The Bleakness That Bonds Us

I am a child of Watergate. When I was in grade school in the 1970’s it was an all consuming subject, even among eleven and twelve year olds. My small town high school library made sure there was a special reserve section that dealt with the issues surrounding the continuing unfolding of the scandal and eventual disgraceful resignation of a president of the United States. As a adolescent the idea that a president would not only lie but manipulate the infrastructure of the U.S. government to win re-election was nearly impossible to swallow. My parents were products of the post WW II boom. They went to college to gain teaching degrees which our government paid for in order to promote a more robust democracy in the wake of the atrocities of fascism. It was a time of relative idealism despite the assignation of John F. Kennedy just three months after my birth and later Martin Luther King and his brother Bobby. It was a time of hope despite the insipid bombing of Cambodia, the knifing of a young man at Altamont during a Rolling Stones concert and the hideous plague rained down from the Manson family in L.A. The remnants of 1950’s America was still holding charge in small town America. I was taught even then, at that early age about civics, citizenry and the idea of a functional government. My father voted for Nixon, twice and my mother voted first for Humphrey than McGovern, but I was taught to respect differences because the vote is what enabled reconciliation. Republican government with democratic underpinnings was the greatest form of government known on Earth, and despite it’s faults, it was to be respected.

Then came Watergate. It was as if I learned that one of my uncles was a child molester or heroin dealer. I had no personal opinion about the president, but the mere fact that the leader of the free world could lie under oath and deceive on such a large scale was nearly impossible to comprehend. Today, that would be the bane of naivety and I would be laughed at out loud by nearly every school child with any remote sense of current affairs. We all sit and watch The Cobert Report or John Stewart’s comedy news and we take it in stride that our government is filled with idiots, charlatans and deceivers, but in the spring of 1974 the unfolding idea of that our president could be involved in orchestrating something as petty and foul as a break in of the Democratic National Headquarters seemed as reasonable as suggesting that aliens were living at Area 51 in Nevada. It was an odd time because the aftermath of the 60’s still came to bear and much of television was divided between the ostrich in the sand and confronting very directly, somewhat cynically and very much sarcastically the fact that all was not well with our society. All In The Family, Mary Tyler Moore, M*A*S*H, and Soul Train ran at the same time as The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie and American Bandstand. Children, even precocious 11 year olds weren’t capable of sorting out the cultural dissonance taking place at the time. Watergate, changed all that. It made real in a televised cultural way that our society was deeply corrupt at its core. There was no more room for a beautiful landscape of democracy that would self-correct. You knew, even then, there was no coming back from what was uncovered with Nixon’s dirty dealings. Sure, governments and centralized power are always prone to corruption, but what uncovered the deceit of Nixon was the fourth estate. Today there is no more fourth estate. Woodward and Bernstein would have been laid off by now.

I’m making this distinction between the fracture of a belief that I encountered in my youth back in 1973-75 and now because I think the monumental difference between the two eras is quite simply, back then there was a belief to begin with. It seems today that adolescents aren’t silly enough to believe our government works or that politicians are held accountable or even that what they see on television is reality, but rather that it is all a shifting landscape of available cynical gestures ready for the proverbial YouTube mashup. Authenticity is nearly dead and gone and what remains is mocked openly for it’s naive sensibilities and lack of adherence to the only remaining god, money. It should come as no surprise than, that our most culturally mainstream art form, television has created two powerful dramas that ooze of disdain and contempt for all things moral, righteous or truthful and that deny the concept of authenticity as a strategy, shouting its finality from their bully pulpit.

True Detective and the second season of House of Cards act as agreements in an argument with no contradictions. These dramas about police work in the heart of Louisiana and the machinations of our central government in Washington, DC, accept bleakness as religious doctrine. Both shows a denuded moral landscape so tangible it is like smelling a peach at the apex of its ripeness on a hot summer day. The fine art world, if we can any longer call it that, has remitted a similar ripe oblivion but exhibits it in a way largely inaccessible by the average American, let alone any real admirer of art. Matthew Barney’s latest plethora of shit (literally) filmic opera promises a more esoteric rendering of the aforementioned television dramas. But few will ever see Barney’s high fashion elitist rendition of scatalogical infinity, but many will see House of Cards and True Detective. The new dramas hint back to the fears of the 1970’s (nuclear war, the beginning of the AIDs plague, sexism, and government corruption from the top down) but instead offer a new outpost in post-postmodern explication that insists we should all make peace with the fact that all is lost, rather than remain firmly connected to any remnant of hope. At least, dare I say, there were rafts one could reach out for in the river of shit of the 1970’s. What make these new dramas even harder to digest is the fact that they are so profoundly well acted and written. There is no wink or nod to McLuhan’s Bonanza Land, as in David Milch’s magnificent Deadwood. House of Cards 2 and True Detective forego the Shakespearean rhetoric and ode to westerns in favor a unannounced punch in the nose. Thank you sir, may I have another.

