New Orleans Recapitulation

New Orleans' geography is inimical to its well being. Located at the delta of the Mississippi, it was a regional port of entry, and strategically placed for the distribution of goods along the waterways of the United States. In turn, it was also the city on the Gulf of Mexico, and arguably the Southern U.S. Today it has been replaced as a regional center by Miami, whose geographic location on America's wang allows for the reach into Latin America that generations of Cubans have appreciated. I heard it called Norlins more often than Nawlins, but anyway you pronounce it, the city has felt the devastation of rising water levels, giving literal meaning to the old saying, "Come hell or high water." I spoke to some residents selling beer on Esplanade, which is a beautiful oak lined boulevard that takes you right to the French Quarter. They said that they live in a fishbowl, because the dykes that surround the city give way in Hurricanes, which is why even the fire hydrants four or five feet high. Needless to say, in its age, it has immense culture. The unique idiolect includes words like laignappe, and picayune demonstrating the blend of African, French, and American influences. This is a musical sample of the old blind mouth harper, Grampa Elliot:





The following was composed in Napoleon House, 500 Chartres St., New Orleans, Louisiana:

The Half-Loves

Memories of beloveds, now gilded
In the cool, evening sunshine of my mind,
Decay in dead silence, ivy strangled,
Covered in the soft, green mosses of time,
While I, a tourist, wander the cold streets,
Watching shadows lengthen, enfolded in black sheets
And study for clues these ruined sculptures of mine.

Don't Be Scared! Really.

Blauer Schlumpf (Blue Smurf), 2009
Andre Butzer's show at Metro Pictures, "Nicht furchten!" (Don't be scared!) lasts until May 1, and is a menagerie of color, popular culture and pathos. These huge canvases are slathered in paint, an effect that the viewer can actually smell upon arrival. Globs of neon green, explosions of red, and faint recollections of images we know and love - the Smurfs, Winnie the Pooh, Aladdin - are all intermingled in a post postmodernism show robust with a joie de vivre. These signs of culture are abstract, yet lucid, and the heavy colors don't obfuscate - they invite.

A certain self-consciousness is apparent in the naming of these pieces, from "Blue Smurf" to "Entombment of Winnie the Pooh." All of these figures are suggestively abstract, and the names of the pieces reaffirm your suspicions of what you thought they resembled. It's like the formal act of creation calls upon our knowledge of culture, and our love of color, to attract us. Upon inspection we can see that there is a method to the abstraction: the artist carefully etched brushstrokes into the larger globs. We pause, back up, wonder, remember our childhood with these figures. Mr. Butzer said that this is where painting is now, that his use of color and subjects is not arbitrary.

The three paintings from which the show gets its name strike a more somber note. On the large canvases of colorful and exciting facture are oddly shaped figures that come to overpower the entire painting. The first presents a star shaped, flesh colored piece that sits in the middle of the painting, and yet strikes a harmonic balance in its dominance. Its amorphism is curious, but no more so than the black spidery figure in the second piece. It seems to be growing increasingly powerful, as its color blackens and its legs spread over the Matissean color field, but I think back to the title and am reassured. Finally, in the last piece, the black figure has gained complete control; only upon inspection is it possible to see a trace of green or blue. Otherwise, the black is the painting, hanging in thick smudges and smears. If this is the end, then it makes sense that we shouldn't fear it - the bright colors of the other avant garde art made it, well, not quite so bad.

Eye Scream Sunday

The other night was sultry, with gray clouds rolling over the sky and a mid-August feel despite the fact that it was only April. The magnolia in the backyard rollicked in the breeze, its pink petals just beginning to bloom at the top of the tree, and I ate my spaghtetti and arrabiata tomato sauce outside, with a napkin tucked into my collar. Aakash was busy working, moving back and forth from his apartment to the backyard patio.

Aakash had neon orange cutouts that he had measured to fit over the wheels of Guillermo's truck. I sat on my stoop, eight steps high, drinking a bottle of San Pelligrino, listening to the Spanish conversations of the men who worked at the auto shop next door, as Aakash set the neon cubic structures. Guillermo came home and was kind enough to sit in the car and model. We chatted and saw an ice cream truck sing past us with its characteristic carnival jingle. I had long wondered why the trucks flocked to our street, and assumed the existence of a depot, while telling my friends that really they sold ice cream during the day, but after 8 o clock, they sold drugs. We decided to place the neon cubes over the wheels of the ice cream truck.

