier transform of the wave
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will summarize succinctly the information as:
Fig. 3: Fourier transform of A440
Amplitude
(The fact that there are both negative and positive
frequencies is a technical detail that the
reader can ignore for now.) Similarly, the Fourier
transform of middle C looks like:
Fig. 4: Fourier transform of Middle C
Amplitude
Frequency
We can now ask this question: What if we have
a sound that has the following waveform in time:
Fig. 5: Wave form of 2 blips
Amplitude
What does its Fourier transform look like?
Given the theme of this section, perhaps the
reader can already guess the answer:
Fig. 6: Fourier transform of 2 blips
Amplitude
. .
1.2
1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0
-600 -400 -200 0 200 400 600
Frequency
. .
1.2
1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0
-600 -400 -200 0 200 400 600
. .
1.2
1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0
-600 -400 -200 0 200 400 600
Time
1.0
0.5
0.0
-0.5
-1.0
-0.1 -0.05 0.00 0.05 0.1
Frequency
In other words, there is a symmetry between
the representation in time and the representation
in frequency. Moreover, the reader can rest
assured that I did not cherry-pick the one case
that works. This symmetry extends to functions
that are not a single frequency wave. In the case
of the Fourier transform, the theory has power
beyond being a mere simple pretty mathematical
curiosity: It is in fact a very important tool in
modern mathematics.
Elements of surprise
The best jazz musicians are partly defined by
their prowess in improvisation. A delightful improvisation
is in turn often characterized by the
element of surprise: The spontaneous construction
of a melodic line that is at once unexpected
and logical.
It is fair to say that the same is true in mathematics.
One sure-fire way to capture one’s fellow
mathematicians’ attention is to present a correct
yet totally unexpected result (note the order of
adjectives: correctness and rigour always come
first). Unexpected compared to what, one might
ask. Unexpected as measured vis-à-vis the general
consensus among mathematicians, would
be the answer. Very often, there is a consensus
about how likely a certain statement is true or
false, even though neither a proof nor a counter-example
has been produced. An unexpected
statement would be one that defies the common
wisdom. Obviously, expectation changes over
time and is adjusted with each new discovery.
Statements that were considered surprising in
the 19th century will be treated now in a matterof-fact
manner. Still, we can look at an example
that most mathematics students find surprising
when they first learned about it.
In the following, we shall not give the precise
statement nor proof of the Banach-Tarski “paradox,”
but shall merely state it in layman’s terms.
Double the fun
The Banach-Tarski paradox states that one can
take an orange (or bowling ball) and break it
into a finite number of small pieces. From these
small pieces, one can reconstruct two oranges
(or bowling balls), each of which is identical to
the original orange (bowling ball).
Before the reader tries this at home, inevitably
35

36
fails, and writes me a letter calling me a fraud,
let me clarify that the “pieces” are unions of infinitely
many infinitesimal “atoms,” and not at
all like intuitive contiguous “pieces.” Nonetheless,
I hope the reader will find this true mathematical
statement as unintuitive as I did (and
still do!), and can appreciate the beauty in having
a surprise popped out of nowhere.
Before we continue our journey, let me offer
the reader a joke (with limited opportunities for
use):
Q: What is an anagram of Banach-Tarski?
A: Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski.
Ingenuity and Simplicity
The late, great Hungarian mathematician Paul
ErdÖs once said that God keeps a book that contains
the best proof of theorems,
and though one does not necessarily
have to believe in the existence
of God, one should believe
in the existence of the book. What
does he mean by “best”? While
different mathematicians might
give different answers, it is generally
agreed that in most cases,
simpler is better. More often than
not, simplicity goes hand in hand with ingenuity,
because it usually takes a unique insight to
transcend a maze to find the beeline from point
A to point B, and finding the route from point A
to point B is what constitutes a proof. Furthermore,
a simple, clever proof will almost always
be considered beautiful by mathematicians.
I hope that the reader will bear with me for the
moment and dust out the old calculus textbook
to prepare for a beautiful and original proof by
Euler of the following statement:
While different mathematicians
might give
different answers, it
is generally agreed
upon that in most cases,
simpler is better.
Theorem:
I would also like to urge the more ambitious
readers to try their hands at proving the above
theorem before reading on. All one needs is a
basic command of first-year university calculus
to prove the statement.
When one faces the task of proving an equality,
A = B, the natural instinct is always to start
with one end, say A, and slowly work one’s
way towards B. That would be akin to how one
builds a bridge. The beauty of the proof detailed
below is that it is analogous to starting to build
a bridge in the middle of a river, and work from
there towards both ends.
Proof: The idea is to evaluate the double integral:
in two different ways. One way will yield the
left hand side of the theorem and the other
will yield .
On the one hand, can be written as ,
therefore
On the other hand, we can make the substitution
. The integral then becomes:
Writing ,
the last line above is equal to
Daunting endeavors
There are artworks that are admired not only
because they are beautiful, but also because
the scope and ambition in creating such pieces
represent a feat of strength and a celebration of
human ability. Two examples that immediately
come to mind are Michelangelo’s frescos in the
Sistine Chapel and Gaudi’s “Sagrada Familia.”
In mathematics, there were similar endeavours.
However, collaborations among mathematicians
are prevalent and these feats of strength
are rarely accomplished by a single person. Let
me relate one such instance: the proof of Fermat’s
last theorem by Andrew Wiles and his
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collaborators, many of them his students or former
students at the time of the publication of
the proof.
Fermat’s last theorem states that the equation
admits no non-zero integer solution for any natural
number n greater than or equal to 3.
The theorem has a storied history. Pierre
de Fermat, born in 1601, wrote down the theorem
and claimed to have a proof. He said
he couldn’t write it down because there
wasn’t enough space on the margin
of the paper on which he was writing.
The proof, as it turns out,
eluded the brightest mathematical
minds for over 300 years.
Moreover, Wiles’ proof utilizes
modern concepts and techniques,
many of which are unavailable
to Fermat. The reader
is welcome to draw any conclusion
to his or her liking.
Andrew Wiles spent seven
years of his life working on the
proof and many of his students
at that time (Richard Taylor, Brian
Conrad, etc.) contributed to
its solution. After the proof was
announced, a gap was found in
the argument. This is one of the worst nightmares
for a mathematician: to find a flaw in
the argument of one’s work, let alone a piece
of work that has taken years to bring to fruition.
Just imagine the horror if, after 100 years
of construction, it is found that the “Sagrada
Familia” is structurally flawed and poses a
danger to any person entering its storied basilica!
Fortunately, Wiles was able to fix the gap
and publish the complete proof a year after the
flaw was found. This is one of the most celebrated
achievements (if not the most) in mathematics
in the 20th century.
I hope the reader has enjoyed this brief journey
as much as I have. If I have convinced a few
of you that there is such a thing as beauty in
mathematics and that our concept of beauty is
not so far afield from the common conception
– and can even be appreciated by someone outside
of the profession – then I have achieved my
objective.
n
Pierre de Fermat was fluent
in French, Latin, Italian, Spanish,
classical Greek and Occitan. He also
wrote verse in several languages.
37

What
is beauty...
38
THERE IS A PHOTO OF ME
in front of a glittery Christmas tree
with sundry boxes wrapped in silver
polka dots and candy-cane stripes.
Me with red lips from a cherry sucker,
shirtless, decked out in a red cowboy
hat and embroidered jeans, my hair
parted into a mini ponytail on top of
my head – a style I rocked with every
single day, a style only my mom could
comb. Like a real country singer,
I loosely held a pretend guitar.
I believed, at age four, my red
ukulele was strummed beauty.
By Kelsy Yates
... and why it’s Chopin
It was my first instrument. Though it was a
passing fancy, I gleefully slapped the ukulele’s
body, thudding the wood and swiping the
strings, as I followed our terrified cat around the
house. I would flatten my hand over the carved
sound hole to muffle the vibrations, choking
them, fascinated by the contrast between cacophony
and deadened sound.
The following Christmas I asked Santa for a
harp − a real pedal harp that I imagined hugging,
seated on a whittled wooden bench, noodling
notes, fingering the cold wire strings until
they warmed. I saw myself dressed in white
shorts and a white Hanes T-shirt – an imagined
outfit that pushed the boundaries of my feeling
too “girly.” I failed to define “harp,” however,
and Santa brought me a red mandolin. In hindsight,
considering his red suit, sleigh and sack,
I suppose Santa’s favorite color was red. After
tinkering with the mandolin, I eventually grew
bored and asked for a cream-colored plastic recorder.
My first-grade class was learning the art
of pressing lips to smooth tapered mouthpieces
and blowing into hollow tubes – an action that
produced more spittle than melody. Though we
did memorize a few notes which we strung together
in some semblance of a song, the effort
reminded me more of a clunky tugboat whistle.
The recorder closely resembled nunchucks,
and I sometimes used it as a weapon against my
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younger brother when he failed to follow my
ever-changing rules as we played among the
cornrows and marigolds in the garden.
Whether I was practicing marital arts or inventing
discordant lullabies for my newborn
sister, the recorder was just another attempt to
assuage some part of myself that longed to be
expressed through sound, some creative void
needing to be filled, some desire for beauty that
had yet to be revealed. At six, I was just beginning
to understand myself based on the life I
shared with my family and community. But I
was also becoming aware of another reality, an
emotional and mysterious one, immeasurable
and beyond my five senses. In Best Words, Best
Order, author Stephen Dobyns writes:
... we can define this other world only
with a range of possibility. At one extreme
is the place where God exists, all sorts of
gods, spirits, magic and mysterious forces.
At the other is the place where beauty
exists and love is possible, where the objects
of the literal world are seen through
an element of emotion.
He goes on to say:
... in experiencing beauty ... we think of
ourselves as most human. Because while
we take our physical definition from
common reality, we derive our spiritual
definition from this other world, and we
take our sense of self-worth mostly from
this spiritual definition.
Perhaps my creative scrums made me feel
more human. When I got a brown upright piano
from Santa the following year (I should
have specified a black-lacquered baby grand,
since Santa’s taste was not quite my own), I
knew I had found my instrument. The buttery
sound and warm tonal quality fit into how I
was starting to understand beauty. I loved the
smooth plastic keys, and though I didn’t know
it at the time, I liked the way two hands could
work together in different patterns, inhabiting
two harmonic worlds. I liked the complicated
modulations from minor to major keys, the right
hand perhaps moving chromatically while the
left hand worked diatonically, utilizing both the
dominate and the tonic, respectively, to provide
a foundation for the otherwise colorful thematic
shifts between various degrees of the scale, all of
which express something beautiful, inspirational,
and melancholic.
Because I was spatially gifted, crayoning 3-D
perspectives on paper napkins while waiting for
green chili burritos with my family at restaurants,
beauty also meant drawing. I was attracted
to dimensionality, though at the age of seven,
39

