Art naturally, is no savior, but the structures that art rests on, including painting, architecture, design can help. A lot. What I mean, is, the imagination with all it’s inventive power can make the world a better place. And, not with the decorations you find in every city, so called “public art”, but in the creation of art linked with living systems. Here’s an example in the Gowanas Canal in Brooklyn, where the exemplary use of oysters has cleaned the water of a gross-out spot, that’s now on its way to recovery. There are artists like architect Kate Orff who seek to offer the sad planet a solution using the grace and gift of biological processes to palliate the woe. Oysters filter pollution, returning clean water to an ecosystem, and when well-established loose their absorbed toxicity and become delicious food. A viable and saving thought process is emerging as the way we live on Planet Earth. Here is Kate Orff giving you the lowdown.

Art is so often a node of wonder for the human race and most often depicted are images of the beauty of the Natural World. These days its usual to see nature washed over by the ravages of industrialization a la Edward Burtynsky:

Images like this are fine and so beautiful in their own way thanks to Burtynsky’s avid eye. An artist of that power and dedication who opens our eyes to the unlikeliest confluence of horror and beauty. Necessary.

Peggy Rathman, an award-winning children’s book artist, and her husband John Wick, an architect and builder have used their visionary skills to create The Marin Carbon project. They bought 600 acres in Nicasio seeking to return it to its natural state as a gift to the world. Peggy is the scion of the Genentech fortune who wanted to return her good fortune to humanity by restoring their land to its original state. Turns out, once intensive grazing has been implemented the land is ruined for a scheme like John and Peggy’s. Hooves compact the soil and the invasive shallow-rooted oat grass make a hard pan just inches below ground. Deep-rooted native grasses don’t stand a chance. With the introduction of just 1/2 inch of compost and a carefully monitored grazing program, the land is well on its way to productivity and planet saving. The supreme bonus of this restoration is that the carbon breathed by the grasses stays in the soil creating a natural carbon sequestration. Two creative souls at work. Like I said, art will save us.

Art is maybe not that thing on your wall, in the corporate board room, taking up space on the mall plaza, art is, as we’ve said it before, where creative thinking is born like The New Alchemy Institute in Woods Hole, MA. I first visited this project in 1974 and got a first-hand look at The Ark. Here is a picture from our visit in 2016, much the same as I remembered, thriving and bustling with ideas. The Ark is a living space that integrates design, beauty and the thrill of seeing something brand new even if it is 50 years old. In the harsh New England climate the new alchemists have created a living house that is not only beautiful and refreshing to inhabit, but the house itself produces food! Here’s picture of the interior showing fish tanks growing tilapia, the water from which will nourish the interior garden.

Finally on our tour of living-systems inspired art work, we come to The Last Resort, the brain child of David Hoffman. His 2.5 acre property is devoted to the idea of finding meaning in living systems. For 45 years Hoffman has been building relentlessly, basing his design ideas on his ten-year journey through Asia. The place is a wonder to visit, and plans are afoot to turn the place into public workshops on design, sustainability and the wonder of life. Don’t let anyone tell you that art has no practical value. David was the first friend I made when I moved to San Geronimo Valley.

David has been under siege by the Marin County building department for 40 years and plans are being hatched to turn his property over to a non-profit entity that will become the care taker of his legacy and his vision for the future. A board has been formed to accomplish this. Yours trulies are on that board.

So we see the creative mind at work with the prime goal: make it beautiful first.

Art is pleasure in the largest sense, whether visual pleasure or thinking pleasure. Connection to art makes for happiness.

Here’s a little story about The Poetry Jukebox, illustrative of the future of art. The Jukebox is a performative act I offer as an auction item at fundraisers. 144 memorized poems are at the ready to be spoken in a one-on-one moment. Ask a “life question” and out rolls the verse. Here is the outfit that goes with it.