When we walked over, an older man walked back and forth from the truck to the shop carrying big bags, and a young girl spoke on her cell phone. We asked if we could use the truck, and then the owner appeared saying that he wasn't sure, he didn't want his truck to end up in the New York Times and not get anything for it. Aakash reassured him that it was nothing like that, and I decided to buy some ice cream to assuage the situation. 

The girl, who was about my age and would have been pretty except for an overbite that made her lisp, sold me an ice cream bar, and I eagerly ate the chocolate on vanilla. Aakash wanted us to act natural and so we started to chat.

She was ecstatic and said that we were so cool to be taking pictures of her truck, that she was so happy, that all she ever does is work, and this kind of thing is so much better. I asked her about her family's drug cartel and she said yes, they sold weed and coke, primarily, but they were willing to submit special requests.

When we said our goodbyes and thank yous and got home, we decided to look at the avant garde art pictures for which one to put on display. Out of the 127, we chose one, featured above. This one we chose over the one with me and the girl interacting – she leaning out of the window with her hands over the glass like a puppy dog hopefully waiting on my reactions, me standing, ice cream bar in hand, gesticulating widely over some forgotten aspect of conversation.

Baudelaire and Millenialism

Baudelaire is a boss. His 1857 work, Fleurs de Mal (Flowers of Evil) is arguably the most important French poetic work from the 19th century. It inspired a movement of symbolists, and helped to create modern poetry. Symbolism was all about generating emotion through metaphor and comparison, all with the help of a Platonic ideal.

I've been thinking a lot about art today and I think that a similar idea is apparent in many artistic and literary works. Recently, I came across the term, "object-hood," which is another way of saying "symbolic content," the representation of feelings and ideas through materiality. For more on this see my post postmodernism manifesto below. Tradition is inescapable, so it was only natural that I turned to Baudelaire's "The Soul of Wine" as a prime example of wine's object-hood. Here it is:

L'Ame du Vin

Un soir, l'âme du vin chantait dans les bouteilles:
«Homme, vers toi je pousse, ô cher déshérité,
Sous ma prison de verre et mes cires vermeilles,
Un chant plein de lumière et de fraternité!

Je sais combien il faut, sur la colline en flamme,
De peine, de sueur et de soleil cuisant
Pour engendrer ma vie et pour me donner l'âme;
Mais je ne serai point ingrat ni malfaisant,

Car j'éprouve une joie immense quand je tombe
Dans le gosier d'un homme usé par ses travaux,
Et sa chaude poitrine est une douce tombe
Où je me plais bien mieux que dans mes froids caveaux.

Entends-tu retentir les refrains des dimanches
Et l'espoir qui gazouille en mon sein palpitant?
Les coudes sur la table et retroussant tes manches,
Tu me glorifieras et tu seras content;

J'allumerai les yeux de ta femme ravie;
À ton fils je rendrai sa force et ses couleurs
Et serai pour ce frêle athlète de la vie
L'huile qui raffermit les muscles des lutteurs.

En toi je tomberai, végétale ambroisie,
Grain précieux jeté par l'éternel Semeur,
Pour que de notre amour naisse la poésie
Qui jaillira vers Dieu comme une rare fleur!»

— Charles Baudelaire

The Soul of Wine

One night, the soul of wine was singing in the flask:
"O man, dear disinherited! to you I sing
This song full of light and of brotherhood
From my prison of glass with its scarlet wax seals.

I know the cost in pain, in sweat,
And in burning sunlight on the blazing hillside,
Of creating my life, of giving me a soul:
I shall not be ungrateful or malevolent,

For I feel a boundless joy when I flow
Down the throat of a man worn out by his labor;
His warm breast is a pleasant tomb
Where I'm much happier than in my cold cellar.

Do you hear the choruses resounding on Sunday
And the hopes that warble in my fluttering breast?
With sleeves rolled up, elbows on the table,
You will glorify me and be content;

I shall light up the eyes of your enraptured wife,
And give back to your son his strength and his color;
I shall be for that frail athlete of life
The oil that hardens a wrestler's muscles.

Vegetal ambrosia, precious grain scattered
By the eternal Sower, I shall descend in you
So that from our love there will be born poetry,
Which will spring up toward God like a rare flower!"

