Not Another Art Paper

Don't let the title fool you. It is, in fact, totally another art paper.

 Last week, I went to Gadsden to find a work of art. I scoured the Cultural Arts Center and the Gadsden Museum of Art for that single perfect work that would truly speak to me. I saw numerous paintings and photographs of portraits and landscapes, sculptures, abstracts, and drawings, but there was always something missing. I had all but given up when I saw one that evoked stronger emotion than any I had ever seen. It was called Mama Bird.

It held more color than any painting I had ever seen, had more moving parts and texture than even the most dynamic sculpture in town. It was a curious thing, in the diverse reactions it generated. Personally, I felt horror and disgust at the sight of it, while others didn't seem to react at all. I daresay that nobody around me was even aware of this masterpiece's existence. There was a certain mock naturalism to the lighting, as though machines were trying to simulate sunlight. The pieces moved without thought or motivation, yet it was remarkably structured and industrialized. If you looked closely, you could see that it was a pointillist monster built of hundreds of tiny people trapped within the skin. The pinpricks of color were masterful, to the point that you had to really draw yourself back to see what the work truly was.

Machines worked across its skin, operated by slaves, the faces of which were dramatic caricatures of misery and shame. These men and women were made to look the same, to blend in with the machine. It almost seemed to be making a statement about the shame of individuality and humanity as a whole. The grand focus was on the Machine, the mechanism for which they all lived. The dredges pushed and pulled, dragging vain people down the belts to the juicers. These braggarts and swaggerers were no different than the workers, were made from the same materials, yet were glorified as they were robbed. The workers fed them into the Machine where they were squeezed of their very lifeblood. The liquid gold was toted to the top of the work and it finally became clear that you were looking at a pyramid of meat. At the very top, perfect and beautiful, wearing only the finest clothes, were vampires.

They drank of their willing victims, eschewing all dignity and drinking like dogs from their buckets. They gorged themselves until they made themselves sick, and would purge their stomachs into the mouths of the overseers beneath them. The overseers, in turn, would sick into the mouths of the underseers beneath them, who would feed the seers beneath them in such a horrific manner. By the time the blood reached the slaves, the feeding had been reduced to a few oily drops.

I looked at this artwork, this “unstill life” and wondered why nobody else could see it. They stared with glazed eyes and empty hearts, stepping through the artwork and feeding the Machine. I wanted to tell them that this was insanity, that nobody should ever help make such a monstrous and foul work...but I felt the tidal pull, that drive that dragged me inexorably down those belts to the slaves and their juicers. For all of my pomposity and assumed wisdom, I had inadvertently contributed to Mama Bird by going to Wal-Mart with the rest of them.

Some would say that what I saw had nothing to do with art. They call me pretentious and vulgar and a fool, telling me that I have no concept of real art. Art is painted, art is sculpted, art is performed, art is written. But these aren't art, merely the methods of artists. Much like biology, geology, and physics, art is one of the highest sciences. Art is, at its very core, the science of metaphor. Going all the way back to the most primitive cave paintings, it has served as the most beautiful lie of human existence: The statement that this is that.

It's easy to look at the Mona Lisa and the Sistene Chapel and declare it art. You have to, because you're told to. To compare an abstract to the works of Leonardo and declare them equals borders on heresy, but an honest man can't help but do so. The observer may be able to more easily identify what the “great works” are, but that doesn't mean a thing. Anybody can paint a dog and make it a dog. A computer can print a dog of such detail that no human artist can match it, but a printer was never declared an artist. Art is the ascription of meaning. Any copy machine can draw a dog, but it takes an artist to say the dog represents faithfulness.

Oftentimes, it's not even the creator that intends the meaning. Sometimes a dog is just a dog and a knife is just a knife. Abstracts are truly beautiful in this way. A brushstroke here, a brushstroke there, and you have a pretty picture. It's colors on a canvas, nothing more. You show it to your friend and he sees an expression of anger. You show it to another, and they see the texture of flowers. From cave art of mammoths to the realistic and grotesque skulls painted by Bob Eggleton, we lose sight of the big picture: Both are nothing but paint. Whether the viewer (or even the artist) can readily identify with the work, it doesn't matter. Art is what is made of it. What moves one man to tears or laughter or shrieks of terror is another man's everyday life.

