ALIENATED AND IN DOUBT

Any astute observer of our doctrinaire social and political environment will agree that to be right and to belong are the twin scourges of individuality. Nothing is more comforting to the intellectually timid than a club of like-minded provincials. We see it in the intolerance of the Ayatollahs, we see it in the intransigence of the ideologically entrenched and we see it in the hundreds of thousands of well-meaning lost souls who cling to cults like driftwood in a storm.

“Confirmation Bias” is a nice way of putting it and I thank our responsible scholars for giving it such a sweet name. I call it brain-wash and if you’ve mastered the delicate art of emptying the befuddled brain of a sensitive and wounded waif it takes nothing at all to fill it up with nonsense.

An artist friend of mine recently told me a story about his cousin Ruthie. She was going through a painful divorce and her supposed support system was of little use. She was on terrible terms with her family and her confidantes and friends were powerless to console her. She flirted with suicide and like most flirtations, it was never really serious. She tried therapy but that apparently required too much honesty. She was too afraid to find out that her husband left her because she’s a whiny narcissistic bitch.

She finally found help in a cockamamie self-help racket called GroundSign Technologies. There she found just the right amount of slogans and superficial palliatives to make her feel good about herself again. 

My friend tells me that she’s always in a big rush to get to her various classes and workshops which typically begin in the early evening and drone on till after midnight. He complains that he can’t talk to her anymore because an important part of the program are the enrollment quotas she’s expected to fulfill and she’s constantly badgering him to come for a free introductory class.

I tell my friend to relax. It seems like his cousin has finally she found a place to belong.

She’s at peace now because she finally found a place to be right.

Sad to say, but to belong and to be right are the irresistible Bobbsey Twins of the emotionally untethered and the spiritually bereft.

But it’s really a terrible shame, he tells me, and there’s real emotion behind his grief.

My friend must be nursing some serious grudges because the next thing he says is that Ruthie could have used “that very same fearful myopia, that same priceless affinity for tedious repetition and that same desperate craving for acceptance and validation and used it to become an independent curator. At least then I might have gotten invited to be in some Dystopic-Gender -Neutral-Post-Structuralist-Pre-Robotic-Ur-Lacanian type exhibition or two.”

Ouch!

Okay, okay. Maybe I’ve curated a few less than stellar shows and yes, perhaps I used a bit of trendy artsy argot here and there to get some traction and yes, maybe I neglected to include my friend in any of these shows but is that any reason to compare what I do to these merchants of feel-good and fluff? 

Have I ever asked anyone to attend a Leadership and Communication Seminar, a Creativity and Relationship Retreat or an Awareness Training Home Introduction?

I suppose the moral of the story is that none of us are blameless. 

Or as Bob Dylan put it, "You may serve the Devil/Or you may serve the Lord/But you gotta serve somebody"

FILIAL IMPIETY

I didn't take to drawing naturally. I'm sort of a half-baked academic type. After an undistinguished undergraduate career at State University of New York in Oneonta (where I majored in beer and minored in masturbation) I took the uncharacteristic step of pursuing a graduate degree in what I thought at the time would be a subject that would impress my parents.

"Critical Theory" was vague enough and carried enough hard syllables to suggest a gravitas unfamiliar to my working class upstate family. They never for a moment suspected that I chose CalArts because I heard that art school chicks were "easy" and that the whether never got colder than 50 degrees.

Well, much to my astonishment both the girls and the course material were more challenging than I had anticipated but after two grueling years in Southern California I discovered that I had a latent taste for dense, tautological dialectic and a blatant taste for men.

Fast forward to the present and I'm an art critic in New York City, getting paid to go to openings and writing dense, tautological essays that no one but a desperate adjunct could possibly read.

I suppose I started going to life drawing classes as a form of penance. The only way I could reconcile my trafficking in art critical tripe was by getting a bit of training in the very thing I was trying to debunk.

Who knew I would get good at it? 

When a friend of mine offered to do a video of me drawing I thought to myself, "finally I'll have something to show my parents that they'll understand!"

... sort of ...

THE THEATER OF CARELESS CRUELTY

When Erhard Bern first developed his Spin/Speed Awareness theories he was ridiculed as a crank. He was captivated by Robert Jay Lifton's  research on thought control during the Korean War and suspected there was serious money to be made in what he euphemistically called "personality development."