Maybe what bothers me most about all this acceptance of corruption, hate, violence, darkness and sexual malaise is the complacency around it. More than affecting a new kind of awareness, a call to arms that we should all recognize something is terribly amiss about our culture ala Network (1976), we are left alone in the dark to contemplate time being a “flat circle”. True Detective in particular acts as a model for the two extremes that represent themselves in modern America. On the one had we have the greatest increase in religious extremism and fundamentalism in our history, and on the other, the unraveling of time/space with the discovery of the Higgs Boson. I should be celebrating M-theory being used as an expository monologue in American mainstream television, but instead it just makes me sad. To hear Matthew McConaughey recite multiverse theory and superimposition betrays it the wonder it deserves despite his lilting Texas accent. Pizzolatto’s message is clear, we’re all rodents on an endless treadmill doomed to repeat ourselves. Similarly, Francis Underwood, played by the extraordinary Kevin Spacey (who reminds me there is still hope for acting after the death of PSH) has a similar take on time/space, except that his is beholding to only one ideal—power. For the Underwoods as DC power couple, even rape can be turned into a power grab ratings gambit. Even Camille Paglia blushes at Claire Underwoods coldness and calculation.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUfN8wL5zKY&w=560&h=315]I worry that we are less and less impacted, touched, and influenced by art and that it simply serves as yet another device to placate our boredom and hold hands as we walk the flat circle of time. Indeed, Barney’s River of Fundament, loosely based on Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, is a nod to the perpetual flat circle of time. In some ways the current cultural dynamic is ancient in its parsimonious positioning of romanticism against cold pragmatism, but there is something deeper at play. We are regurgitating centuries of culture on top of itself to the point of blurring any recognition of origin or meaning. We are forcing end game thinking and you can see it in all the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic art being made. This recursiveness will doom us to a self fulfilling prophecy if we can’t see something other, in effect, evolve. Where is the art that will evolve us? Where is the hope?

Death's Fantasy

“He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.” ― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

As a little boy living in western New York poised almost exactly between the cities of Rochester and Buffalo I learned my adult sleeplessness. The sleepless nights began sometime around the age of ten or eleven. These were still the days when you had nuclear disaster preparedness drills at school. We were told where to find the bomb shelter in the basement of the school and how to move their in orderly fashion if we heard the air raid siren. An inquisitive and precocious child led to my unending questioning of my world. Every week, usually at night, I would hear the drone of B-52’s flying overhead. I asked my father one day, why the bombers were out flying at that time and where they came from. My father, not being one for sensitivity, immediately responded that they were part of the nuclear defense grid, or strategic air command that flew constantly in shifts carrying nuclear weapons as a deterrent against a Soviet first strike^[i]. Right around this same time, my parents became friends with a couple just up the street. The husband worked for FMC or the Food Machinery & Chemical Corporation in nearby Lockport, NY. He, lets call him David, was employed as a geneticist researching new techniques to increase crop production. One night while eavesdropping at the top of the stairs, I heard David say, “if there was an explosion at the FMC plant, all of western New York would be wiped out.” The train that carried FMC petrochemicals traveled right through our small town and upon hearing the train I would lay awake in a soft panic hoping the train did not derail. Perhaps this is how DeLillo’s White Noise was born. So, between the nuclear threat in Niagara Falls, and the chemical threat in Lockport, not to mention the research on nuclear fusion taking place in Rochester, I lay awake at night a lot.

During this same time, the artists Ed and Nancy Reddin Keinholtz created Still Live (1974). The art was a work of theater where the viewer became the actor in something very real. The Keinholz’s built a set piece of a typical American living room and surrounded it by barricades and barbed wire. Before entering you were asked, essentially, to sign your life away, in effect liberating the exhibition or artist of any responsibility should something go horribly wrong.

I the undersigned am at least 18 years of age. I fully and soberly understand the danger to me upon entry of this environment. I hereby absolve the artist Edward Kienholz, the owner of the piece and the sponsors of this exhibition of any and all responsibility (morally and legally) on my behalf.^[ii]