At the Friends of the Petaluma River shindig, a few years ago, our congressman Jared Huffman bid and won me—an hour of poetry at his party; paid but never collected. It bugged me (debt owed and lingering) and I pestered his office (a bit) but no response. Time marches and a few years pass. So, at our Town Hall on Monday 8/5/19, I cornered him in the parking lot after the event as he was leaving. We are in Point Reyes Station where the town clock chimes with MOOOOOOOO at high noon. Green thickly forested hills, fog rolling in, tinged pink with sundown…. “Hey Congressman, you never collected…etc etc”

“OK OK, we’re running late…just give me some Allen Ginsberg…”

Howl for Carl Soloman came spilling out as if he had dropped the needle on the record:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull….

I got that far, and then I said, uncensored (Ginsberg smiling approval in mythy clouds overhead),

“That poem ends with a whispered MOTHERFUCKER!! as so many of his do….”

Huffman flashes a giant white-teeth grin of joy and relief that I’m not asking more of this public servant than to live for a moment in art. And his political show-case smile becomes part of the scene as he and his admin haul themselves into the Suburban. Paid in full I said. A day in the life of the struggle to die happy. 

A clue comes around to explicate this die happy business. Have an idea, realize it in the material world. I tuck away this moment into the file of “happiness beyond its opposite”. Happily here in the parking lot of the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station, California. Art will not cure injustice, heal the lame, bring down despots and Mafiosi. Nor feed the hungry or right the ship of state. Art is for pleasure, mostly.

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1970 saw “The end of Art, the end of history” according to Arthur Danto, Sherrie Levine, Jack Burnham and a boatload of French post-structuralists. The end of meaning, the end of metaphor. Art Degree Zero. We’ve had fifty years of the “End” But what of the struggle to die happy? Are we? Are we struggling to make this “die happy” a reality? How does art help in this regard and we come to the question of what is human happiness? Are humans the only creature who think of this? Dying happy? Or better, living happy? Does art answer?

This was the question of 1970. Now that we had entered the pointless forest of post- modern, did art help answer? I feel the room fill up with figures offering perspectives. The English skeptic too cool to be bothered, having better things to do like perching on a high stool casting lifelines to those drowning in the high water of foolish optimism. Like the new-age tout saying love is both the question and the answer. A yawning chasm splits open. Filled with? Filled with a yawning chasm. Art won’t cure the suffering of the world—art can only make you happy—its own reward.

OK, we’re so over Post Modernism, aren’t we? Well, if we are, what exactly was it? We think it was the banal coupled with ennui founded on a foundation of money culture, where value was best expressed by the cynical pile-up of wealth, abstract glowing cyphers on a screen. Meaning becomes provisional, no grand ideas save that being was meaningless—images that could have had bearing, sailing away like lost kites in the wind—more coming right along, and then the next and then the next. Things of value gusting off as a confetti so that the only thing seeming to have value was money itself.  Art lost its value as something to help develop the soul, something that could shine into the corridors of the mind, into the dark halls of the body with its feelings, into the joie de vivre of spirit, joining the dance of dark and light. “Well, money is something, it’s a basic flow, and me I am the archetype of jewels and dough,” says “His Highness King Gold” and “Madam Silver” his Queen. “They keep it all a-rustling with their Dollars and Pounds, everybody knows that money makes the world go ’round.” This from The Incredible String Band, c. 1968. In the 60’s some of us were absorbed into suffering the guilt of being among those who had too much in an ocean of those who had too little. All manner of goofy schemes rose up, communes and collectives, the “War on Poverty” as images of money replaced the image of the gods; we’ve been striped of every value save market value. The Trump’s apartment in NYC—a golden emptiness. Nothing to eat as the teeth clink on a wedge of golden pie. Does the name Midas ring a bell?

This Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog is the epitome of value in the age of the twilight of the gods, Götterdämmerung. So that Trump Tower becomes aspirational. BOTH truth and beauty blown away. There is no salvation, no development. The old gods are dead, the new god says, “Get as much as you can while you’re here.” Some smokey whisperer telling ancient truths just doesn’t cut it as we gather ’round the new golden calf of Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog. Fetching $160,000,000 at auction.