He went on to create a small empire of Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT) clinics around the country and has inspired countless individuals to seek the professional services of exit therapists, hypnotists, locksmiths, bounty hunters, family counselors, divorce lawyers, tavern keepers, marijuana dispensers and what Canadians like to call les filles de joie.

It was Bern's belief and ultimately his dream, that he could create a vanguard of like-minded ontological stormtroopers who, through severe and consistent training methods, successfully estrange ordinary people from their past. 

Aside from the conventional forms of brainwashing - the long hours of indoctrination, the rejiggering of familiar vocabulary into strange new meanings, the constant repetition of illogical concepts until they acquired the urgent ring of truth and the sequestration of the initiates into intimate support groups, each with an assigned minder who Bern cleverly called a "coach" - he introduced a bizarre centrifugal machine (the 'Erwhirl') that literally spun a participant at high speed in order to physically empty their brains of potentially dangerous skepticism.




Bern eventually overplayed his hand and after a string of lawsuits and more than a few embarrassing disclosures about his private life, he sold the franchise to his cousin Manny and moved to the Cayman Islands with his chiropractor's niece.

A recent exhibition at the new Landmark Visual Arts Forum in Brooklyn has highlighted this interesting piece of popular culture and has provided an interesting aesthetic lens on the American obsession with programmed re-invention. 

The Russian conceptual artist Boris Oushensky created an hysterical manifesto called "The Baby-Steps Toward Mindless Authenticity," (Небольшие промывают шаги к подлинности") which calls on all free citizens of the world to submit to "the integrity model of Vladamir Putin."

 Los Angeles diva, Dahlia Danton somehow snuck her completely unrelated drawings into the show under the cover of some dubious philological connection.

The Genesis of Being: Bern's Bailiwick #3

But by far the most impressive piece was by a little known Montenegrin artist by the name of Davor Megukhach. He actually found the original blueprints for Bern's Erwhirl and had four built to their precise specifications. His subsequent videos, however disturbing, may pave the way toward Erhard Bern's eventual rehabilitation.

FATAL FLAWS, DESPERATE CRAVINGS AND THE BANALITY OF AMBITION

I have a friend on the West Coast who grew up in Queens but you'd never know it. His name is Phil and as kids we used to call him Phillie - not as in horse but as in Mike Schmidt - but now he only answers to Philip.

He's an actor, or maybe more precisely an aspiring or struggling actor. In the ten years since he moved to L.A. he's booked a few commercials and landed a few Indie walk-ons. He takes yoga twice a week and trains at Gold's Gym with a few guys from the Kings.

He does some substitute teaching in the public schools to make ends meet and even though he barely has two pennies to rub together he hired this "career counselor" to help him get ahead.

He's had a few relationships and almost got married once to this really nice woman from Seattle. Her name was Penelope and at 28 she was the senior social worker for Family Services of Yerba County. They were a great couple but ultimately Phil chickened out.

"I have this fear of intimacy thing," he explained, "whenever someone gets too close to me I feel threatened and terrified."

He figures that with all the money he saves by not dating anyone, he can afford going to all these expensive career seminars.

He's so hooked on these "empowerment" classes that I actually think he would experience a profound sense of disappointment if his acting finally took off.

"It comes down to this," he told me the other day while we were sipping chia seed slurpies at an acai bar on the Santa Monica pier, "I'd much rather be coached than loved. Relationships are far too transparent. As soon as you let someone get close to you they learn to read you like an oracle bone. Life coaches are all about encouragement. They never make me wrong."

... okay...  

It sounds like a business model straight out of the art world. Your clients are terribly insecure so you give them just enough advice to make them feel better about themselves but not quite enough to render your services obsolete.

Who do you think the better actor is, Phil or the coach?

CONNOISSEURSHIP

I bought a work of art the other day.

It was nothing special, just a drawing, but I discovered in it a quality one rarely comes across these days.

Chantal DeMauri-Faure, 2015

Sincerity.

But not just that.

There was something unique about this work, something almost embarrassing and therefore irredeemably uncool.

The work was an unabashed tribute to process and craft which in no small measure was due to its unmistakably feminine touch. Though neither sentimental nor cliché, the drawing suggested to me a more innocent age when being merely clever was conceptually inadequate in sustaining a body of work.

Berthe Morisot

It was as if the artist had channeled the likes of Morisot, Porter and Micah Carpentier.