The reason for signing such a disclaimer was due to the high caliber rifle perched above the television in the living room set the Keinholz’s created, which was aimed directly at the chair in facing it. Allegedly (this was never verified) a black box controlled a random timer connected to the rifle’s trigger that could fire a live round at any time over the course of one hundred years. The Vietnam War was winding down but the country had endured more than a decade of war in southeast Asia with the networks carrying a scrolling list of the American dead, night after night during that time to the tune of 58,282. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8YCNFmWtYU&w=640&h=480]  The Keinholz’s forced violence from the virtual space it occupied for most Americans watching television to the real, by confronting them with the possibility of a very real death. In September 1974, Nixon had just resigned over the Watergate Scandal and the Symbionese Liberation Army had kidnapped Patty Hearst. IRA bombings were on the rise in London and fighting persisted in the Golan Heights of Israel. Inflation was on the rise with a deep recession unfolding across the country. This was the time of ‘generic’ foods and long gas lines. In the midst of this, Ed and Nancy Keinholz placed a work of art in the center of Berlin that directly threatened the viewer. Their goal was to deliberately disrupt and rupture the passivity Americans held toward violence and their complicity in it. “Keinholz’ theatricality was meant to heighten his critique of aspects of American society, and he attempted to construct situations in which the everyday became visible for his viewers to question and ponder—to create opportunities aimed at effecting significant change in behavior.”^[iii] The Kienholz’s were interested in revealing the everyday persistence of violence and our incorporation of it as commonplace. An earlier piece The Beanery (1965) based on a Hollywood bar he used to frequent, the viewer walks past a stack of newspapers that read “Children Kill Children in Vietnam Riots” before entering the bar. Ed Kienholz’s confrontational perspective, later shared in collaboration with his wife, focused on shaking people loose from their dream state and forcing confrontation with the system they supported. Ed Kienholz said;

It is my contention that to the extent that the major networks intertwine, we, the viewing public, are endangered...In my thinking, prime time should be understood as the individual span each of us has left to live here on earth. It’s a short, short interval and serves the best quality possible. Certainly better than the boob tube pap we all permit in the name of bigger corporate profits and free enterprise.^[iv]

It is hard now to recall the extraordinary violence of the time. I’m sure my sleepless nights were exacerbated by watching the CBS Nightly News with Walter Cronkite night after night and witnessing the scrolling lists of Americans killed in the conflict. In fact, another piece by Kienholz titled The Eleventh Hour Final (1968) speaks directly to that experience, with a death list permanently painted on a TV screen that reveals a decapitated mannequin head staring back at the viewer from inside the set. The 70’s was a time of fear, uncertainty and fractured psyche in America. I remember distinctly feeling a deep sense of loss and anxiety, even at 11 over Watergate. I had been raised to believe in the Constitution and our government as essentially functioning, despite their imperfections. In 1969 I watched the moon landing and found the hopefulness of science conquering our deepest problems. By 1974, Watergate was unraveling our government, the recession hit, crime was rising and we encountered defeat in Vietnam by a low-tech insurgency. In the midst of all of this was the ever looming threat of nuclear holocaust and biological warfare. The pantheon of American cinema during the 1970’s was filled with darkness from Andromeda Strain to Twilight’s Last Gleaming reinforcing what must have seemed at the time like a real threat of armageddon, not the phony Walking Dead gorefest on TV now.

Unfortunately, the Keinholz’s Still Live was even too intense for its German audience. German authorities rapidly shut down the exhibition and arrested Ed Kienholz on “unauthorized possession of arms” and “the suspicion, of a conditional, but intentionally attempted homicide.”^[v] The piece was bizarrely rescued along with an intervention on Kienholz’s behalf by the American Consulate and relocated to Switzerland before the tableau was shipped back to the States in a crate and stored until 1982. It was briefly exhibited at the now defunct, Braunstein Gallery in San Francisco and then returned to its crate where it remains today in the possession of Nancy Kienholz.

Americans are not fond of self-deprecation or self-criticism. We like to think we are know it alls, who have all the answers and don’t need anyone, even our own calling us out on our shortcomings or bad behavior. Ever since Jimmy Carter said, “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns." in his sweater in his fireside chat in 1979, we have reacted violently against any form of reality. Kienholz’s dream of threatening Americans into confrontation with their violent, sexist, racist and classist ways disappeared when Ronald Reagan was elected president. On that day, Americans firmly rejected compassion and sensibility with the delusion of the American dream. The theatrics and conceptual groundings of 60’s and 70’s art was replaced with the blinding irony of the 80’s.

So today we find ourselves immersed in a world of corporate politics where our dreams have been replaced by consumerism and our productivity and inventiveness shipped offshore in favor of the sad theatrics of reality TV. The darkness of the 70’s, which was always couched in Kienholz’s idea of real threat has been replaced by fantasy threats—zombies and vampires. The art world has matched with its own kind of fantasia, selling its soul to the highest bidder in order to provide religiosity to hedge fund managers, or as the late Robert Hughes put it, "The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive." There are a few artists who continue to push the the ideas that the Kienholz’s instigated in those heady decades of the 60’s and 70’s, like Gregory Green and Wafaa Bilal, or Banksy, but the art institutions marginalize them. In the early nineties I had the pleasure of working briefly with Gregory Green in NYC delivering art and then visited an opening of his at the Dart Gallery in Chicago where I lived at the time. Gregory had a wonderful piece he installed there called Thirty Blade Wall Installation. He had directly mounted thirty circular saw blades on their own axels and they spun away in magnificent danger, free of any protective covering or roped off quadrant. Anyone could have simply reached in and watched their fingers fly effortless about the room in wondrous horror. Green had made a more minimalist and direct homage to the Kienholz’s and I remember being very moved by the piece.