40
When I practiced, I
didn’t worry about
not having enough
friends. I didn’t wish
to be someone else –
smarter, older, taller,
prettier, thinner,
cooler, better.
I didn’t understand music for its dimensional
components, with its vertical phenomenon of
intersecting harmonies and its horizontal latticework
of independently zigzagging notes, each
on its own trajectory to create chords, melodies,
counterpoints and rhythms. Now I see how my
proclivity for drawing naturally paralleled my
interest in music, in the piano, and, ultimately,
in Chopin. But I didn’t start with Chopin.
My first piano teacher was an older woman
who taught me scales, chords and basic songs
like “Old MacDonald,” “Silent Night” and
“Skip to My Lou.” The music had notes printed
in large black dots on white sheet music that
reminded me of my kindergarten
books: “Can he see? See, he can.”
The beginner series was baby blue,
and as I advanced, the various colors
indicated my progress, changing
from green, yellow, orange
and eventually to red. The red series,
with its complex, mysterious
compositions, fascinated me, and
I’d flip through the pages, trying
to decipher the densely-written
notes that looked like scurrying
ants. They made me long to be
done with the other colors. Perhaps an equation
could be formed: Red = Santa = Music = Red =
Mystery.
I reached the elevated red status as a pianist
by age eleven. My piano teacher lived with her
adult daughter, and while I had lessons with
the mother, my brother took lessons with the
daughter. Though he later gave up piano and
took up the squeaky violin, my brother eventually
renounced music for computer programming
and code. But back then he and I were musicians,
though we never played a duet unless it
was “Heart and Soul,” which I’d learned how to
doctor with bluesy overtones.
I never liked going to my piano teacher’s
house, located just outside of Santa Fe. The air
smelled like boiled green beans. One piano was
in the living room, the other in the bedroom,
and both were covered with doilies. My stomach
always cramped before my lesson, maybe
because I was hungry or bloated on grapes, or
was unprepared, or the waist of my jeans was
too tight, or because the dusty, stale scent of the
furniture troubled me. But I remained dedicated
to the piano and later, at home, when I practiced
“Maple Leaf Rag” or “Memory,” I found the process
meditative and calming. When I practiced, I
didn’t worry about not having enough friends.
I didn’t wish to be someone else – smarter, older,
taller, prettier, thinner, cooler, better. I forgot
about the boy who, through gossip, had said he
wanted to “hump” me. Music, in all its encompassing
beauty, hijacked my thoughts and redirected
my feelings into a positive lane.
Then, somewhere around the 7th grade,
my musical trajectory changed. My parents attended
a silent auction and bid on three private
lessons with a Polish concert pianist. They won.
Enter Marcin Borowski, a Polish Impressionist
art collector and Italian real estate investor
− a man who once had an affair with a famous
young ice skater and who, after the break up,
I tried to set up with my babysitter by playing
a game of Sardines and pairing them together.
Instead of going to his house, he came to ours.
Marcin (I’ve changed his name) taught me Chopin
− how to feel the music, how to squeeze
emotion out of each note, how to play the keys
like a string of pearls or fluttering leaves, articulate,
light and clear. When he played, he closed
his eyes, flopped his head toward his hands as
if to smell his knuckles, and let his black hair
sweep the keys like Don Music, the Muppet
from “Sesame Street.” With a curved back and
jutting elbows, Marcin’s hands made impossible
leaps, spanning octaves with oscillating fingers.
Each week during my lesson, Marcin would
either flamenco dance or pace the living room
where he examined the bookshelves, occasionally
stopping to yell when I slipped, playing too
loudly in a section clearly marked diminuendo,
or too sloppily on a trill, or too plainly and
devoid of emotion. While I played, my sister
sang to her dolls under the dining room table
and my mother sweated onions in the kitchen,
making curry or Bolognese or some other recipe
she learned in cooking class. Sometimes Marcin
stayed for dinner and a gin and tonic, and
afterward, sat with my brother and taught him
computer code.
Then, finally, I got my wish. Marcin convinced
my parents I was a worthy pupil in need
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BABY GRAND The author, as a toddler, working on her
scales. Courtesy of Kelsy Yates
of a proper piano, encouraging them to invest in
a certain black-lacquer baby grand, one of three
Steinways coming to the U.S. from an estate sale
in Germany. The piano, with its glossy body,
firmly resistant keys and sleek lid that when
propped revealed a brassy interior, had a profound
bass that reverberated in my chest and
a ringing treble that titillated my ears. Playing
this piano was like riding a black stallion or flying
on a magic carpet, or so I thought. Every little
move was manifested with such ease, clarity
and control. This was a completely different experience,
one where I sometimes felt detached
from my fingers with the music taking on a life
of its own, moving quicker than I could possibly
think. My father, an architect, had designed our
house, and the Steinway stood in an open space
lit by tall windows framed by a turquoise plaster
ceiling and dark-turquoise walls. My parents
began to take piano lessons from Marcin, too.
Both of them mostly play Mozart.
So, what is beauty? How, at a young age,
was I able to filter sounds for their beauty?
When Marcin played Bach, I felt indifferent and
bored, as all I heard was mathematics and order.
With Beethoven, I questioned the piece for its romance
and drama, possibly detecting the grand
architecture of the compositions, the orchestral
quality of the music. Mozart’s music I found to
be too happy, pristine, too light and delicate.
Even in minor keys, his pieces felt upbeat.
While I’ve played all these composers and
have been moved by entering their worlds,
with Chopin it has always been different. Chopin
made my heart ache. His music went to my
core. I want to say it’s because of some sadness
in his life that subconsciously embedded itself
into his music. Maybe I was drawn to his use of
minor keys. But my current piano teacher, Seb,
debunked these theories, first stating that Chopin
was not a tortured soul, and secondly saying
all composers use minor keys. He went on to
explain how the minor is not inherently sad but
is registered as a phonological disturbance, an
interference of two frequencies. The major third
and minor third create overtones within the
harmonic series, and we tend to associate disturbing
sound with troubled feelings. Music is a
sense, he said. Minor tones are relative, depending
on what came before them. Moving from
a bright place to a less bright place, while still
in major chords, might give the impression of
shifting to a minor chord. Tone is color, movements
go from light to dark.
I asked if one could assign a color to Chopin’s
body of work. Blue-gray? Aquamarine? Ochre
yellow? Burnt umber? Seb didn’t know. Instead,
he suggested I might be drawn to Chopin’s improvisational
quality, his free, loose rhythm, the
slight disorder of eleven semi-aligning, quick
notes in the right hand to three steady notes in
the left hand. In his Norton lectures, Leonard
Bernstein compares music to linguistics and discusses
the ambiguity found in Chopin’s work,
a signature of the Romantic period. Musicians,
he said, proclaimed new freedoms by inventing
rules and concepts that broke away from
the rigid constructs of diatonicism
and shifted towards chromaticism,
an order that employed a vastly
enriched palette and yielded greater
expressivity. At the heart of this
movement lay the artists’ passions.
When listening to Chopin’s “Étude
25 Op. No. 6,” for example, there is
implied harmonic beauty that arises
out of intentional ambiguity. It
is difficult to decipher the piece’s
See a video of Ivo
Pogorelich performing
Frédéric Chopin’s
“Étude 25 Op. No. 6”
at artenol.org.
41