All men are artists, whether they admit it or not. From dullards to pragmatists to pretentious toffs, we all see the world as metaphor. Nobody looks at a painting and dismisses it as nothing but paint. It's obviously people in a boat. The pixels of television and computer screens are pointillism at its most basic level. To make sense of any of this requires imagination. The goal of the artist is to only take this further. To see Wal-Mart as a menagerie of horrors only requires a slight change of perspective.

Then again, maybe it doesn't.

Simulated Poverty

Source

This past Friday, I went to the Gadsden Museum of Art to see the works of graffiti artist, Scape Martinez. Beyond using the prolificacy of street art to determine when I was in a bad part of town, I've had very little exposure to this artform. I feel as though my inner art critic failed me. I was unimpressed by the works that I saw. Allow me to elaborate. I couldn't hope to paint such intricate works, certainly not with spray paint. The best I've managed was when I, in a fit of idiot teenage rebellion, tagged my bedroom wall with a massive pentagram. My parents were of the strict, religious breed, so this made sense in my enraged state of mind. Afterwards, when the bloodhaze of anger had lifted, I hid my “masterpiece” behind a rug I nailed to the wall until I moved out. That being said, none of the artwork spoke to me. It was very elaborate and colorful, but even if I could spare the funding, I would not have paid the four thousand dollars that was being asked.

I was struck with the strangeness of what I was seeing. What was now hanging in a museum had been called criminal activity for countless generations before this one. Perhaps it strikes a chord with our love of rebellion, but could it be considered counter-cultural if it wasn't done in protest? It seems almost a parody of freedom and poverty. This seems to be a prevailing theme in our culture of excess. Rap music is the urban equivalent of bluegrass, where a poverty stricken sub-culture finds solidarity through art. It’s what makes the works of Ralph Stanley and Tupac Shakur, two musicians one would rarely compare, beautiful in their imperfections. This, though, this was only aesthetically appealing and nothing more.

It may be my rural upbringing that robs the works of emotional value. I have nothing to associate them with. I know that greater artists than me have documented graffiti and have garnered an appreciation for it. The famed author-turned-painter, Clive Barker, did such in his wonderful novella, The Forbidden. This was later Americanized and re-titled Candyman. Mr. Barker used this story to describe the ugly beauty of the street art he had seen. Indeed, the most notable scene of the film, when the boogeyman’s lair was discovered by entering the mouth of an elaborate painting of a screaming face, was taken second for second from the story.

As I write this, I think of other street art I've seen. Horrible obscenities standing side-by-side with such beauty as to move the viewer, these are a reflection of urban humanity. For every “thug-nificent” gangsta wanna-be, there are dozens of people struggling just to keep their children fed. Though often viewed as the just being kept under siege by the unjust that roam the streets, the lines between these two classes are often blurred. Many gangs are clans of rogues, led by their pauper princes. Though violent and brutal to outsiders, they are nothing more than the bottom rung of society struggling to survive. Love and hate permeate their struggles for what destitute scraps of power they can steal.

I guess that’s why this art has such an appeal. Life is empty without struggle, for to struggle is to truly live. By looking at these sanitized paintings, we can approach this vagabond life without concern for dirtying our hands with the soot and grime of poverty. Living in our shells, we can only observe images of actual struggle, so that we can tell ourselves that we understand it. We float in our clouds of safety and claim to sympathize with our fellow man, but at the end of the day we go to our air-conditioned homes, feed our children, watch television, and slip into our clean beds. Are we really alive when we only live vicariously?

I stepped away from this simulated poverty and saw the photography exhibit. There were dozens upon dozens of photographs showing dogs and cats and birds, spruced up with the occasional lizard; essentially the closest that the domesticated modern man comes to seeing actual animals. There were a few exceptions, such as the face of an elephant, but these were depressingly few. Animals, scenery, portraiture, we surround ourselves with such lovely things. It seemed almost to compliment the insult to poverty: Look at the lives of poor people, now go back to your real life of pretty things.