It is important that we remain connected to the effects of violence and their aftermath if we hope emerge from the lessons of the 20^th century intact. Our current obsessions are not idiopathic, but firmly couched in our inability to contend with our own past. We have never reconciled the deceit of Watergate or the trauma of Vietnam. It is no accident the 9/11 memorial is an inversion, a conceptual black hole that swallows both the living and the dead from that moment in time. It is an astounding representation of national shame that looks not toward reconciliation, empathy and hope, but toward an ever darkening cynicism and irony. After the trauma of 9/11 one could presume the nation would grow more empathic, more sensitive to the needs of others, as was witnessed in NYC in the weeks after the event. Unfortunately, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index that has been running since 1979 suggests quite the contrary. The 2011 study results found,  “almost 75 percent of students today rate themselves as less empathic than the average student 30 years ago.”^[vi] There are certainly many contributing factors to this finding but one can’t help but think that ‘magical thinking’ is a leading contender. As a nation we seem consumed by it, otherwise how could one explain the dramatic reversal away from a solid middle class? Four hundred Americans now hold as much wealth as half of our entire population.^[vii] And yet, the battle rages on against the poor. A key point in the Kienholz’s work is Ed Kienholz’s insistence on placing himself as an implicit participant in their own commentary and criticisms. Barney’s Beanery was a bar Ed frequented and he was the first to sit in front of the rifle in Still Live. His anger was directed as much at himself as it was at our collective passivity. He once took an axe to a desk at TWA as result of the airline’s disregard toward the mishandling of a Tiffany lamp Kienholz had shipped with them. He put himself firmly in the tableau, risking arrest and contempt to make an artistic gesture.

The interest in post-apocalyptic fantasies and immortality represented by the plethora of vampire and zombie movies, books and television shows is a desperate form of escapism for a country who has lost its sense of empowerment. If only we had heeded the words of Carter in 79’ and learned to begin using less and stop striving for more we might be closer to a true triple bottom line capitalism now. We might also have a more robust and meaningful culture, less interested in heroics and life after death scenarios and more involved with the real. I have written before on Francis Bacon’s rejection by many of the American art critics and I think the same could largely be said for the Kienholz’s. Ed and Nancy Kienholz’s form of intimidating and even angry art-making was sidelined and diminished by a market that preferred the promise of the sublime over the delivery of truth. Of course there is no absolute truth, but as with science, art at its best is interested in asking questions that can uncover a deeper sense of ourselves and our place in this world. In so doing, it reminds us of our interconnectedness and the fact that violence has consequences, like the rifle pointed at us from above the TV. We can only lay prostrate before the television, computer monitor or smartphone for so long before our own actions catch up to us and we realize that our fantasies have become nightmares, just like the ones I had as a boy.

---

^[i] After a fair amount of research, despite B-52’s being housed at Niagara Falls International Air Field, I could find no evidence that nuclear warheads were involved. BOMARC defense missiles were stationed there until 1969 and may have carried a nuclear payload, but the air base was primarily a fighter base. The air bases with Strategic Air Command nuke’s were located in Rome and Plattsburg. In reality, during that paranoid time, it is hard to say what was housed in Niagara Falls. It was supposedly ranked 45^th as a possible nuclear strike target, which given the scale would have unquestionably wiped out southern Ontario and Western New York.

^[ii] Kienholz, Edward. Edward Kienholz: Still Live: Aktionen der Avantgarde, Projekt für ADA2. Berlin: Neuer

Berliner Kunstverein, 1975, n.p.

^[iii] Willick, Damon. “Still Live.” In Art Lies, No. 60, Winter 2008, p. 23.

^[iv] Ibid, p. 26.

^[v] Kienholz, Edward. Edward Kienholz: Still Live: Aktionen der Avantgarde, Projekt für ADA2. Berlin: Neuer

Berliner Kunstverein, 1975, n.p.