42
primary key, leaving us unsure if it is major or
minor, tonal or modal, unable to say if it begins
on a downbeat or upbeat. We are left hovering
in uncertainty, though musical meaning is still
communicated through a combination of phonological
and syntactical transformations.
While listening to Bernstein’s lectures, I realized
the limitations of my own musical background,
as I primarily played Classical compositions
by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. In my
adult life, I’ve come to love Wagner, Schumann
and Schubert – Chopin’s contemporaries – all of
whom are more chromatic than their Classical
predecessors. While chromaticism is partly what
drew me to Chopin, chromaticism is not why I
love Chopin. There is something more. Something
mysterious, a deeper reason as to why I still
prefer his work to any other Romantic composer.
When I consider my subjective impressions of
each Classical composer, I see how I’ve bent my
ideas around their music to relate to myself. I
am not mathematical. I can barely add double
digits. Auf wiedersehen, Bach. I do not like drama
or romance. I never wore dresses. Bis wieder,
Beethoven. In interior design school, my models
were sloppy, wilting, held together with tape
and glue. I cannot cut or sew in a straight line.
Gute nacht, Mozart.
But I am attracted to improvisation, to muted
disorder, to the grey shades of ambiguous interpretation.
I always seek to understand both
sides of an argument, and my own personal decisions
tend to bristle and sideslip against the
norm. I like the wild, impulsive sides of people,
particularly in men. I understand more about
myself now. I am attracted to anything I believe
is hiding sadness. If yours is a tragic story, we
could be friends, at least for a night over a glass
of Grüner. Whether Chopin was a tortured soul,
or lived with his wife and kids in a white-slat
house with a dog named “Miejsce,” I heard his
music and heard sadness, heard a version of
myself. By age twelve, I was already an anxious
kid who had trouble falling asleep. By college,
I would have insomnia. Chopin spoke to my
restless spirit, my desire to be from myself, and
from my worrisome, existential feelings.
Does the idea of beauty, then, come from
within, commingling as it emerges with our
Beauty can also go beyond order, expansiveness,
achievement and awe-inspiring
moments to encompass the mysterious,
the terrible and unexpected, the base.
memories and experiences? Is what we find
beautiful simply based on the narratives we tell
ourselves about ourselves, a developed aesthetic
that connects to our deeper identities? According
to Thomas Coleridge, the English poet, literary
critic and philosopher, the answer is yes. He
said as much in “Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal
to His Genius”:
The organic form … is innate; it shapes,
as it develops, itself from within, and the
fullness of its development is one and the
same with perfection of its outward form.
Such as the life is, such is the form.
I believe beauty to be an organic form. And
while beauty is a universal notion, expressed
through a myriad of categories – creativity, athleticism,
fashion, the great outdoors, symmetry,
good teeth, a desire to love and a willingness
to be hurt, human perseverance and survival –
our specific ideas of beauty, of who and what is
beautiful and why, might just be coded within
us. Beauty can also go beyond order, expansiveness,
achievement and awe-inspiring moments
to encompass the mysterious, the terrible and
unexpected, the base. Dobyns says, “For art to
be successful and beauty to be approached, it
has to be created out of one’s totality – the light
and dark parts, with nothing held back.” This
is what I find in Chopin’s work: a totality, a
wholeness, music that when listened to makes
me feel complete. My darker moods drift from
the shadows, unrepressed, and are allowed
to linger next to my lighter, happier feelings,
thereby lessening, albeit momentarily, the polarity
between light and dark.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky
writes, “Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It
is terrible because it has not been fathomed and
never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing
but riddles. Here, the boundaries meet and all
contradictions exist side by side ...”
Beauty exists somewhere in the context of
FALL 2015

perceived dualism, light and dark, sad and happy,
love and hate, objective and subjective. I say
“perceived” because binary elements are two
sides of the same coin, existing together, dependent
on one another. Beauty is an objective moment
that aligns with our subjective emotions,
allowing us to compare that moment with everything
else we have experienced. Within that
comparison we find contrasting ideas at odds
with our own, helping us identify “the other.”
We gain a less abstract understanding of someone
else’s experience, and the result is a deepening
of our own comprehension of ourselves. It is
by understanding the other that we understand
what we aren’t, and therefore begin to understand
what we are.
If beauty is a moment of self-recognition, art is
the mirror we hold up in order to see our beautiful
reflection. Art and beauty connect us by
transcending the illusion of binaries to create a
sensory whole. According to Dobyns, “We are at
our worst in isolation; we lose our capacity for
objective measure and drift toward solipsism.
As journalism confirms our existence in the literal
world, so does art confirm our existence in
this other world ...” He goes on to say that art
“takes us out of our isolation by challenging our
complacency” − complacency being “spiritual
solipsism, physical stasis and emotional vacancy”
− and “ideally will lead us to reconsider the
terms of our lives and to resume our roles in the
greater community.”
When thinking of my childhood and my
relationship to Chopin, I realize I lingered in
spiritual solipsism, isolated in my feelings,
unable to communicate why I was anxious. I
was only aware that I did not feel “normal” or
“smart.” Music, with its immediate assuaging
effect, lifted me above myself, connecting me to
a larger community, making me feel less alone.
Einstein says, “The most beautiful thing we
can experience is the mysterious.” I should
thank my parents for giving me a belief in the
unknown, for loving me and for allowing me
to have a childhood graced by, among other
things, the magical spirit of Santa. At the time
I wished to break free, uncomfortable with innocence,
bothered by the static in my mind. But
those days too were beautiful, even if I was impelled
to ask my parents nightly for a topic to
think about before bed. Dolphins. Mermaids.
Grazing lambs. Once, on a fishing trip with
my dad and his friend, I went into their shared
room and stood barefoot, dressed in flannel
pants and my dad’s worn shirt, observing the
plaid curtains and spackled ceiling with gold
flecks. I asked for a topic, and his friend glanced
over his heavy book, lowered his glasses, and
said, “Kid, when you’re my age, you’ll wish you
had nothing to think about.”
I thought life would be easier when I grew
up, though now I see that no matter where I am
or how old I get, I’ll always have plenty of unresolved
issues. Just when I think I understand
myself, life rotates, sending me off kilter, like
the last two notes of Chopin’s “Nocturne in
D-flat Major,” the ones that slightly disrupt the
cohesion of the composition. Those two notes
punctuate life’s turmoil, reflecting human experience
in undercutting the notion that something
can be made beautiful and complete. I
may still be attracted to disorder, still trying to
find center and to accept myself just as I am.
I will always be drawn to the complex, layered
and melancholic pockets of people’s lives,
seeking undertones of sadness in others in
order to understand myself. And though I no
longer have insomnia, when I still find myself
unsettled, uncomfortable with the hummingbird
nervousness of distractions from myself
– running too far, drinking too much, working
too obsessively – I can always
return to Chopin. The music
is my tonic, a familiar
pattern and sound that
remind me that frenzied
energy can be
reordered to have a
calming, beautiful
effect. n
43

Project
BATTERY
POWERED
HAIRY
ARTICULUM
The
answer
machine
METER READER
The “Platometer”
allows users to check
their aesthetic experiences.
By pointing the
device in the direction of
an object or event and pressing
first one button and then
a second, the user is given a
“true” or “false” appraisal.
Build a handheld device for validating works of art
Have you ever wondered about
the quality of your aesthetic
judgments? Have you ever felt
just the slightest twinge that
your enjoyment of a painting,
a line of poetry, a piece of music or a film’s
mise-en-scene was, well, superficial at best and,
at worst, self-indulgent? Could it be the elaborate
performance piece you saw last week
at PS1 had, in reality, no more artistic merit
than a gaudy sunset snapshot posted on some
happy vacationer’s Facebook page?
Worry no more. Artenol’s technical staff
has, after much testing and experimentation,
developed a compact device that can easily
determine the validity of aesthetic judgments.
With the simple press of a button, any art
enthusiast can receive a scientifically derived
evaluation of whatever aesthetic event or moment
presents itself.
Artenol is pleased to make this remarkable
new device available to its many readers, as
well as to artists and professional critics. Using
materials readily available in most crafts and
electronics stores, anyone can now build a
personal version of Artenol’s “Platometer.”
The days of aesthetic uncertainty have, at
long last, come to welcome end.
n
FALL 2015

GOING NORMATIVE
Creating a statistical norm
for authentic aesthetic experience
is easy once a user
becomes familiar with the
Platometer’s function. Use
the device to evaluate various
aspects of an artistic encounter,
then record the results
and tabulate those records to
establish an Aesthetic Experience
Pattern (AEP). The AEP
can then be used as a guide
for further experiences.
n Experience 1 | “The Starry Night,” Vincent van Gogh
Colors............ False Line............... False Lighting.......... True
Composition... True Presentation.... True Sujbect .......... True
n Experience 2 | “Photo Booth Self Portrait,” Andy Warhol
Colors............. True
Composition... True
Line............... False
Presentation.... True
Lighting.......... True
Subject ......... False
n Experience 3 | “Braids,” Andrew Wyeth
Colors............ False Line................ True Lighting.......... True
Composition... False Presentation.... True Subject ......... False
AEP Conclusions: When tabulated, the Platometer readings in
these three examples suggest that the viewer should seek out
paintings with muted colors, strong presentations, subtle lines
and bright, focused lighting for maximum aesthetic enjoyment.
Exploded view
45
Cover
Buttons
Battery
Platometer
facing
Circuit
board
A little spare time and a few simple tools are all that is needed
to create a Platometer. This version was built in a picture frame.
PLATOMETER CIRCUIT DIAGRAM
1K
2.2K
1 7805 3 +5
2
9V
+5 +5 +5 +5 +5 +5
7
NE 555
74LS74
2
2
6
1
5
3
1
.1K .01K
4
3
4 13 10
6 5 12 8
Switch
470Ω
74LS74
11
Adhesive pads
9
2.2K
2.2K
2.2K
330
LED
+5
3904
3904
3904
LED
Frame box
PARTS LIST
Resistors
1K 1
2.2K 4
.1K 1
.01K 1
330 1
470Ω 1
Transistors
3904 3
Chips
74LS74 2
NE555 1
LEDS 2

PAIN?
FIND RELIEF THROUGH
THE ART OF HEALING
THE HEALING POWER OF ART
The modern Science of Aesthetics offers a powerful new tool to cure
a host of physical and mental afflictions, aches and pains. After only a
few simple, easy treatments, patients can be pain-free. Therapeutic
application of time-proven art masterpieces by trained aestheticians can
give these clinically-proven results:
• Back Pain Relief: “The
Scream” by Edvard Munch
• Ear Infections: “Self-portrait”
by Vincent Van Gogh
• Chest Pain Relief: “St. Sebastian”
by Giovanni Bellini
• Sexual Dysfunction: “Venus of
Urbino” by Titian
EXCITING NEW TREATMENTS!
IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION
Patients should discontinue Art Healing if they:
• Experience shortness of breath
• Develop color spectrum sensitivity
• Undergo an irresistible urge to open a gallery
arthealingministry.net
ART HEALING MINISTRY
TM