The artist's name is Chantal DeMauri-Faure and she lives in Ghent where she teaches design at the Instituut Voor Niet Erg Fijn Kunst (IVNEFK).

I considered buying a second drawing but honestly, it was way over-priced.

Chantal DeMauri-Faure, 2015

So I took the artist out to dinner instead.

 

THE BANE OF BARTLETT'S

It hasn't been that long since I left college and the echos of my professors' words are still ringing in my ears. Some of my teachers were truly inspired with lofty rhetoric that stuck in my gut like grits. Others were, to use my little nephew Moses' favorite word,  'lame'.

I went to an art school and if you ever want to meet a group of bitter failures just register for a painting class. Painters are the worst. They all pretend that they are so sublimely important and it was only the cruel mistress of fate that forced them into the indignity of a day job.

I guess not all the painting instructors. Only the male ones in their forties with tenure. 

You get the feeling that the only place they ever get to wield any authority is in front of a gaggle of tattooed undergraduates. You can always spot a busted and deflated painter because the first thing they do in class is show you their work. It's always so sad because after the third or fourth slide it becomes pretty obvious to everyone that the poor slob hasn't had a show in years. 

These guys always talk about the same thing, how true quality is ignored by the ignorant vicars of culture and you get the sense that they really believe they can correct these injustices by pontificating to teenagers. 

After about 3 or 4 weeks of class you begin to feel a distinct pattern emerging. You start to realize that your professor, in lieu of any discernible technical skills, has what seems like a bottomless reservoir of illuminating quotations from the great artists of yore.

"Art is the lie that reveals the truth!" they roar with what might appear to a visiting parent as something resembling conviction.

"Genius is nothing but childhood recovered at will," another warhorse that I think I even heard on an episode of the Simpsons.

If you're lucky enough to get a particularly insecure teacher you may hear this chestnut from Rimbaud delivered with stentorian mispronunciation:

 "Il s'agit d'arriver à l'inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens." 



 You won't, however, find out what it means unless you have one of those private school types in your class and they'll surely blurt it out in no time, corrections and all.

A lot people - I suppose the mediocre majority - have to have some outlet where that can pretend to a certain level of leadership. It doesn't matter what it is, so long as they can lord it over someone else.

It is the ecology of PTA activism, small town government, sewing circles, personal development coaching and the priesthood.

But as my dad used to say:

 "Those who can, write. Those who can't, quote."

POST-MODERN ENGLISH USAGE

At the Watermark Quorum they call it "stepping on vapors." That's when the edifice of one's "fictional self" serves as a guiding principle for a misdirected life.

 Or what my Cobble Hill neighbor Carmine might call "horseshit."

The streets of Brooklyn are no longer awash in Saddlebreds and Mustangs but Carmine still has an unerring ear for all manner of dissimulating feculence. I wonder what he'd make of the Watermark Quorum.

I've been taking courses at The Quorum for about a year now, ever since my beautiful and exotic girlfriend Noga assumed the distinguished position of girlfriend emeritus. She told me to "show some character," "grow up," that she was not my "mommy" and that I had - and this was the unkindest cut of all - "the aesthetic discernment of a postman." (I suppose in her native Israel, mailmen aren't known for their erudition or sophistication).

My friend Serge told me about the Quorum and how it changed his life so with half an open mind I decided to give it a go.

The whole thing is set up so that you are practically shamed into facing your vulnerabilities. You meet in small groups led by "team leaders" who "coach" you into small epiphanies that they encouragingly call "breakthroughs."

For example, when I admitted to my group that despite the admonitions of my dental hygienist I neglected to floss my teeth, they looked at me so sympathetically that I welled up with tears. When I came back the following week I joyfully announced that after facing all of my inhibiting fears I had successfully (though perhaps not thoroughly) flossed 5 of the previous 7 days.

The event was greeted as a dramatic success and indeed I felt flush with a sense of palpable accomplishment! 

The most useful lesson I learned from the Quorum was to avoid what they call "feckless phrasings." (Alliteration is to self-help what photosynthesis is to plants). A feckless phrase is any idiomatic construction that contains irony, lyrical ambiguity, rhetorical flourish, double entendre, ornamental description, metrical cadences, extraneous adjectives or anything else that is not plainly transactional or utilitarian. The only possible exceptions would be cozy, homespun aphorisms and a limited number of uncomplicated similes, a list of which can be found on the Quorum's sensibly designed website.