^[vi] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-me-care

^[vii] http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011020612/understanding-extreme-incomewealth-gap

Reality Bites

The Bravo TV series, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, now in its second season, is a ‘reality’ television show acutely focused on the world of art. Why not? Reality television which began with game shows and found its seat of power in “The Real World” began to wain as a genre in the mid aughts and needed fresh blood. Dancing with the Stars, a British born ballroom dancing escapade bore the first real fruit in its adoption in America, a country far more obsessed with celebrity, or at least a country bearing more celebrity offspring. The brilliance or sadism or both of juxtaposing professional ballroom dancers with ‘B’ and sometimes ‘C’ list celebrities (and now offspring of vice presidential wanna-be’s) was an inspiration befitting a Warholian wet dream. That inspired dalliance, has become the pro forma reality TV format. It extends from America’s Next Top Model through Project Runway to American Idol to Top Chef. The central theme being, any amateur with enough gusto and narcissism can become a professional sharing the limelight with the likes of Heidi Klum, Alexandra Beller, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) or Gordon Ramsey. And now, that conceit tilting against the windmills of Malcolm Gladwell, is fully realized in the ultimate enigma of contemporary culture — fine art. Forgive us Narcissus.

The most prominent member, with the most street cred in the art world on Work of Art, is the Senior Art Critic for New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz. A former art student at the famous School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later an adjunct professor there, he fell away from art making after college. In fact at one point in his history, he was a long haul trucker. Saltz has quoted Charlie Parker’s  “If you don’t play the saxophone for a year, you get a year better.” and added

After two years of not working at all and fretting about it all the time I stopped making art altogether. I haven’t made it since. I miss it. I miss being able to listen to music while writing, working with materials, and the amazing psychic space making art creates. Soon, I became a long distance truck driver; my CB radio name was the Jewish Cowboy. I’d come on and say ‘Shalom, partner.’ While driving trucks I thought about how much I loved art and the art world. I knew I wanted to be part of that world no matter what. I thought writing criticism would be easy, so I decided to become a critic.

In 1998 he took a position as the Senior Art Critic for the Village Voice newspaper in New York, then the dominant force in art taste making in arts capital city. After eight years of writing for the Voice and Art in America, he took the position he still maintains today. He is an ardent fan of irony and Warholian Pop descendants and is a progressive adopter of the Facebook culture, using his profile page as both a dais and community bulletin board. In 2009 ArtReview named him the 73^rd most powerful figure in the art world. Saltz was a clear choice as an anchor for Work of Art because he maintains a very populist vernacular about a culture which is the farthest from populist. He is witty and self-deprecating, which removes the stain of elitism his cohorts, including his wife Robert Smith (Senior Art Critic for the New York Times) are often coated with by mainstream media and middle America. In other words, he was the perfect combination of art world establishment and affable schlub. We don’t much care for informed criticism in this country, but we love our pundits and Saltz is the closest thing to a pundit the New York art scene has.

Being an art critic is to be a critic of the core of societies future. Most of the time it must appear as though one is criticizing the air we breath or the invisible man. If we are to believe the seriousness of Saltz, and Bill Powers having been quoted they hope the show creates a bigger audience for art as a whole, then we should take a critical look at the show. In the book The Crisis of Criticism, the editor, Maurice Berger lays out a beautiful description of what criticism can be in practice;

The strongest criticism today—the kind that offers the greatest hope for the vitality and future of the discipline—is capable of engaging, guiding, directing, and influencing culture, even stimulating new forms of practice and expression. The strongest criticism serves as a dynamic, critical force, rather than a s an act of boosterism. The strongest criticism uses language and rhetoric not merely for descriptive or evaluative purposes but as means of inspiration, provocation, emotional connection, and experimentation.

We are all participants in the absurdity of life, but to play in the art arena/world one must be just a little bit unbalanced. The making of art in a fiercely capitalist society is hard enough, but the effete inner circle of the New York art world, the so-called epicenter of great art, is nearly impossible. The gallery owners, auction houses and art fair doyens of New York live by what Robert Hughes said, “The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive." It is no surprise that when Wall Street takes a dive, so follows the art world. Do those who create wish to be judged by those who wish they could? Is it possible for someone who stopped ‘making’ to have an eye for that which they no longer have the personal will to create themselves? Aren’t we talking about taste-making here and the very Renaissance idea of verity in the form of established beauty within the guidelines of the cultural elite? Isn’t that why in recent years, without shame, Versailles has been the host to solo exhibitions by the Pop Art pugilists Jeff Koons and Haruki Murakami? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the executive producer of the show is the former co-star of Sex in the City, a TV show based largely on gossip and absurd fashion. That the two leading members of the art world who are judges, are fans of Warhol’s legacy is no accident either. To add insult to injury (or irony?), Mr. Powers’ co-owns the Half Gallery with the infamous author James Frey. Yes, that James Frey, the one that hoodwinked Oprah and convinced a ton of people to buy into his false biography of pain-killer-free dental rehab. As icing on this illustrious Pop cake, we have the ‘model’ China Chow and her ridiculous haute couture dresses and perilous high heels (a mimic of Carrie from SITC perhaps?) and the seemingly always mystified Simon de Pury the co-founder of one of the largest art auction houses in the world. Shakespeare said it best, “Like a fair house built on another man's ground; so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it.”