ONE YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A
Non-conceptualist
Sorry for my breaking English.
I am an unwanted
Russian artist. Maybe I
am “the” unwanted Russian
artist. It is difficult
for a (the) Russian like me to know
whether I am “an artist” or “the
artist.” There is no choice between
definite and indefinite articles
in Russian, because there are no
articles. In Russia everything is indefinite,
but there is still no choice.
This is why I decided to emigrate
from Russia a year ago. Everyone
says in Russia that if you are either
“the” or “an” artist, you should
live in London. But in London,
every artist says that there are too
many artists in London.
My Polish employer says I
shouldn’t listen to all this nonsense: It’s good
for London to have many artists. Too many
artists are maybe not very good for art, he says,
but they are very good for estate agents and
pro-petty developers. He is a pro-petty developer
himself. Some estate agents actually pay artists
to go to very ugly and poor areas of London
where everything is ugly and cheap and there
is no underground transport. They occupy old
ugly buildings and open big beautiful studios in
them. They find ugly derelict houses and they
sit squatting in them.
Their music friends join them and play music
in pubs and bars, so ugly pubs become full of
beautiful customers drinking vodka and dancing,
cocktail bars and cafes open to serve them
vegetarian bacon and organic marijuana with a
tequila sunrise every morning. Then transgender
multiculturalists and poly-amorous metro-men
create exotic clubs and fancy restaurants are
opened every day and night, everything becomes
jolly and gay from dusk till dawn.
By Zinovy Zinik
Drawings by Andro Semeiko
Story
This gradually makes rich,
swinging people – city wizards
from the bonking system and corporate
executioners – want to live
in an (the) artistic neighbourhood
with a lot of sex, drugs and rocking
Rolls-Royces, because they
don’t have time for art, so they
want to live next to it, rubbing
shoulders with art without getting
bored of it. Then the pro-petty
developers move in, buy ugly
derelict houses, do them up and
sell them to corporate wizards
with 100-percent housing benefits.
That’s what happened here
in Shoreditch and Hoxton. Prices
are sky-high here. Artists are good
for business, my Polish employer
says. That’s how he made his fortune
– by employing illegal immigrants like me.
When asked where you are from, I don’t say
I am Russian. I am not sure, am I “a Russian”
or “the Russian”? Sometimes I wish I could
drop definite and indefinite articles altogether.
England is a free country, let English people put
in any article they like. Just in case, I say I am
Polish. (I never heard anyone Polish say “I am a
Polish.”) Also, British people know who the Polish
people are, so they don’t ask more questions
and don’t think of me as an (the) oligarch. I am
oligarch inside, my soul is very rich, my heart
is big and my God is great, but British people
don’t know it, because they judge everything
with no inside knowledge. The Polish developer
is not British and he knows that I am not Polish
but Russian. He knows I am not oligarch.
I thought I would call myself Polish because I
came to this country via Poland in a truck loaded
with cardboard boxes. They had the strange
shape of a 3-dimensional triangle. I was underneath
these boxes. I paid a lot of money for
47

COUNCIL
BLOCK
48
this place underneath triangles. I didn’t know
what was in these big cardboard boxes – maybe
mousetraps or handcuffs or barbed wire. They
produce a lot of traps and handcuffs and barbed
wire in Eastern Europe, for use in Western European
prisons or for sex and dancing. Or maybe
they were pieces of avant-garde art from Eastern
Europe. They were big enough to hide underneath
in the truck and then on the ferry from
Holland, but they were very uncomfortable. On
the (a) English shore, I, along with other illegals,
was met by pro-petty developers, who took us
to London to renovate old ugly houses and to
build new ones for the rich, famous and beautiful
who want to live next to ugly art.
It is difficult to be in London during the
winter. Outside it is warmer than in Russia.
But inside, a Russian can perish from the cold
because the English don’t very often stimulate
their central hitting in their houses. My point
of you is that you Western peoples don’t care
about what is inside the soul of the (a) man,
while Eastern peoples like me are for inner freedom
and warmth. I started living my London
life in a “bedsit” where I had an old coin-operator
to stimulate hitting inside. You need to have
enough 50-pence coins in your pocket not to die
of cold there. The temperature is not as freezing
as in Russia, but the cold and the northeast wind
gets inside your bones − it settles in there like a
squatter and never goes out.
My Polish developer buys cheap 1970s council
blocks and redevelops them into modern luxury
apartments. These blocks have old rubbish
chutes that look like crematorium chimneys.
My boss says we have to restore these chutes,
because his future buyers like houses with the
original features.
“In fact, these rich bastards like to have
rubbish chutes in their apartments so they can
throw pieces of conceptual art into the chute,”
he says. “There is too much conceptual art on
the market, so they buy it cheap one day and
the next day they want to throw it away to buy
more. But they don’t want to look like barbarians,
throwing this rubbish art into rubbish
bins for everyone to see. And so they want their
private rubbish chutes at home – to throw away
unwanted conceptual art without anyone to see
what they are doing.”
To rebuild the rubbish chute is not a simple
business. You have to remove the old rubbish
that has become like a hard rock at the bottom of
the chute. You have to work hard with the spade
or mattock and scraper to get rid of rocky piles
of rubbish before the chute can be rebuilt. I feel
FALL 2015

cold and miserable. But I clench my teeth and
keep on working together with other Romanians,
Poles and Ukrainians. In these moments
of despair I always remember my grandfather
on a building site in Siberia. He was arrested for
stealing cheese (he was hungry) in the dairy factory
where he worked. He was sent to a labour
camp in Kolyma. There he, with the other prisoners,
had to build barracks for more prisoners
to come to that labour camp.
My granddad told me how, in order not to
freeze to death, he and his mates would give
themselves all into work. Thanks to the quick
rhythm and urgency of work, the first wave of
heat would come over them – when you feel
wet under your coat, under your jacket, under
your shirt and your vest. But they didn’t stop
for a moment: They hurried on with the laying
of bricks. And after about an hour they had a
second flush of heat, the one that dries up the
sweat. Their feet didn’t feel cold, that was the
main thing. I remembered that. Nothing else
mattered for my grandfather.
But in my case, I was worried not about my
feet but my fingers. My fingers got frozen in
winter from handling rubbish with metal tools. I
was scared that another month like that and my
fingers would not be able to hold a pencil to do
my drawings. Because I am the artist and not the
bricklayer. Sometimes, in the heat of the building
activity around me, I thought to myself:
what would we artists not do for the sake of our
art of Socialist Realism?
“You are an artist, aren’t you?” the
Polish pro-petty developer said to me one day.
“You’re not fit to be a builder. You’d be better off
working for Ms. Cunst. Ms. Cunst is looking for
artists. She is an art dealer and curator. She will
pay your rent and give you weekly benefits. For
that, you have to be an artist and produce art.”
“This is what I came to London for,” I said.
And he gave me her mobile number.
Ms. Cunst wore black leather boots and a
black leather jacket. She also had black sunglasses
that were twice as big as her small face.
I could not see her eyes. I also thought, it would
be very difficult to see art in black glasses. Very
soon I found out that she was interested in art
that doesn’t have to be seen. “The art of concepts,”
she said. “It is called ‘Conceptual Art’.”
“Are you conceptual?” was the first question
asked by Ms. Cunst. She knew from my Polish
pro-petty developer that I am Russian and not
Polish. “Are you doing ‘Sots Art’? Don’t do it!
Sots Art was a reaction to the overproduction of
propaganda in the Soviet Union. It’s passé!” said
Ms. Cunst. English people know about Russia
more than Russians ever do.
“I am not a Soviet artist,” I said. “I am a Russian
Socialist Realist.”
“It’s good that you’re social,” said Ms. Cunst.
“No matter what you call yourself,
the important thing is to
behave like artists do and have
something conceptual in your
pocket for the next exhibition.”
She has very important local
clients to entertain. She paid me
my first weekly benefit and gave
me a key for my lodging above
a pie-and-mash place on Hoxton
Street. There was no central
hitting in this place either, but
now I had enough paper moneys
to change them into a lot of
50-pence coins. I also bought a
big wedge of the cheese that I
love most. In Russia we call this cheese “rokfor,”
but in this country it is called “Stilton.” I put a
lot of coins into the hitting machine to get warm
and fell asleep very quickly.
But in the middle of the night I was woken up
by a strange rustling noise. Maybe it was coming
from behind the wall? The walls here are
very thin, like paper, to remind the artist that he
should take a pencil and draw something. What
shall I draw? I fell asleep again. In my dream
I saw a mouse. It ran across the room, passing
my bed on the left side and looking at me all the
time with its beady left eye. (It was all on the left
side because I was dreaming in England, where
they drive on the left.) In the morning, I wanted
to have a bite of rokfor, but the whole piece of
cheese had disappeared from the table.
When I went to the communal bathroom and
toilet inconveniences, I met my neighbour from
the next room. I introduced myself, “My name
is Ivan Denisovich.” I explained that the stress
in my name is on the “o” of the third syllable,
RUBBISH
SHUTE
49