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Neurosurgery Confessionals

I wrote this my freshman year of college for my writing class:

 My dad wasn't around much when I was younger because he was in his residency until he was 36. I can’t blame him  though, since he has to deal with life and death on an unparalleled basis.  This I came to understand during one of those lazy Sundays that involved running errands and making rounds.  This particular Sunday, after making rounds earlier in the day, his beeper went off again.  Usually, if we were out and about and he was called in, I would have a book ready. I often sat alone in the car, reading for hours at a time until he finished doing whatever it was he did.  I expected the same out of this call, but my father emerged from the hospital just as I was settling in for a nice hour or two of reading. He knocked on the window with a key and beckoned me to follow.


In the hospital was a 15 year old boy who was very recently involved in a gang shooting.  When we walked through all of the double doors and were deep into the heart of the hospital, we finally arrived at the right room.  The boy was lying on a bed leaning at 45 degrees, looking very close to death. He was white, his head was shaved and he was stark naked, which added a touch of realism to the situation; that body looked similar to mine, and indeed, we were the same age.  The bullet had entered the boy’s head in between the left temple and ear.  Rather than the bloody mess I was expecting, there was a tiny v-shaped cut.  The bullet was lodged in the left ventricle of the brain, causing massive hemorrhaging.  There was no exit wound.  This kid, who a few hours before had been running around, doing teenager stuff, had been shot and was most probably going to die.  My father was busy conversing with nurses about how the kid had become brain dead.  As his heart was still beating, he was alive and in a vegetative state that would not continue for many more hours.


My father summoned me onwards to a room where he said the boy’s mother was.  I knew what was coming and began to protest that I wanted no part of it.  But I knew that after having come this far, I could not turn back.  It was a ride of painful emotions that I had to weather, even if only to understand how precious my own life is.  We entered the room and sat down in a style akin to the way it’s done in movies.  The mother and the boy’s uncle were there; they knew also.  When my father began to slowly explain the situation, the mother began to sob.  Not uncontrollably, but with deep, steady, sadness.  The man to her left was stone-faced, arm around her, trying to stabilize her bobbing shoulders.  The whole time my dad was solemn, his countenance grim  -- he knew exactly how to handle the situation.   

Dealing with such heavy emotions is never easy, but the composure my father showed was amazing.  He knew the scope of the family’s tragedy. To reveal anything more than a compassionate frown would be disaster, the woman would completely lose it and who knows what might happen after that.  I felt nearly sick from feeling so close to tragedy, yet so very removed; I didn’t even know these people.  And so I just sat, silent, watching, wondering what it would be like to hear that my own son was going to die from a bullet wound to the head. 


My father's poise allowed me to garner a further appreciation for what he does.   While for me, this experience helped me to see the thinness of life's thread and when snipped just how far the spool can unravel, for my dad it was just another day at work.

...and the Birth of Millenialism

Our present moment of incipient socialism is inexorably changing art. The globalization of the past decade was supposed to destroy cultures and languages, but in fact, has done just the opposite, unifying groups hitherto incapable of reaching each other. Information is more readily available, because of the Internet, the great democratizing tool, and its structures of social grids.  Meanwhile, emerging markets around the world demonstrate in action a global community, a notion the Great Recession confirmed. The world today has sorted some of the struggle against chaos that postmodernism mourned during the 20th century. Granted, we are still descendants of destruction, but the evidence shows up less. Last generation was the American Golden Age, and the while, the threat of a WWIII and apocalypse plagued the collective unconscious. But the Millennial generation never lived with the devastation of World War - the year 2000 brought no end to the world, and neither will 2012. The only end will be that of the American empire. A concentration of sustainable ideas will take its place.
These abstract notions are manifest in artistic theory. In the 20^th century, strains of avant garde art  followed the Duchampian school in repudiating the objet d’art for concepts. Resultantly, the readymade and notions of mechanical reproduction shaped the tenets of 20th century art. Walter Benjamin’s notion of the original's diminishing aura was represented by Andy Warhol. Pop art deskilled art– technicality withered and abstraction flourished. But today, reproductions are not purely mechanical. The goal of the millennial artist is to return meaning to simulacra.  Although reproductions diminish the aura of an original, they remain representative of originals, containing shards of the original’s meaning. For example, telling a Chinese boy who knows nothing of Western art about the Mona Lisa does not help him to understand what it is. Googling the image, albeit nothing like seeing it hanging in the Louvre, approaches the meaning of the original. While Benjamin and Warhol described a world devoid of pathos in a culture of reproductions, millennials acknowledge the potential for simulacra to evoke. 
We are as gods in this new community. It is a new age of gods, one different from the first age that Vico assigned to Ancient Greece. Instead of lending symbolic meaning to nature, we assign virtue to the nature that we have created. Culture, as a second nature, was established during the second half of the 20^th century; hence the dismay at losing what is real, and the resulting irony pervasive in postmodern art. Yet that decline has led to a rebirth. We are beginning to comprehend living together as a world with global signs. Nationalism is passé – it was a 20^th century ideal. Ours is a society of imagination, a society of metaphor.