This scene from the 1956 The Ten Commandments lives in the land of naive kitsch unexamined and soon after, Moses comes down from the mountain hurling the god-wrought stone tablets smack onto the calf. Of course, the ground opens and the calf is swallowed in volcanic flames as the LAW takes the place of the idol in the biblical fairy tale. In our provisional world of get-mine-first the Law devolves from a civilizing energy into a pry-bar opening an abstract advantage over the other. Tacticle delays in court proceedings are about this usage of the IDEA of law and justice, often for unjust purposes…

How can you look at Koons’ Balloon Dog and not think of the biblical calf. When art becomes translated into money there is a garble of meaning. You can’t cynically shrug away the statue of Lincoln sitting in his DC memorial or the near-by Maya Linn Viet Nam memorial as you can the Balloon Dog. It’s the very point of Koons’ dog as an artifact of the Pointless Forest. Memorializing what…?

The flow of history moving to the future finds some wishful thinking and some despair, but if art is to retake a place of real value, meaning beyond money, it will re-emerge. It feels dire these days with “newspeak” dominating discourse, nothing of real value is spoken. But, we remember the only gold worth anything is The Golden Rule.  A revival is being born as we rediscover timeless value. The orange grotesquery occupying the White House is but a tiny speed bump as we navigate toward planetary and cosmic thinking. Let’s dance our way into the mystic, shall we? It’s about time.

We’ve been through the “twilight of the gods” with the Post Modern cascade of nihilism. We see artist Richard Prince, that arch nihilist from the Eighties, coming full circle with his collecting mania focused on archiving the original texts and ephemera of Beatnik, Punk and Hippie eras in leather-bound clamshell boxes. Those three eras reflected the pull of culture to recapture something of lasting value. High atop the Chicago Board of Trade stands the Goddess Ceres (Demeter to the Greeks) holder of the energy of grain and increase.

There may be trouble ahead…but let’s face the music and dance. Let’s welcome back the gods! That’s a future worthy of life.

 

 

Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future…

From the Four Quartets …TS Eliot

Locate. To fix a place, to establish a spot and here our purpose is to reach from our location now, into an unknown future. It looks from Alexander Marshack’s work defined in his The Roots of Civilization, that the ability of humans to locate themselves in time was one of the great strides in the human project. Observations of lunar cycles were recorded on bone tablets or on spear throwers or other useful implements like arrow straighteners. Marshack, a journalist writing about the space program, deciphered the arcane marks fifty years ago.

It was essential for survival to know where in the solar cycle you were. To know by past observations, for example when to expect the return of the spawning salmon by knowing what time of year it was. A relatively cool or warm spring was an unreliable indicator of season. How would you know when it was time to head to your favorite fishing spot, or when was it time to be on the lookout for flocks of migrating geese? A calendar would turn out to be a great survival tool.

“Are you keeping time, or is time keeping you” says Wm Wiley’s famous character, the hourglass Buster Time. Here Buster appears as a song and dance team with wings to reference the flight of time.

Pierre Tielhard de Chardin (speaking of paleontologists—discoverer of Peking Man and more) predicted the future of humanity as moving toward a teleological end—the development of life as a spiritual project. “You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience…” de Chardin pointed out almost a century ago. He called this end the Noosphere or the Omega Point when biological processes evolve to spiritual awakening of the human body-mass when technology art and biology merge.

One of the thinkers in this merging was architect and artist Paolo Soleri.

Soleri’s city structures fully integrated art, science, economics, religion, agriculture— true structures of the coming noosphere. So, to talk about the future of art we are going back to a time when all human activity was an integrated whole. The debates about science and art, about religion and science, about economics and art all seem silly taken in the context of the Omega point. There is little doubt that the world is perfectly flowing in that direction. Perfectly flowing does not preclude human suffering because we all know that both tragedy and comedy are a part of the human genome. The creative mind is also part of the genomic tool kit. It’s bred in the bone as we like to say in our better moments.