ROTACON-
CEPTILUS
not on the “i’” of the second syllable. But English
people always put the wrong stress on Russian
names. Take Abramovich, the oligarch. English
people make the stress on “a” in the second
syllable of his name, but it should be on the “o”
of the third syllable. If the stress is on the second
syllable, it will be like the patronymic, not a family
name. For example, the full name of another
oligarch is Boris Abramovich Berezovsky. Here
Abramovich has the stress on the second syllable,
because it is the patronymic, not a second
family name.
“I know, I know,” the neighbour interrupted
me. “I am from Romania.”
“A lot of mouse in this house,” I said. “Didn’t
you hear the noise?”
“No, I didn’t. There is nothing here for a
mouse to steal.”
I didn’t mention my wedge of cheese. Maybe,
it was he who had stolen my cheese in the night.
“Are you an artist?” I asked. “The artist?”
“I am the one. Aren’t we all here?”
“Are you conceptual?” I asked.
“No, I am straight!” he said. “I am going back
to Romania. Everyone is queer here. All this
artistic community in Shoreditch and Hoxton is
fake. A decade ago there were a lot of real artists
here. Then the property prices went sky-high.
So those poor artists who didn’t make it had to
move out, they couldn’t afford to rent here any
longer. And those who became famous – Tracey
Emin and suchlike – they don’t even stay in
their renovated houses, they open their own
museums in Margate while we are kept here like
animals in a zoo in order to produce this fucking
conceptual shit commissioned by this fucking
Ms. Cunst. We are kept here to create an illusion
for the rich and idle corporate men who live
among artists in the Bohemian Zone.
“From time to time, this fucking Ms. Cunst
gives us some additional cash as a premium
payment for us to get drunk, to vomit on the
street corners and copulate in alleyways and
sing bawdy songs in our own multicultural,
ethnic-minority languages. Once in a while
she creates different exhibitions of conceptual
art produced by us – her slaves. Some of these
slaves become so famous and rich that they start
their own independent business, producing this
fucking conceptual shit by other inmates of this
concentration camp. But I am a Gypsy by birth,
I can’t stay put in one concentration camp, I
should go back to my roots.”
And off he went to Romania. With the wedge
of my rokfor, most probably, in his pocket. Only
a triangle trace of the chunk of cheese was left
on my table.
Since that day the noise at night stopped.
But I started seeing the mouse again on a regular
basis. Not a real one, as in my half-dream,
but an apparition. I knew it was not real because
it was there only when I was watching it. The
moment I took my eyes off it, I knew it was not
in the room any longer. It would come when
something happened inside me, when I needed
something outside of me that at the same time
was dependent on me being aware inside myself
of its presence outside. It was like my shadow.
Not of my body, but, maybe, of my soul, which
was like an illegal immigrant in the outside
world, like a frightened mouse. And it was
artistic, because it wanted me to draw it. It was
as if it were projected from my soul on to a piece
of white A4-sized paper lying on the floor. And
I took a piece of real A4 and a real pencil and I
copied what I saw lying flat on the floor. I did
it like a Xerox copy of a mouse shadow on the
floor. I made many of these copies, because the
shadow of the mouse was taking up different
positions, depending on my point of you.
I stuck my many drawings on the wall, and
waited for Ms. Cunst to come and see my work.
She came, looked quickly at the wall and started
shouting at me.
“This is representational art!” she cried.
“Forget about your socialist realism or capitalist
surrealism or Sots Art. We are not in Russia, we
are in the modern Western world. Do something
conceptual, deconstructive and psycho-geographical
about your roots or identity or failing
memory or falsified past or fabricated future –
something that everyone is talking about, not a
figurative depiction of this fucking mouse.”
I couldn’t understand what she was talking
about. But she was right on one point. Drawing
the mouse was bad for me. I saw this mouse
everywhere and it was eating up my soul.
This mouse was stealing the soft cheese of my
crumbling inner world. It made me spiritually
FALL 2015

starved and exhausted. Ms. Cunst told me that if
I did not stop drawing this social realist mouse,
she would stop paying me my weekly benefits
and I would never see a wedge of rokfor again
on my table.
But I kept on drawing the mouse, I just
couldn’t stop; and Ms. Cunst said I was sick, a
mouse addict with a socialist realist fixation, that
I needed help and should be treated.
“Perhaps, you are suffering from ‘Charles
Bonnet syndrome,’ how would I know?” she
said. “Perhaps this mouse symbolizes your
mother’s vagina, and you want to fuck your
mother?”
She couldn’t have known that both of my
parents were dead, because she would start
suspecting me also of
‘Trishkin does
triangles,’ Ms. Cunst
explained. ‘Conceptual
triangles,’ she
corrected herself.
‘His triangles sell
like hot bagels.’
necrophilia. She doesn’t
have money to pay for
a psychoanalyst for me,
she said, but she can
make me an assistant to
the most famous conceptual
artist in Hoxton
and Shoreditch. His
name is Cesar Trishkin.
I can learn conceptual
art from him and help
him to produce more of it. I asked what sort of
conceptual art Cesar Trishkin produces.
“Trishkin does triangles,” Ms. Cunst explained.
“Conceptual triangles,” she corrected
herself. “His triangles sell like hot bagels. The
demand is such that he cannot cope with it. He
needs an assistant to produce more triangles. He
is Russian like you,” she added.
So off we went to meet this famous trianglist
Trishkin at Calvert 22 Gallery, where he was
taking part in a panel discussion. This was about
the screening of a new print of Eisenstein’s
classic film, “Ivan the Terrible,” in two parts
(the film, not Ivan). Trishkin was arguing with
some English critic on the panel. We entered the
gallery at the moment when the English critic
was saying, “How about Eisenstein’s mousetrap?
Ivan causes the conspirators to expose
themselves when he cajoles the pretender to sit
on the throne and put on the Tsar’s royal robe
and crown; and so it is not Ivan the Terrible but
the pretender who is murdered in this case of
mistaken identity in the cathedral. A brilliant
example of art as a device.”
“It’s all so arty, there’s no art left in it,”
objected Cesar Trishkin. “Mousetrap? What’s
in it? Spice and poppy seeds instead of plain
bread and cheese.” At this mention of cheese
and mousetraps, my ears pricked up. “It is not
a mousetrap, but the justification of personal
tyranny,” Trishkin said.
“You don’t understand, Trishkin, the art of
montage and subtext. The episode could be read
as an exposure of the Stalinist machine of terror.
That is, Eisenstein sets a mousetrap for himself,
too, because Stalin could have arrested him
for this. It was a double mousetrap,” said the
English critic.
“Even if it was a triple mousetrap, it’s a
mockery of the memory of three generations of
Russian intelligentsia.”
“Art isn’t a matter of what, but of how.”
“But what is how?”
“It depends on the interpretation.”
“Then don’t call Eisenstein a genius. Geniuses
don’t adjust their interpretations to suit the taste
of tyrants!”
“It’s passé,” Ms. Cunst said. The panel discussion
was over and Ms. Cunst took me to Trishkin’s
huge studio in the former Barclays bank
building in Shoreditch. It was full of triangles.
“Eisenstein was busy creating complex interpretations
of history using montage and subtexts
on tyrants to crack the complexity of it,”
Trishkin said. “I create simple triangles for ordinary
people, and it is for them to interpret the
work any way they like. You can see all kinds of
things in a triangle. Napoleon’s hat. And bacon
sandwiches. Or the pubis. The axe is a triangle.
Napkins are folded in triangles. The triangle is
also a musical instrument. A computer mouse,
too. Or Georgian ‘khachapuri’.”
“Or a wedge of cheese,” I suggested.
“Yes,” he said. “Or Ukrainian ‘vareniki’.”
It turned out that Trishkin was not Russian
(as Ms. Cunst always thought) but Ukrainian.
“During the rule of Socialist Realism, the artist
had to produce art that was Socialist in its content
but its form had to reflect his ethnic origin,” Trishkin
said. In conceptual art, the form is unrelated
to your ethnic origin. The form is universally
conceptual, but it is the content that reflects your
51

52
ethnicity. “And so the same triangle becomes
Gerogian ‘khachapuri’ or Ukrainian ‘vareniki,’
depending who is looking at it. If you put two
triangles across each other you can get a Star of
David – that’s good for my Jewish clients. Stalin,
Sputnik and Samovar together are the Soviet history
triangle. But let me tell you my professional
secret,” he went on, confidentially. “Would you
like to know my professional secret?”
“Yes!” I said, thrilled. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“The secret is that I started drawing triangles
simply because of my name – Trishkin. It starts
with ‘tri’.” I understood him immediately: “tri”
means three in Russian, and in Ukrainian. “I am
successful because the triangle is simple and
universal. To become successful you have to be
universal and simple. No need to be Eisenstein.”
Thus Cesar Trishkin was talking, sitting
in an (the) easy chair and drinking his
Ukrainian schnapps, while I was standing in
front of the (a) huge canvas and was covering
every centimeter of it with triangles according to
his instructions. After a few weeks, as Trishkin
had become confident of my gift for drawing
triangles, he would leave me on my own in his
studio to go entertain his rich clients, showing
off his bohemian life style in front of them. From
the material point of you, my life became much
more comfortable. I could afford to rent accommodations
with my own private inconvenience
and hot water all the time.
But the mouse didn’t disappear. It was
haunting me day and night. So after a day of
drawing triangles for Trishkin, I would come
back home and draw my mouse from different
angles and in varying shapes. I knew it was bad
for my psycho-geographical state of soul and
my artistic career steps, but I couldn’t help it.
Each time I had a picture of the mouse finished,
I would take the piece of paper, stick it on the
wall with pins or tacks, and mutilate it with a
knife and fork, abuse and spoil it with black ink
in the Jackson Pollock style. Some of these pieces
of paper I burnt, but only at the edges, so the
mouse would feel pain and fear and wouldn’t
come back.
But it did. I kept all these half burnt and torn
portraits of the mouse on my walls like wallpaper
to frighten the mouse, but it kept on coming
I told him about the apparition, the mouse
that appears in front of my eyes and then
enters my mind − without any preliminary
knocking at the door − to steal the conceptual
cheese of artistic ideas from me.
back into my mind.
“What is it? What are these mice doing with
my triangles!” shouted Trishkin one morning,
when he came back to the studio after a bohemian
night with his clients. He was looking at
the big canvas that I had just finished covering
with “his” geometrical triangles from top to
bottom. But inside each triangle I had drawn
a little mouse. I did this subconsciously, in an
instinctive attempt to create a mental mousetrap
to catch the imaginary mouse.
I explained my problem to Trishkin. I told him
about the apparition, the mouse that appears
in front of my eyes and then enters my mind −
without any preliminary knocking at the door
− to steal the conceptual cheese of artistic ideas
from me. It was a jealous mouse. It wanted me
to draw her and only her – nothing else in the
world but her.
“So you’ve tried to trap her in my triangle,
have you?” asked Trishkin. “Did it help?”
“It did for a while,” I said. “But not for long.”
Trishkin looked at the mouse in the triangle
for a long time and then said, “Very interesting.
The mouse has a triangular shape, too, doesn’t
it?” He was interested to see all the mouses I had
depicted. We went to my room and I showed
him all the walls with the portraits of the mouse,
mutilated and abused in every possible way:
splashed with ink, half-burnt and partially torn
apart. He looked like he was very impressed.
He called Ms. Cunst. At first she said she didn’t
want to see “that motherfucker’s Social Realist
crap,” but Trishkin insisted that she should
come. He showed her my walls.
“This is conceptual, isn’t it?” Trishkin said.
She was surprised. The names of Guy Debord,
Deleuze and Lacan were whispered between
them. And they said they wanted to take all my
mouse icons away. But I said I need these images
on the wall so the mouse would be frightened
FALL 2015