But there was one that gave me pause and I hate myself for not remembering the name of the artist. It was a black and white photograph of a middle aged woman, with all of her hanging skin and scars. Time had turned her belly button into an inverted V of wrinkled skin. Her face wasn't pictured, but the folds of her neck were clearly visible, as were the spotty patches of skin that are caused by years of exposure to sunlight. She was topless, but there was no nudity. She was using her arms to cover her one remaining breast. She was a breast cancer survivor, somebody who had endured true pain and suffering. Her scarred and aged body was ugly, but so remarkably beautiful I wanted to cry. There she was, naked and vulnerable, but strong and defiant to the hateful stars above.

Her nude form spoke more of pain and struggle than any sanitized street art ever could.

Holy Hipsters

I hate french fries. Like, I refuse to believe that there is a single person on Earth who truly loves them.

We all know they're like little greasy nuclear bombs that wriggle their way from our stomach right into our arteries. We know that any manner of inedible contaminant can easily fall into that fryer and pass off as that weird fry at the bottom of the bag. We know that if not for the metric shit-ton of salt that's poured over these things, we would despise them down to their last molecule. We know all of this, but we still eat them. Unless you're a health freak, in which case you need to get on out of here, you vitamin water chugging mutant.

You're goddamn right.    Source

We eat them because we're told to. There is literally no other logical reason for it. We're told from an early age not to waste food or to waste money, but food costs money, so it's all about the Benjamins or whatever. It's cheaper to just get the combo, even though we know that the fries are going to be the greasy nail in our over-sized coffins. The reason they add so much salt is because fried potatoes taste like fucking fried potatoes and no sane person would eat them. It's like adding sugar to a doughnut made of farts: You would probably be better off just not eating it.

This had nothing to do with the rest of the article.

Oh, right, it kind of did. Let's make up a person. He has brown hair and blue eyes, each with 20/20 vision. Each of his eyes, I mean. His hair is incapable of vision because it's hair. He is 5'9 and 160 pounds, with an IQ of 100. He makes $30k a year at a job that he hates, lives in the suburbs, and doesn't listen to rap, metal, or country music. He is completely average in every way, except for his name. His name is Timothy Terwilliger IV, because fuck this guy.

Now, Timothy Terwilliger IV wants to stand out from the crowd but can't figure out how. He tries to get a tattoo, but settles for a handshake and a scornful glare from a man who may or may not be a biker. He tries to get a nice car, but can't afford it. He can't sing, he can't dance, he can't draw or paint or act, so what's a boy to do? He decides to be French. Now, he doesn't want to move to France. Average men don't do that. He learns a few choice phrases in French and tries to impress his friends with his cultured language. He studies French fashion, French food, French movies, French kissing (with his pillow). He basically becomes that mysterious crispy object in the bottom of the bag, the one that masquerades itself as a french fry. He knows he's not French. We all know damn well he's not French. But he's gonna call himself French nonetheless.

Timothy Terwilliger IV is now a fucking hipster. He's pretending to understand something he doesn't and looks down on others for not making believe that they do too.

He also grew a beard. Source

Now, there is no doubt that Timothy Terwilliger IV is obviously pretentious and annoying. He's mocking another culture by pretending to be a part of it. You don't think that uneducated imitation is mockery? Try going to downtown Atlanta while wearing blackface and see if they accept you.

Now with that in mind, I'll raise this question: Are Christians hipsters for calling themselves children of Judah? Now before everyone gets up in arms, hear me out. I'm not making a statement about whether there is a God or not, that's beyond the scope of this article. I'm not going to patronize you for your beliefs, no matter if I disagree with them. You believe in God and Heaven and all that...but it has nothing to do with you. You remember that Old Testament, the one you just kind of skim through looking for red letters? Yeah, that's the history and culture of a completely different nation. All that stuff that Moses said about The Law? It was called The Law because it was the legal system of his people. He didn't write it for you or your mama or Judge Roy Moore. He wrote it for his people. In that time, you would have been killed or enslaved by the Children of God. Why? Because you weren't a Child of God. Fastforward to the New Testament. You remember how they raised a big deal about Gentiles? That was you. When Jesus said  "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel", he wasn't exactly being all inclusive.