I am not making an argument here against criticism or Jerry Saltz’s particular criticism, but rather its waning value to 21^st century popular culture. An accidental conspiracy of the internet and capitalism has promoted amateurism above professionalism. Indeed the current art world itself, may be the most devilish trader in this idea. Saltz, as a cultural critic, has abdicated his responsibility to elevate our understanding of art. Despite the fact a liberal arts education in America is vanishing, we have never been a culture, as Europe is, well versed in the idiosyncrasies of fine art. Our patience is low and our drive is toward capital and superiority at all costs. Art does not fit into that notion very well at all. Publicly supported/sponsored art just makes sense in Europe, where as in the U.S. it requires complicity in a lie. A lie that we are a culture at all and the public will “get it” if we simply set public money aside for it. Whether it’s Serra’s Tilted Arc, Mapplethorpe’s S & M photography or Ofili’s elephant shit Virgin Mother, we as a nation are uncomfortable with conceptual thinking. The only conceptual thinking tolerated is of those who make so much money it obscures criticism. I’m thinking of the late Steve Jobs here. Ask any random American on the street what gestalt means or who Andre Serrano (a guest critic on the show), Damian Hirst or Jeff Koons are and you’ll get an equally quizzical tilt of the head. All of the aforementioned artists would be referred to as ‘blue chip’ in the art world and their work sells for thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in the leading galleries.

Ultimately, my disappointment with Saltz and company in The Making of Art comes down to something said by Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in the masterful 1976 movie, Network;

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'

Why the hell is nobody on this show mad as hell? Two seasons now of artists dancing like monkeys before an ever increasing television audience and not one of them is breaking the rules and getting pissed off at being treated like a captive in a zoo? And Jerry Saltz, like some Stockholm Syndrome victim expurgating sensibility in exchange for sympathy for their captors? In the last couple of weeks I’ve taken the time to query artists on their thoughts about the show and I get one of two solid responses. One camp simply doesn’t give a damn because they dismiss it as the same formulaic crap that is Project Runway or Top Chef. They see it as a dismal attempt to put amateurs lacking social graces and borderline personalities in a room together to ‘perform’ for an audience that knows little or nothing about the creative process they are pretending to compete in. The other camp of artists take the position, not of disappointment in the formulaic show or even Jerry Saltz, but rather the pathetic and regressive behavior of people who call themselves artists and yet follow the rules given them explicitly, i.e. the contestants. When contestant aren’t crying over criticism or whining about how hard things are for them, they’re busy gossiping like teenagers about sex or wistfully dreaming of how they’ll spend the next $20,000 bonus for winning that week’s monkey dance.

A part of me watches the show and thinks Andy Warhol is still alive living in a penthouse in Las Vegas producing Work of Art, as yet another cynical gesture intended to tear the last vestiges of art apart at the seams like the defeated Scot, William Wallace was drawn and quartered. Never before was Woody Allen so prescient when he said, “Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.” And that’s why Work of Art is actually dangerous. As the historian Kenneth Clarke said at the opening of Civilisation, “great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts. The book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless you read the two others. But of the three, the only trustworthy one is the last.” And therein lies the broken promise of the show and the damaging deceit it carries out — that art in America, in the 21^st century is nothing more than a series of clever skits, designed by the cynical and carried out by the greedy. With each successive week of Work of Art, season two, we see the producers throw more and more money at the artists as an incentive to perform as if all that matters is fame and cash, and of course that is the only way to achieve great art. The allure is great as we live in a society ever more divided along lines of economic strata. The rich do indeed get richer—much, much richer and believing in the American myth leaves one either isolated and adrift from society, fighting an uphill battle against a mighty foe—greed, or succumbing to participation in the belief, we as a nation will only endure and remain strong if we place money at the top of our idealistic pyramid. Work of Art: The Next Great Artist portrays the last bastion of hope for a cultural legacy, art, as nothing more than a device like all others, developed and pursued for riches at the expense of anyone else who stands in the way. Work of Art portrays all artists as whores, who think they can cleverly bend the rules, convincing the elite they have produced something truly sustaining and enriching in the hopes of making a fast buck. We no longer glorify our gods, our emperors or science, we only glorify money.