and not come back.
“Why wouldn’t you simply adopt a cat to
scare the mouse?” Trishkin asked. I told him
I had thought of that. But firstly, there are no
stray cats on the streets of London, and a good
cat costs money. And secondly, even if I had a
live cat, it would not be capable of chasing away
my mouse. My mouse is a mental phenomenon,
while a live cat operates in a different category
of reality – the material one. They do not
overlap. The material cat cannot chase away the
mental mouse. At this moment, Trishkin said, “I
have a mental cat for you.”
And then Trishkin told me the story of his
grandfather.
His grandfather was a doctor in a Ukrainian
village. During the
famine of the 1930s,
when the Stalinist
state took all the
grain from peasants,
leaving them
to die from hunger,
the People’s
Commissar arrived
at his village to
give a speech about
Communism. He
spoke about how
we have one foot in
Communism and
the other in Socialism. After the speech Trishkin’s
grandfather asked the People’s Commissar
how long our country was going to stay in this
spread-eagle position. The same night, he was
taken away by the NKVD and sent as an enemy
of the people to a Siberian labour camp. After
ten years in the camp, when the local doctor was
looking for an assistant, Trishkin’s grandpa volunteered
and, as a well-behaved prisoner and a
doctor by profession, he was given the job.
He was given a separate cubical in the barracks
next to the clinic. Soon a large white Siberian cat
started hanging around the place. Now, being a
doctor’s assistant, he could feed the cat regularly
and it became his pet. At night it would climb on
his chest, and that is how they would fall asleep,
warming each other. But apart from political
prisoners in the camp, there were criminal ones,
too. These “zeks” and the political prisoners hated
each other. One day, some political prisoners
rushed to the clinic to alert my grandfather that
his cat had been caught by a group of zeks whose
leader, a criminal by the name of Denis, had been
threatening for some time to kill it.
Trishkin’s granddad found the gang at the
other end of the zone, but he was too late to
save his beloved cat: they had already murdered
it and were grilling it on the bonfire, ready to
eat it. The criminal Denis, their ringleader, was
standing over it with a big knife. Trishkin’s
grandfather, a big Ukrainian, could have killed
that little Russian, but he realised that if people
chased after a cat in order to kill and eat it,
these zeks were dying from hunger like those
peasants he had tried to save during the famine
in the Ukraine. So
my grandfather
turned his back and
left these prisoners
to have their cat
dinner. But since
that day the ghost
of the Siberian cat
would come to his
bed every night
to sit on his chest,
looking into his eyes
accusingly. For the
rest of his life he
suffered from severe
insomnia.
I was listening to this story, astounded and
thrilled, getting more and more agitated. Because
my grandfather, Denisovich (the stress
on “o” in the third syllable), nicknamed Denis,
happened to be in the same labour camp as
Trishkin’s grandfather, and he had been the zek
who had stolen and eaten the doctor’s cat. After
Stalin’s death, he was released from the prison
camp, a ruined man. Guilt stricken, he started
to go to church every Sunday to repent his life
of crime. The most horrific of his crimes, he told
me, was the murder of a doctor’s cat, and that
was why he had become a vegetarian.
I confessed all this to Cesar Trishkin and said,
“Maybe the mouse that haunts my imagination
has nothing to do with my mother’s vagina or
my father’s penis. Maybe it is the ghost of my
grandfather, Denis.”
53

54
“In that case, this explains why the moment
you entered the studio I started seeing the
ghost of the white Siberian cat at night,” said
Cesar Trishkin. He took both my hands in his
and, holding them tight, said, “Lets expurgate
the sense of guilt and vengeance that we have
inherited from our ancestors. Let the spirit of
my grandfather’s cat enter your mind through
me and release you from your mental pest of
a mouse, once and for all. And I will take all
your drawings of the mouse away from you.
You will sign a solemn pledge not to tell anyone
that you have ever drawn these pictures.
Ms. Cunst, can you prepare the contract for
Ivan Denisovich to sign?”
I was happy. I signed the contract. The
same night an apparition of a cat appeared
in my room. It sat on my chest and when the
apparition of the mouse crossed the floor, it
jumped off the bed and devoured the spectre
of the mouse. I thought I heard a squeak, and
then there was total silence. The Siberian cat
has done its job. The mouse didn’t ever come
back. I then decided to go to the Polish developer
and say that I had enough money to
become his business partner in pro-petty development.
A (the) Romanian artist returned
from Romania to work for us. At the end
of last year, I bought a big house in Arnold
Circus. I eat rokfor every day now.
One morning Trishkin suddenly came to
see me.
“Do you have any more drawings of the
mouse left?” he asked. It turned out that
by now he had sold all my drawings of the
mouse. There was nothing left to sell. His
clients demanded more. He said he had tried
to imitate my style, but there was something
uncanny about my way of depicting the
mouse and then abusing its image. Something
of a Georges Bataille about it, he said.
This mystery he cannot recreate. Can I draw
more “mouses” inside triangles for him?
But I said, “No, I signed that contract,
everything in my mind is sealed, the door of
perception is shut for the mouse, and I see
it no more. I am not an unwanted Russian
artist any longer. I am a successful property
developer. I develop rubbish chutes.”
And then I cried.
n
no a soffitte e ripostigli
dell’infanzia. Altri
si arrampicano ancora
sulle ciminiere
di vecchie fornaci.
Nessun elenco
esaurisce il
mistero di ogni
singola evenienza.
Solo di rado è
concessa la grazia
della parola
poetica, la parola
giusta che
arriva a cogliere
– Gabriele Noferi
Babele, la moltiplicazione delle lingue
ci obbliga a un lavoro di traduzione
incessante delle idee in parole, sempre
incompleta ma necessaria per ritardare
il degrado nell’entropia del rumore
bianco. Ogni tanto, dormendo con la
testa posata su una pietra, capita di
risognare l’andirivieni degli angeli
lungo la scala di Giacobbe, intermediari/traduttori
fra cielo e terra. Per
noi hanno il volto e le movenze degli
angeli di Klee e di Rilke, compagni di
viaggio che ci lasciano intravedere la
verità delle cose.
FALL 2015

Poem
On angels and ladders
Rome, piazza Madonna dei Monti, 1st May 2015
Poesia
t is an iron ladder with a railing, it
curves along the leaden dome up to the
lantern. The angel is a weather-vane
on top of the belfry. The light changes
with the time of day and year, shadows
shift. Every time an epiphany. There
are no words able to tell it all, the
sharp outline of the sight, the
loss, irretrievable in the instant
flow of time, the heaped layers
of memory. Other rungs
imbedded in walls used to
lead up to attics and closets
of childhood. Others still
climb the chimneys of old
brickyards. No inventory exhausts the
mystery of any single occurrence.
Once in a while the grace is granted
of the poetic word, the true word able
to seize at least a fringe of the aura
surrounding the thing itself. In an effort
to embrace as much of it as possible
some felt forced to invent a language all
of their own. If you really mean it, it is a
fight, as hard as Jacob’s nightly wrestling
with the angel at the ford of the
Jabbok. You may come out of it lame,
not necessarily with a new name.
Lost forever, with no regrets, the language
of Eden, by which Adam named
the animals, each one according to its
kind. Since Babel, the multiplication
of languages forces you to perform an
unremitting work of translating ideas
into words, never complete but necessary
to slow down the entropic decay
of white noise. Once in a while, in
sleep, head resting on a stone, you may
happen to dream again the coming and
going of angels up and down Jacob’s
ladder, middlemen/translators between
heaven and earth. To you they show the
face and demeanor of Klee’s and Rilke’s
angels, fellow travellers who let you
glimpse the truth of things.
Di angeli e di scale
È una scaletta di ferro con ringhiera
e segue la curva della cupola di piombo
fino alla lanterna. L’angelo è una
bandierina segnavento sulla torre della
campana. Cambia la luce con le ore e
le stagioni, si spostano le ombre. Ogni
volta un’apparizione. Non c’è parola
che dica senza residui il contorno
netto dell’immagine e la perdita
irrimediabile nell’istantaneo fluire
del tempo e il cumulo degli
strati di memoria. Altri gradini
infissi nelle pareti portavaalmeno
un lembo dell’aura che circonda
la cosa. Nello sforzo di stringerne
insieme quanto più possibile c’è chi
si è visto obbligato a inventarsi una
lingua tutta sua. Per chi fa sul serio è
una battaglia, come la lotta notturna di
Giacobbe con l’angelo al guado di Jabbok.
Se ne può uscire zoppicanti, non
sempre come lui cambiati nel nome.
È perduta per sempre, senza rimpianti,
la lingua dell’Eden con cui Adamo
dava il nome giusto agli animali,
ognuno secondo la sua specie. Dopo