Yeah, you keep walking, homie.    Source

You don't think this is pretentious? Most Christians don't live their day to day lives any different than an atheist. Every once in a while, they might take to the knee, but how often do you see Christians living among the homeless? How often do you see them living the lives of ascetics, monks, martyrs, whatever you want to call it? What if somebody claimed to worship the Egyptian gods, but only had the vaguest understanding of Egyptian rituals and culture? And they didn't really do anything to practice their religion except donate money to Egyptian infomercials? Yeah, you'd call them a hipster asshole.

As I said, it's great that you believe in God. More power to you. But don't claim to be a moral authority and think you can tell other people about the Jewish culture because you bloody read about it. Don't be a hipster. Find your own way to worship God. Don't keep eating french fries because everyone you know does it or because "It's the way it's done." You're in the wrong hemisphere to be recognizing Israelite rituals. Don't eat your parent's french fries. Eat Freedom Fries. Eat Fried Tater Crisps. But don't do it because "it's tradition", because, I hate to tell you this, but "it's not your tradition".

This has just been some random thoughts by a casual observer. If you agree or disagree, that's your prerogative. These observations are casual and so I wouldn't be surprised to find them inaccurate and in the end, grossly off-topic. But they're my thoughts and it's boring to keep them to myself.

On Leadership

You won't like him when he's angry.   Source

That's the beginning of the big boss fight when 90's Jesus smacked it down with Zeus on a scale more epic than any mere mortal can conceive. That also has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Continuing what I was discussing in my previous article, I'm having to get my GED. Because I'm not made of money (that's some other Eggleton), I'm taking a class so they'll pay for the test for me. They asked for me to write an essay for Language, so I wrote the article below. I did no research, nor did I do an outline. I did it all in one draft. It's a GED class and anybody who can't crap out an essay better than this doesn't deserve a diploma. Without further ado, here's my polished turd of an essay.

LEADERSHIP

   In these questionable times we find ourselves in, one must raise a question of leadership. What makes a good leader? The common man will raise many points in an attempt to grasp such a nebulous concept. He will say that a good leader is somebody he can trust, somebody he can have a beer with, perhaps even somebody who has a good financial history. It seems imperative for the common man to be able to relate to his leader.

   This is why the common man is a fool. He searches for the father he never had, a powerful patriarch to guide and protect him through life. We edge toward a time when we may be led by a matriarch, but even those women we may elect are forced to fill a male archetypal role. The commoners wish to have leaders they may relate to, yet they turn to deceivers who have accumulated more wealth than a thousand common men.

   This seems a cynical view of the wealthy elite, and some may write this off as jealousy. But one must ask, how does such a person become rich? By taking the money of others. This is the basis of all economics. Though theft is considered a horrifying concept, simply outrageous, confidence games are legitimate. What is advertising  but convincing others to give the con man money for products they don't actually need?

   With this being said, our current system invalidates all candidates who aren't millionaires. The common man trusts their leaders? If these men of greed had a knife to a peasant's throat and were offered a million dollars for murder, would they do it? Every commoner, these followers, would say yes. They would then rationalize it by saying that anybody would, but they only do so out of the romance of Stockholm Syndrome. When afflicted by this perversion, a boot on the neck feels an awful lot like a kiss.

   If you want to vote for somebody you trust and vote for a liar, are you in any position to call anybody mad? In this nation where those we trust raid the coffers and murder the citizenry under the guise of protecting national security, we must ask what is missing. It is certainly true that a leader is somebody we can trust and relate to. In branches of civilization beyond the hearthfire, into the towns and cities and counties and  states, all the way up to the national and global levels, we are searching for grander versions of our own parents. As adults, we long for the patriarch and/or matriarch that will protect us from our own decisions and the decisions of others.

   More important than our ability to understand our leaders is their ability to understand us. For us to trust them, they have to trust us. In the ancient world, a king who divides himself from the people was a king who would one day divide himself from his own head. We send the poor to fight our battles overseas while the wealthy never know pain. In ancient Greece, it was the wealthy elite, the kings and noblemen, who protected the others.