Some of you will say, but who cares about a silly television show only a small demographic of American’s will watch. Why does it matter? To me it matters because it is a symptom of something larger and in this case that symptom is in my own backyard. I suppose if I were a chef or a fashion designer, I would have already written about these appalling shows, but Work of Art deals with my profession—art making. More importantly it matters because we can do better and succumbing to this nonsense makes us all complicit, even if we don’t watch. Saltz has at least 5,000 Facebook friends and he writes a column on art in a populist magazine, New York Magazine, and now he’s on television. In other words, he influences popular culture, much more than he cares to admit. This has a trickle down effect on all of us in the same way that bad design does. Accepting silly gamesmanship and mediocrity as art and playing that back to a larger audience, largely ignorant about art, is negligent and narcissism. As mentioned, Jerry Saltz and Bill Powers have both commented on how they participate in the hopes of making art accessible to a larger audience. I maintain, that a larger audience experiences art, fine art (for lack of a better term), by way of indirect exposure. Just try to imagine how much influence Picasso has had on popular culture in the last one hundred years and the closest thing he ever came to making what you could call “pop” was a series of ceramic plates. He is however, a household name, even among the great uninitiated masses and rightfully so. He foresaw the conceptual dynamics of quantum physics before it was put to mathematical formula and his sense of fragmented, folded space has changed the way we interact with things from iPod’s to clothes. We accept a looser organization of things more easily now because of the huge impact Picasso had on society. Art does not need to be, nor in many cases should it be, more accessible to a larger audience. That is the Pandora’s box Warhol opened when he shifted art away from making to making money.

I was saddened frankly to watch an established artist who calls himself “The Sucklord,” kowtow to the judges and diminish his own creative abilities in the hopes of self promotion and a quick buck. Artists on the show are punished for not working outside of their own oeuvre, and yet, presumably that is how they managed to be selected for the show. This reeks of typical art-school crits, where tenured professors sit in judgement of burgeoning artists and fearful of their own tenuous grasp on the art world, pour vitriol and disdain on another’s creative expression. Work of Art  also reinforces terrible stereotypes:  the art school girl, the art slut, the freak, the redneck self-taught artist, the euro-trash artist and on it goes. Place can be paramount in an artist’s work and throwing an Arkansan into the mix with seasoned kids from New York and LA is simply throwing the proverbial Christian to the lions. In both seasons of Work of Art contestants hailing from rural towns are akin to blacks in horror films—sacrificial lambs. Asking a painter to make something of a gutted Fiat’s parts, proves nothing about that artists’ ability, other than their ability to perform like a trained seal. Art at its core is subversive, dangerous and guileful because it asks questions that most people would rather leave unasked. Its power lies in its truth. Not some ultimate truth, but the truth that we are all better off when we question the status quo and we understand the rational is inextricably connected to the irrational. Work that leaves you bewildered, stunned, shocked and questioning is always the best art. Art that is mystifying and misunderstood in its own time is usually the most important in the long term. As long as the artists on Work of Art continue to play by the rules, the title of the show will remain the ironic joke it is. As Dave Hickey has said; “If there is no art, no culture, then what the fuck are we going to talk about? These are our stories and our stories are all we got!”

Billboard Dreams

“Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It let's us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.”

—Don Draper (Jon Hamm) from Mad Men, The Wheel, 2007

Mad Men resides in the louche, languid and heavily intoxicated world of the Madison Avenue advertising firms of the sixties. Now in its fourth season, Mad Men evokes the imagery of the consumer side of the sixties, the new middle class side. Sequestered in suburbia away from the turmoil of the Vietnam war, the inner city and college campus explosions of discontent. The irony of Mad Men is in its title. The self-named advertising executives and creatives of the sixties were a group of egomaniacal, mildly crazy individuals whose own lives betrayed the false dreams they sold to everyone else. When the character Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) talks about nostalgia as the motivation for buying he is fully detached from cynicism. In essence he’s revealing the foundation of pop culture that arose in the sixties and now dominates the landscape of middle class America. Draper is referring to the paradigm known in the German vernacular as kitsch (based on Immanuel Kant’s philosophical theories of aesthetics). Kitsch first took form in the newly moneyed Munich bourgeoisie of the late 1920‘s. A derogatory term from the German, meaning pretentious trash (dialect, kitschen, to smear, verkitschen, to make cheaply, to cheapen) it was a descriptor of class distinction more than actual aesthetics. Hitler as dictator-artist gave the force of law to his own aesthetic ideas in the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst. Hitler’s fascist cleansing of what he called degenerate art, was an attempt to eradicate intellectualism and reinforce the power and pride associated with Germany’s bourgeoisie. It was also, of course a swipe at the culture and money retained by the German Jews, whose cultural awareness was rooted in intellectualism. Goebbels and Hitler rightly understood the power of art but misplaced their enmity by singling out those who they considered degenerate, empowering them in a way they could not have achieved alone. Entartete Kunst was also the first instance of state-enforced kitsch, when Goebbels paralleled the degenerate exhibition with Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German art exhibition), an exhibition filled with sentimentality and nostalgic portrayals of an idealized, bucolic Germany. Kitsch’s dominance was largely crushed by the economic and physical destruction brought by WWII in Europe, but found its treatise written in America at the end of the fifties by Madison Avenue.