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56
Reviews
RAISING QUESTIONS Okwui Enwezor, left, curator of the 2015 Venice Biennale of Arts pauses for a picture with
Biennale president Paolo Baratta at the opening of the event last May. The Associated Press
On Venice, Seagrave and On
Mr. Enwezor Speaks
Power to Truth
By David Adler
Nigerian poet and artist Okwui Enwezor,
a prominent figure in the contemporary
art world as the director of the Haus der
Kunst in Munich and holder of affiliations
with the Whitney and Guggenheim museums
in New York, is acting curator of this year’s Venice
Biennale. While his appointment as the venerable
art exhibition’s first African leader is seen as a
progressive step forward, it’s not without controversy,
as David Adler notes in the following analysis.
– The editor
He is appalled by art’s failure to speak
truth to power. “We expect writers to ponder
the big questions, and musicians and
composers. But somehow in the current
moment the things that are most celebrated
in our field are devoid of position. They
do their job; they don’t disturb. They don’t
raise questions.” He pauses and then adds
gloomily: “There is a lot of painting.”
– Financial Times, “Venice Biennale:
Politics Show”
Mr. Enwezor’s answers to the big questions
– in this and every other interview – never disturb.
They always have a position, though, and
that is the consensus position. Yet his answers
are worth examining closely, for what they
dance around, for what he can’t or won’t address
or even question. Through these critical
voids it is possible to construct something most
interesting: an outline of power today, what the
powerful deem to be the truth, and topics the
powerful have deemed taboo.
FALL 2015

L’Uomo Vogue: The writings of Karl Marx
himself play a central role in the exhibition
through a continuous reading of his Das Kapital
...
Enwezor: Yes, this project developed
from conversations with Isaac Julien whom
I invited to direct a continuous reading of
the three books of Marx’s Das Kapital, as
a kind of oral epic, an oratorio that lives,
through its continuous live broadcast over
seven months, in the body of the exhibition,
constituting the show’s central nervous
system. The three volumes are read
by professional actors, every day, for several
hours each day, almost as a secular ritual.
Today the question of “capital” and its processes
represent one of our great contemporary
dramas, as seen under a million different
guises and forms, and as such, Marx’s
book is read in many different voices.
– L’Uomo Vogue, “The Director”
Quoting Marx, and having actors read Marx,
and giving interviews to L’Uomo Vogue about
Marx, doesn’t make you a Marxist. Enwezor’s
constant invocation of economist Thomas Piketty
is a case in point. Though Enwezor doesn’t seem
aware of it, Piketty is not only not a Marxist, he
told The New Republic, “Das Kapital, I think, is
very difficult to read and for me it was not very
influential ...”
But Enwezor’s performance of Marx does distract
from the economic issue at hand, one right
at the front door: the ongoing crisis in the Italian
economy. Italy hasn’t grown since it joined the
Eurozone in 1999. The GDP has now been flat
for more than generation. And Italian youth unemployment
is at 43% as of April 2015. We all
know the economic problems of Italy are small
compared to those of the peripheral countries:
Spain and Portugal, and of course Greece.
The crisis is now also present in France, the
very core of the Eurozone. In France, manufacturing
continues to contract. French government
But Enwezor’s performance of Marx does
distract from the economic issue at hand,
one right at the front door: the ongoing
crisis in the Italian economy.
hiring cannot make up the slack because of austerity
policies. The country cannot compete with
mercantilist Germany.
But this is all getting drab, too drab certainly
for L’Uomo Vogue. And too real. Here are the real
questions: Is there something about the architecture
of the Eurozone that has caused this crisis?
Could it be even be the Euro itself?
These remain taboo topics. So much easier to
hire actors to read Marx.
Deutsche Bank: The lynchpin of this
year’s Biennale will be the expression of
global disquiet in the face of war, inequality,
and climate change, an unease that occupies
so many of us. Connected with this is
a fundamental criticism of the system
of the art market.
Enwezor: The program of the Biennale
is trying to address these
moments of insomnia. We will ask,
how can we look at the wounds of
history? We’re going to talk about
disorder, dystopia and that moment
I call “permanent transition.”
That insomnia has to do with the security
state, the constant surveillance, the constant
state of alert, the militarization of our
lives. It’s all because our rulers can’t go to
sleep.
– ArtMag by Deutsche Bank,
“The Will to Protest”
Let’s not be children here. It is very hard to
get arts funding. Affiliation with or sponsorship
from a bank, even Deutsche Bank, which just
paid a $2.5 billion fine in the LIBOR interest rate
scandal, is not blood money.
But let’s also be adults here. Deutsche Bank is a
business. German banks are some of the primary
beneficiaries of the introduction of the Euro, which
has dramatically reduced their cost of capital.
What does it mean for political art when a custom
publication from a bank, ArtMag by Deutsche
Bank, devotes itself to celebrating participatory
art and protest art? Beyond the interview
with Enwezor, another article profiles Japanese
artist Kori Tanaka’s “art activism.”
The Deutsche Bank interviewer is quite clear
about which issues occupy “us.” Not surprisingly
these issues do not include Deutsche Bank’s
See a video of work
at the Venice Biennale
at artenol.org.
57

Reviews
58
attempt to manipulate LIBOR, the resulting
huge fine or the larger economic crisis in the Eurozone.
And not surprisingly, these issues don’t
seem to be of particular concern to Enwezor
either, who instead is more worried that “our
rulers can’t go to sleep.”
So who is sleepwalking during this interview?
Who is being co-opted?
And so let’s talk about
other ‘narratives’
instead while making
sure what happened
in Libya is not part
of the contemporary
historical narrative.
We have reached a point where we cannot
have one homogenized narrative, one
view of the future, a singular idea of what
constitutes the good life, even though we
have inherited certain monolithic cultural,
social, and political ways of thinking about
the world. This monolithic narrative
has become increasingly
untenable and can no longer
hold. That’s why George W.
Bush and the neocons’ version
of enlightened despotism did
not take hold in Afghanistan
and Iraq ...
One must rethink what
the multiple frames of reference
might be, what other
paths might constitute new versions of
the future, and the direction each might
take. What if, say, in Nigeria we don’t get
it right? ... What if Beijing does not become
like Washington? Is it possible to have multiple
ways of looking at social conditions
that are not necessarily in alignment with
the dominant Western ways of thinking?
– Artforum, “Okwui Enwezor Talks with
Michelle Kuo“
Finally an original question from Enwezor:
What is the future of luxury brands in Nigeria?
What if they don’t get luxury right? These are
issues to ponder.
But is the rest of this interview news? Is it
even worth printing? Has Enwezor personally
ever encountered anyone on the other side of
these arguments?
Though he mentions Bush and Iraq, there is
another, more recent war, much closer in time
and certainly geography to Italy: Libya. Libya is
the main source of the refugees and the migrant
crisis in Italy.
Should the West have invaded Libya? Why
did the West invade Italy? Why didn’t the West
commit the resources to install a functioning
government afterwards? These are deeply taboo
topics. And so let’s talk about other “narratives”
instead while making sure what happened in
Libya is not part of the contemporary historical
narrative.
The most devastating criticism of Enwezor,
and his curatorial practices (not just his interview
answers above) comes from the art historian
S. Okwunodu Ogbechie. Like Enwezor,
Ogbechie was born in Nigeria and educated in
the US. He writes in “The Curator as Culture
Broker”:
It is obvious that Enwezor’s valorization
of a contemporary African art, largely defined
through the work of African Diaspora
artists, has had the paradoxical result of
validating a form of contemporary African
art that negates critical engagement with
the history and development of modern
and contemporary art in Africa itself,
or with indigenous forms of African art
whose contemporaneity remains to be theorized.
His curatorial work thus produces
historical interpretations of contemporary
African art in general and advances a
self-referential narrative of contemporary
practice using limited numbers of artists
recycled in closed-loop exhibitions.
But Ogbechie isn’t done with Enwezor. He
has much worse things to say about him:
Let us suggest then that the contemporary
curator is a culture broker in pretty
much the same way a hedge-fund manager
brokers financial instruments.
So how can we ultimately interpret the statements
of Okwui Enwezor, this most moralistic
of curators, a man so worried about the fate of
humanity and the world, and injustice that he
can’t discuss the crisis in the Eurozone right in
front of him in any meaningful way?
His silence could mean Mr. Enwezor has
nothing to say about these issues. But the silence
can also be interpreted as complicity.
FALL 2015

A Day in the Life:
On Kawara
By Alex Melamid
Art has been defined over and over as man’s
highest spiritual expression, superior even to
religion in that it is the only human activity
that does not lead to killing.
True.
But art is not without its own victims.
We are familiar now with the evolution of
cultural revolutions.
In the beginning there was the Christian
revolution, where Christian ascetics achieved
fame by the extravagant feats. One “devised
a cell which forced him to live doubled up,”
another “spent 10 years in a cage shaped like
a wheel.” Some went completely naked. The
most famous one, Simon the Stylite, spent 36
years sitting on a column. The church was built
over his grave and the column, the remnants of
which you can still see in Syria (better visit right
away before ISIS finishes them off).
Wasn’t Simon a great performance artist? Just
like the artist who lived on a shelf in a gallery
for weeks, or the semi-naked lady in the museum
under glass, or the woman who stared
at gallery visitors for hours? Such acts must be
torturous, but they serve a higher purpose.
Christianity has taken the road from the
scorched Syrian desert to the opulence of the
Vatican. Modern art took a route from parched
Arles to the splendor of Fifth Avenue.
The Guggenheim Museum, on that very avenue,
recently held a showing of work by artist On
Kawara (it closed May 3). Kawara was born in
Japan in 1933 and, at the age of 32, moved to
New York where he died in 2014. The art he
practiced was and is called Conceptualism. He
won notoriety for a series of works he started
sometime in the mid-’60s. He created one
canvas a day with the date painted in simple
white letters, usually on a black background,
but sometimes on a red. As far as I know, he
did it from 1966 until the day he died.
Roberta Smith of The New York Times wrote
about the Guggenheim show, observing that
“the first retrospective of this Conceptual Art
giant turns the museum’s spiral into a vortex
DATELINE It was a Monday, that much we know. A
painting from On Kawara’s “Today Series.” wikimedia.com
suffused with consciousness of time, life’s supreme
ruler, in all its quotidian unfoldings.”
I am not making this up. These were her
words.
She mentioned “Mr. Kawara’s exquisite
sense of discipline and craft.” Apparently Ms.
Smith was referring to his painting letters and
numbers by hand – that’s craft – and his onepainting-every-day
regimen – discipline. Oof!
Crafty and disciplined inmates in New York
State’s prisons make license plates − stamped
with numbers and letters. The deeper meaning
of this is known only to the Department of Corrections.
The deeper meaning of On Kawara’s
work may be known, I hope, to departments
of art and other art institutions, and even to
Roberta Smith, but none of them can explain it
clearly to the general public.
On Kawara found his own way to kill time by
serving time – it took long time, I suppose. Also
on display were Kowara’s postcards and telegrams,
a lot of them, sent to some major players
in the Art World – curators, critics, artists.
Understandably, his livelihood depended on
them. The postcards were invariably inscribed
with the message “I got up at ...” and the time.
That was usually around 10 a.m. When did On
go to bed?
Walking from the Guggenheim to subway
along 88th Street, I passed awnings of palatial
apartment buildings emblazoned with numbers.
Doormen were pacing underneath, bored
to death – prisoners of a real vortex of time.
59