I can't tell you how much this has helped my critical essays which are now featured semi-regularly in the Quorum's quarterly newsletter Extraordinary News for an Exceptional Life. 

 I sure hope Noga is reading this.

DRAWING ... AGAIN

THE DIMMER DOPPELGANGER

Domingo Sabatinos

I often wonder what it must be like to see the world through the eyes of Domingo Sabatinos.

Here is a writer like no other.

At home in exile, dissolute yet devout, Sabatinos has charmed close readers of experimental fiction for years. Heir to Borges and Cortázar, he resembles them only in his ferocious originality and his deep commitment to Turgenev.

He often writes about love but never from the point of view of advocacy. To Sabatinos, love is an unfortunate affliction, something of a handicap like a stutter or a limp. He's won nearly every conceivable literary prize save for the Nobel, though he's been a front running candidate for years.

I met him in Cannes where a film adaptation of his short story Berel the Clown was screened. He was accompanied by an impressive bevy of young Eastern European starlets including Anca Papanasi and Maldina Amandine. 

There's something suspicious about his demeanor. Whenever he's approached by a journalist or a fan he reaches for his coat pocket with a nervous, jolting gesture as if he were a bouncer or a poorly trained policeman. It's said that he carries a 247 Beretta though I know of no one who has actually seen it. This uncertainty only adds to the mystique but I hear that militant gun advocates are quickly losing patience with what they see as a childish hoax. 
 
He's never been married though he's been linked to several young American poets. The fact that he allows himself to be photographed while in the company of beautiful actresses but is never seen in public with a woman of letters is supposed to somehow attest to his seriousness.

I'd love to get to know him better but with his uncanny resemblance to the Los Angeles artist David Schoffman, I feel that there's almost no need to. 

Strong physical resemblances between unrelated people are an occult reflection in an unsettling physiognomic lottery. At this point, to pursue a relationship with the real Sabatinos might seem like an unnecessary defection. 

I suppose I'm stuck with the dimmer doppelgänger. 

PROGRESS (OR PERISH)

While sincerity is the highest form of intellectual treachery, when it comes the ragtag denizens of the unregulated art world the unleveling impact of legitimate insight rarely goes unpunished. The sanctions inflicted upon the thoughtful and the discerning can be draconian or worse. 

 

Nobody likes a smartypants.

 

Aloïs Gerstedes had outlived his critics. As a young refugee fleeing the Nazis, Gerstedes arrived in the United States during an American golden age of ideas. At Columbia University his professors included Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro and Doris Killhany.

 

As an outspoken progressive he was called to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) where he steadfastly refused to cooperate. As a consequence Gerstedes found it nearly impossible to pursue his academic work and ended up teaching art history in a public high school in Queens. (Yes, they used to teach art history in public high schools!)

 

Mr. Gerstedes was my teacher. 

 

Having survived both Hitler and Senator Joseph McCarthy the New York State Department of Education's 1983 Pedagogy and Advanced Training Standards (PATS) were not about to defeat the brilliant and stubborn Gerstedes.

 

Imagine, after years of soaring lectures on Huzinga, Burckhardt, Berenson and Warbug, field trips to downtown Manhattan to visit the studios of some his artist friends (yes! I met Donald Judd!) and bringing into the classroom distinguished guest speakers like Clement Greenberg and Denny Albatos, Mr. Gerstedes was asked to adjust his curriculum in order to accommodate the (since discredited) "Pleager and Roth Cognitive and Analytical Skill Building Rubric." 

 

Suddenly Mr. Gerstedes was no longer allowed to refer to "The Waning of the Middle Ages" because it was deemed "overly assertive, biased and complex." Professionals visiting his classrooms had to be properly vetted and were only allowed to speak if they received PATS certified training. Art studios were no longer deemed as "appropriate" field trips since the educational value of contemporary art was considered questionable.

 

Mr. Gerstedes quit - or was fired, depending on the telling - and moved to his beloved Tuscany to retire among the tinted hills and scented vines. While he spent his final years writing and painting lovely scenic watercolors New York State rescinded PATS and replaced it with the national standards of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and now The Common Core. The public schools have gutted most of its arts programs and those that remain are mired in the bureaucratic jargon of the Industrial/Educational Complex.

 

But that's okay. Museum attendance is at record levels, especially among school children who are now encouraged to look at all manner of works of art and to talk thoughtfully about their feelings.