The fact that advertising's banal mechanization was subsumed by Pop Art almost two generations ago has normalized advertising in our society. Playing with advertising creatively is art, a notion demonstrated by Poster Boy’s “Human Pop.” Signs that everyone recognizes, from the simple image of a dog, to the corporate symbol of the McDonald’s arch, are already charged with meaning garnered from subjective experience.  In a post-structuralist and post-deconstructionist world, signs are glorified in their ubiquity, and carry meaning for the individual in recognition and association. In our reign as a global community, we can comprehend Vico’s language of symbols as we assign meaning to cultural signs.
The goal of contemporary art is to evoke memories and significance through universal signs. Since we have more signs than ever before from which to choose, the effect is diverse, and rarely sentimental. All emotion, ranging from disgust to admiration, is important. The artist works to give the viewer a pure exposure to his subject or themes. Pure exposure cannot be achieved in front of television or the computer – although these technologies relate shards of meaning to simulacra – but must be achieved in the real world. And yet, accessibility doesn’t mean immanence. Posterboy's work is camouflaged in subways and on billboards.   The effect suggests through likeness. Suggestive abstraction inspires the viewer to conjure their own associations. The slightest change to an everyday sign creates more individuality in a world burdened with routine.

Along with advertising, Noah Kalina's “Everyday” video is a prime example of how the contemporary artist utilizes culture to generate art. The idea of taking a picture every day for six years is simple, but difficult.  Mr. Kalina becomes a symbol for the passage of time, something to which everyone can relate. He also demonstrates how anyone can succeed if they own the necessary dedication, time and creativity. This is a new technicality – one of simplicity and relation. The goal is to make art as accessible as possible, literally and thematically.

Aakash Nihilani's work, in its interactivity and its transience, is a continuation of the postmodern strains of conceptualism and minimalism, but without any inherent irony. These movements created art with relation to its presentation in the gallery.  Similarly, before he creates, Mr. Nihalani uses the confines of his environment to shape his work. Whereas postmodernism recognized that art takes shape according to the physical and mental parameters of its adherents, and replied to this realization, Mr. Nihalani takes this notion further by blending mediums. His use of colored tape fuses sculpture, painting and architecture, incorporating even the most benign signs and symbols, like the crosswalk or a stop sign. He thus shatters the aforementioned parameters through an urban palimpsest. His work is subject to being ripped and torn, and furthers awareness of "real time," because the work will inevitably be destroyed. It is as lasting as the experience of itself, which is reflective of the age of immediacy. Together, the urban and the internet contexts remove the illusion of artistic “space,” with art appearing literally anywhere. Placement of the work, whether on the street or online, gives the viewer an idea of how to understand it.

As a result, the viewer's place in today’s art is increasingly important. His ability to choose and interpret affects a level of self-consciousness distinct from postmodern narcissism.  The art of the 70's and 80's became obsessed with itself as art, and the result was heavily ironic. Today, art is still conscious of itself, but in a way that doesn't vacate its content. Art relies on the viewer for its propagation. Thus, the work's attraction is of foremost import.  This is evident in the success of the blog, which uses the technique of catchy second person addresses to engage the reader. In an age of self help and internet searches, the success of self-conscious art is also evident in novels like Dave Eggers’, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The title of this book demonstrates the self-consciousness of the text, and the subjects of creation and inspiration take up much of the plot. This self-consciousness is a remnant of postmodernism, but instead of irony, it aims at a joie de vivre in the tripartite balance between artist, art, and viewer.

The heightened self-consciousness of today’s art playfully encourages the viewer to interact, in the same way that the viewer clicks, browses and sorts his way through the internet. Here, however, there is no place for irony; the focus is on making the viewer emote, a notion that postmodernism mocked.  Signs and symbols pervade culture, but we’re used to it by now. Today these signs carry inherent meaning for the individual, because they are lodged in our unconscious. Whereas postmodern art was all about the art's ego, today, the ego of the art relates to the ego of the viewer. Spectators of art actively choose how and what they view, optimistically search for varying and diverse ideas, and the while think about making it all cohere and stand alone as something unique and different.