   Why was this? Because they could afford the best weapons and armor. A leader is not a sanctified rose, to be spirited away and protected. This is a cult of personality. Leaders are but flesh and blood, mere men and women like us. They are to be starving and bleeding with their people, fighting and working alongside their fellow man.

   Someday, we may stop searching for these perverse mothers and fathers. We may look to elect our brothers and sisters, those who understand us. If the common man may elevate his peers to such a state, he may someday come to have the confidence and loyalty to trust himself to take charge of his own fate. Though we may never see this day when there are no slaves, there are no masters, we can still dream. Dreams are the one thing the thieves may never steal.

And now I give you a picture of a puppy.

Cute, indeed.   Source

Not Dead But Dreaming

Sorry for the long break. Life interrupted cyberlife and life doesn't play fair.

Let me tell you something about homeschooling. It sounds like a good idea on paper. What parent doesn't want to teach their kids and protect them from the corrupting influences they'll find in public schools? You build a relationship with their kids, keep them from drugs and crime, protect them from school shootings, all that. Sounds great, huh?

In practice, this is a terrible, terrible idea. Your kids need to experience other kids. They need to learn how to socialize and build friendships. If their only friends are mom and dad, who are they going to turn to with their problems? Everyone likes to romanticize their relationship with their kids by saying their kids can come to them with anything. Ask yourself two questions; First, are you going to be able to be there for your kids? And secondly, are they going to want to tell you about their problems?

Everyone likes to think that they will always be there for their kids. But when you're tired from working to put food on the table, most parents will come home, have dinner, and get some Me Time in front of the TV. They seem to assume that their kids will voice in their concerns, but you're both hypnotized by the talking heads in the glowing box in front of you. You watch American Idol or some such rubbish, call it bonding, and call it a night. This isn't bonding at all, it's coexisting. How can a teenager learn the subtle nuances of communication from this? Do you really think that they'll talk about their personal problems in this situation? You're not their friend. You're an authority figure and a distant one at that.

People adore the idea of being friends with their kids, to reclaim that closeness they think people had back in the day...but they're not willing to put forth any effort to fulfill this. Relationships require work that nobody seems to have time for these days. We live in a state of misery and loneliness only an industrialized society brings. In no other part of human history have so many people occupied the same rooms and been so distant. Close families and friendships are a wonderful thing, but are we capable of this? We show each other bite-sized bursts of love during every other commercial break and dive back into the quagmire of distraction. Those dollar menu social scenes are only broken down further if everybody is buried in their phones, Liking each other's statuses on Facebook and reading what some dickbag on Twitter is saying. The good times are gone, but are they lost forever?

In all probability, yes. With nobody wanting to make a change, nothing will change. It's easy to say you want change yet you won't turn off that fucking TV.

Source

My original point, before I got distracted like a monkey with a taser, was the problem with homeschooling I haven't addressed: It doesn't mean a goddamn thing. The State no longer recognizes homeschool diplomas, so, for all intents and purposes, you're forcing them to drop out. I fell out of the blogosphere because I was trying to go back to college. I put two years into community college once upon a time and I'd like to finish that up...unfortunately, all that school time was for nothing because I have to get a bloody GED to go back. 

Being poor (again, college dropout in the hizzy), I couldn't afford the $50 for the test, so I had to put thirty hours into the class to prep for the GED. Surrounded by broken hopes and broken minds, I realized one thing very quickly: I was massively overqualified for this class. Somehow they managed to find me thirty hours of work that wouldn't put me to sleep and I'm now off to get my GED...eight years after I graduated from high school. The gods are real and they're damn lunatics.

But everybody, I'm here to tell you that you can do away with that headstone you were lovingly carving out of gold for me. You can take my picture off the milk carton with offers of a million dollar reward. I'm not dead, I'm not missing, I've just let shit get in the way. I hope to once again regal you with obvious wisdom, with all the subtlety of a drunken, raging Sean Connery.

SourceI Googled "drunken raging Sean Connery"
and this is what I got.
Hey Google. That's rough.
Just the way you're mama likes it.

I'll be here, hope to see you here too.