Cause for celebration

We were driving Sunday, running errands, finishing our holiday shopping, spending time together and there was a hush over the city. The sky was grey, striped here and there with thin blue veins and there were few people out. Even the parking lots at the mall were mostly empty and we didn't have to wait in line anywhere. It was calming. For the first time in a long time, the world felt sane.

It surprised me. All of the worry about the economy, the stress of building sculpture for deadlines, the urgency of making sure all of our six children are adequately spoiled with tons of needless junk for Christmas went away and we were left with a focus on quality, on time, and on the space around us.

That mood has stayed with me and this morning, when I woke to an unexpected foot of snow on the ground, the world white and still, I felt especially blessed. Perhaps we are all taking a deep breath and the slowing down is good for us. Maybe we will spend more time with our family, friends and neighbors around meals we cook ourselves. Maybe we will move away from cheap disposable goods to a renewed focus on quality and durability. Maybe there is something really good in this period of our collective history. A new beginning. A quiet joy. A cause for celebration.

Conceptual Art

Sometimes I get so frustrated. Reading essays today on Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman and others, I feel like screaming. What is it in our world that values derogatory social criticism and horror so highly? The "real" it seems, to me, is too obvious. Certainly death is real, and commentary on it has been a staple of western tradition. Still, morbidity, exploitation, dissection and dissemination are so easy that I am repulsed by the contemporary art establishment's thrall.

Lying awake tonight, trying to understand the energy given to sadistic and horrific ejaculations, I ended up envisioning my own "outrageous" exhibit. Admittedly, it was fun. I imagined the exhibit space down to its last detail--a beautiful room, replete with aesthetic art, furniture, rugs, but scattered throughout with my own particular social critique. There would be an enormous mirror layered with shards of other mirrors, one on top of the other so that all one would see in the reflection would be fragments of self, repeated endlessly. No full, complete view would be forthcoming. Interspersed in the mirror shards would be fragments of text from letters, newspaper clippings, old photographs, sundry household effects. I would call the piece, "Introspection divided by obsession = Narcissism." Then there would be a mannequin, or maybe two, completely wrapped in computer and electronic wires holding blackberries or the equivalent. One would see their eyes, which are down cast and focused, but nothing else human. This piece I would entitle, "Email me." There would be a pair of lovers, so completely involved in a kiss that they are oblivious to their surroundings. Encircling them would be several nay-sayers, holding up screens and smirking. This piece would be called, "Get a room," and would be a commentary on the hypocrisy of our society that makes the porn industry more successful than the mainstream film industry while it shuns natural and beautiful affection. Finally, in the corner, would be an expensive toilet. When the viewer flushes it, it would peal with laughter--a commentary on the value of "potty humor"in today's society which, when all is said and done, contributes exactly as much as a laughing toilet to human endeavor.

Finally, I got out of bed, poured a very stiff drink, and started to write this because if I succumb to what is easy (and contemporary art as it is revered is as easy as a simple landscape delivered with a little aplomb) then I forsake everything I value in art. For art, metal art or stone, oil or pastel, music or literature, must give you more than what you can read in the newspaper (or on the Internet) on any given day. We are so good at recognizing, and accepting, what is wrong with our world. We so seldom focus on what is right. How does one know love? Certainly not through sentimental film or literature. How does one know beauty? If we are looking to art to help us understand that which makes us recoil, then how is it that the mainstream news media is not being auctioned at Christies? Today's news headline "Aunt arrested in chained teen case," and its accompanying photograph, is certainly as shocking and socially revealing as a cow sawed into sections and preserved in formaldehyde. For me, art has to be about the things we know but can not articulate. Death is easy. It happens to us all. We know what death is. But can we define love? Or faith? Fear or joy? Art, I think, must attempt to describe and deepen our understanding of the things we know but can not define.

It would be fun to let go, to absolve the frailty and banality of what is human in techni-color, to finally free myself of rage and horror as I make metaphors for the most low in human experience and celebrate myself as one who has the "balls" to be honest about it. Ultimately, that endeavor would prove as mundane and worthless to me as it seems to have done to those who came before me and are finally settling down to raise their kids, sobering, finally, after too long an adolescence. Instead, I try to articulate that which is as real as death, but more rewarding -- I try to articulate the components of life that defy definition and are as individual as they are inspiring.