Reviews
60
Gary Indiana
speaks about
writing his memoirs
at artenol.org.
Have you ever
met Seagrave?
Tell us what
he’s like at
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The Maestro, Seagrave
By Gary Indiana
As for Seagrave, it’s well known throughout
the world that Seagrave produces only one masterwork
per year, seldom in the same medium or
format as the year before, disgorging everything
his capacious, rarefied interiority has ingested
and ruminated over in the course of his wayward
existence that year, underwritten entirely by a
fortunate few who can and sometimes do actually
purchase this work, for which the annual bidding
invariably reaches new mind-boggling peaks, all
quite speculative since whatever he comes up
with remains muffled and blindfolded in secrecy
until it’s almost ready to serve, so to speak, hermetic
secrecy and the great flair with which Seagrave’s
annual efforts are unveiled being prominent
thrusts of every article ever written about
them, every conversation engendered by them,
every doctoral thesis and academic journal issue
devoted to Seagrave, a methodological quiddity
so reliably fixed and shrewdly infrequent that it
generates as much attention when Seagrave has
an off year, resulting in some object or chimerical
manifestation that defies comprehension
and deflects all but the most pedantic interest,
as when he astonishes everyone with what he’s
been laboring over, presumably on an incessant
basis, though of course there are skeptics who
claim Seagrave quietly produces many things
the public never sees, dust-veneered paintings in
a clandestine studio, bizarre documentary film
Seagrave shoots in obscure regions of the globe
during the months he drops from view, poems
and even whole novels Seagrave composes in his
many isolated hours far from any known scrutiny,
such rumors anticipating either Seagrave’s
death or the subsequent exposure of his hidden
treasures, or a future living moment when the
maestro will decide to release this widely imagined
hoard of artistry into a world he despises
and withdraws from more drastically as time
passes. Others swear that Seagrave does absolutely
nothing all year until the month before the
promised work appears, a month in which his
formidable creativity, stored up or sadly fallow
over the previous 10 months, erupts from him in
a volcanic manner, plunging him into a Strindbergian
frenzy of art making that robs him of
sleep and any willingness to eat, relying for sustenance
exclusively on liquids consisting of fruits
and vegetables pulverized in an appliance often
advertised on television in the early morning
hours, accounting arguably for the gaunt-waisted,
barely ambulatory, even skeletal appearance
that Seagrave presents every year at the myriad
venues, festivities and associated publicity events
planned long in advance of the first vernissage
by Seagrave’s representative, Thurwill, who has
been described variously as a dangerous psychopath,
a wretched mind-fucking bastard, and
as a public menace, a world-class prick, a fucking
Rottweiler with his teeth in his master’s ass
and the creep who does all the dirty work for
the pleasure of it, among many other things, the
last-cited epithet being, in my view, perhaps the
most nearly accurate, though Thurwill draws a
considerable salary in exchange for this so-called
dirty work, pleasurable or otherwise. Since even
those who claim hearing the very name “Thurwill”
will cause them to vomit have to acknowledge,
when pressed on this point, that the odious,
brutal Thurwill, however manipulative,
underhanded, treacherous, sadistic, importunate
and unpleasant his conduct on Seagrave’s behalf
may be, his rebarbative character cannot be unknown
to Seagrave, whose pestiferous actions
controlling anything and everything related even
remotely to Seagrave’s art and reputation necessarily
have Seagrave’s endorsement, Seagrave’s
approval, Seagrave’s imprimatur. The ferocity
and barbaric hostility Thurwill exhibits when
anything to do with Seagrave abrogates some
unknowable rule or condition, cannot have escaped
Seagrave’s attention year after year and it
is logical to conclude that Thurwill is exactly the
type of person Seagrave wants as the agent of his
wishes, leaving aside the frequent psychological
speculation that Thurwill is also the person
Seagrave himself would be, without ever desiring
to be anything akin to Thurwill, if not for the
existence of Thurwill. Of Thurwill’s mediation
between Seagrave and the dull reality of vulgar
commerce, according to this line of thought, the
placid, agreeable, high-mindedly aloof Seagrave
is only the sanguine verso to Thurwill’s bloody
recto, the angelic flipside to bloody darkness,
though surely this notion is far too simplistic
and, at the same time, much too complicated. n
FALL 2015

AIR OF
IMPORTANCE
ARTETYPES
By Anonymous
Shutterstock
You can tell everything about gallery
visitors in the first 10 seconds of
their entering the gallery. The way
they open the door, the way they
take their first steps into the space,
the way they first glance at the art on the walls,
the clothes they wear, the energy they emanate.
These things tell you who they are.
Some come in, pensive and undemanding,
quietly reflecting on the works on exhibit. Sometimes
they sketch. Sometimes they write. They
stare at the work as if, in that moment, it is the
most important thing in their world. Dressed as
modestly as their actions, their presence is hardly
noticed. They drift in and
out, as soft and subtle as one
of the brush strokes on the
canvas at which they gaze.
Their experience is inward and profound. They
seem to gain nothing more or less than what the
art has to offer.
Some stumble in, unsure of what they might
find inside, but intrigued enough to enter. In
an attempt to be cultured and in-the-know,
they immerse themselves in “art.” They walk
through the space quickly with newfound confidence.
They have seen something. They may
not understand the details or fully appreciate
the craft, but they have had the experience of
seeing art.
Social media plays such a dominant role in
one’s identity today that gallery goers often use
it to influence how others perceive them. I notice
these visitors taking pictures of works and
uploading them to their personal web pages in
an attempt to use their visit as a means of self
definition. They stay just long enough to accomplish
this task and then head back to the
world outside. The door swings open and, as
they walk out, they have slightly more bounce
in their step.
People do not always enter a gallery space
to view the art. Some of my favorite gallery
guests are not there to see the art at all, even
A look at those who
look (or don’t look)
VISITERIUM

62
though they are the most frequent visitors. The
door opens and I hear someone belting out an
old Russian tune: our mailman. He comes in
every day singing loudly as he gathers our outgoing
mail and leaves the incoming letters on
the table. He enters not to see art but to perform
his daily task. He probably doesn’t even
look at what is on the walls. For our mailman,
the experience of art in the gallery is derived
from duty, though he leaves us with an art experience
through his songs.
Then there are some whose presence is hard to
ignore. A black car pulls up, the door is thrown
open and in walks someone important. It is in
these first few seconds that we know this person
is here for a specific reason − to collect art, or to
make it known that they do. Some are old, some
young, but they all seem to have a similar air
about them. They enthusiastically exhibit their
knowledge of the gallery or the artist to their
friends as they make their initial lap around the
show. Within a couple minutes, they usually
call out to the office. “Hello?” they say, with an
air of entitlement. “Can someone answer a couple
of questions?”
This is the moment to scramble, to pick up
sheets of information, to gather yourself, stand
up tall and walk over to them with a smile and
a confidence equal to theirs.
“Hello,” I declare back. “How
can I help you?”
They point to a certain work
with the flick of a finger and
ask all the right questions,
while I endeavor to answer to
their satisfaction. They ask to
see more works, continuing
to flick fingers while still displaying
their knowledge. This
goes on until they are satisfied
their questions have been
answered and their expertise
has been sufficiently revealed.
You exchange plans with
them for further communicatio
and then they leave with
the same air of importance
with which they entered.
I must note that I am not
putting down these people. In
fact, I hold them in high regard. They are the
ones who enable the art business to grow and
thrive. Thanks to collectors, galleries can afford
to mount great shows and offer them to the public
free of charge.
But galleries are also portals for experiences.
Each person enters seeking an experience. For
many, this experience is a quiet and reflective
one. For others, it is a means to assert themselves
as persons of culture. Some come in daily
out of obligation, without looking at or caring
for the art. There are also those who come to add
to their collections and to make connections, to
maintain their status as important figures in the
growing art world.
I’ve seen them all, and many in between. I’ve
even become more aware of my own presence
in a gallery now that I work in one. I find myself
wondering what type of visitor I am. The artist
in me strives to be the quiet and contemplative
visitor, but that persona often clashes with the
gallerist in me as I seek to assert my knowledge
and make connections. Perhaps my awareness
of this dilemma has made me into a whole new
type of visitor: the neurotic and conflicted person
too wrapped up in divergent experiences to
truly experience the art. I wonder, too, what it
is about contemporary art and art galleries that
gives rise to these types of behaviors.
I believe the various attitudes
of our gallery’s visitors
stem from the fact that
contemporary art can have
many different meanings.
For some, it remains “art for
art’s sake.” For others it has
become a powerful symbol
of economic and social status.
There are also those for whom
contemporary art is a means
of social and political protest.
The different behaviors art
visitors exhibit reflect what
art means to them and how it
serves them. It’s that quality
that makes their behavior so
intriguing: it ultimately says
more about them than the
work on the walls. n
Adriano Castelli/Shutterstock.com
FALL 2015

Closer
Untitled
By Nick Wadley
63
See other
cartoons by
Nick Wadley at
artenol.org.