The uncomfortable link between Nazi Germany and 1950‘s/60‘s America is an important one. Fascism is wrongly associated with demagoguery and socialism but in reality Nazism had its foundations in corporate capitalism. Aside from his sociopathic behavior, Hitler’s philosophy was dependent on the power of production and manufacturing. Corporate production was the purest form of German nationalism and was of course responsible for powering one of the most destructive armies in history. It is the kernel of corporate ideology that found fertile soil in the growing bourgeoisie in 1950‘s white, suburban America. A second or third generation European immigrant population living in the inner cities of America, capitalized on their new-found wealth and education from the GI Bill and fled the inner city. Industry began to shift to white collar jobs and companies relocated to the suburban landscape as well in support of their chief economic fuel - the white middle class worker. This had a chilling effect on American culture In the 1930‘s the artists who fled the great European conflagration and immigrated to the U.S. were the seed for a new American aesthetic that achieved global recognition with Pollock’s drip paintings in the 1940‘s. Unfortunately, the migration of the middle class to the suburbs diluted our emergent cultural maturity. Without the benefit of influences from the abject poor, minorities and the patronage of the wealthy, suburban life became of vacuum of kitsch. Materialism supplanted imagination and Madison Avenue stepped in to fuel the fire of desire. Firmly entrenched in the white bread, cookie cutter sameness of suburban life, the American middle class fell into the same nostalgic leanings that dominated Hitler’s aesthetic of the 1930’s. When Draper talks about the ‘pain from an old wound’ he is not only speaking to his own personal trauma, resultant of his escape with false identity from the Korean war, but the collective pain of a ghettoized white immigrant population that now found pride in their materialistic desires. When spiritual and personal well-being are fixed to materiality the subtleties of human expression are lost in a sea of mediocrity. Advertising becomes art and even when art mocks and mimics the devices of modern advertising as in Pop Art, the general public is left to rely on their Barbie dolls and Cadillacs for aesthetic grounding instead of the works of Rauschenberg, Warhol and Rosenquist. The suburbs contain no art galleries or museums outside of the strip mall poster shops and inkjet printed canvas reproductions of digestible masterpieces.

Kitsch is not to be confused with the art movement of the 50’s and early 60’s — Pop art. Beginning with Rauschenberg and Johns, Pop art became a reaction to the internal conflict and existentialism of Abstract Expressionism. It leveraged suburban kitsch and ever growing domination of advertising to subvert the cultural exigency for materialism. As Madison Avenue advertising became the dominant, piquant expression of suburban desire the artist James Rosenquist entered the art scene. James Rosenquist was born on the plains of Grand Forks, North Dakota in the heartland of rural, agricultural America. After attending school in Minneapolis in the early 50s he accepted a scholarship to attend the Art Students League in New York, fulfilling the peasant to urbanite conversion Greenberg refers to in his 1939 essay on kitsch. Rosenquist’s subversion of a dominant form of advertising he worked at before moving to New York — billboards. Rather than inure himself to what we now call the ‘red state’ mentality of provincialism and pedantic expressions of a Norman Rockwell cum Ronald Reagan mythology, Rosenquist embraced the dynamism and cynicism of advertising as a way of providing an alternative vision of American possibility. James Rosenquist added a surrealist twist to Pop art which questioned the semiotics used in American advertising by juxtaposing its imagery with the dreamscapes of the suburban imagination and the mundane. It was a nod to the so-called degenerated artists of the 1930’s and it would lay the groundwork for postmodern irony that followed. It was also a warning to the nostalgia fueled kitsch that was gaining a foothold on the aesthetic sensibilities of middle America as television grew in influence.

Long before America’s superpower dominance, Glement Greenberg wrote his seminal essay on Avante-Garde and Kitsch in 1939. He eloquently reveals the underpinnings of Draper’s sentiments on nostalgia;

“The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city's traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless, their taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.”

Instead of peasants settling in the city centers of Europe, Americans resettled the suburbs in an inverse form of Greenberg’s theory. This suburbanization or faux rural culture allowed predominantly WASP culture to distance itself from integration with other cultural influences found in the city, streamlining edgy and complicated urban culture. It was a way of creating a false security amongst an increasingly integrating world. The unrest of African-Americans in inner cities,  the college rebellions of the disenfranchised youth, the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the terror of annihilation to the forefront. Middle class, white identity reacted with a flight response to the nearby, newly bulldozed bucolic suburban landscape. Cineplexes replaced museums and isolated auto travel replaced mass transit.

Enormous half spheres, supine soft and wet against the backdrop of a giant spoon materialize from James Rosenquist's 1964 painting Lanai, like upended orange-yellow half moons. The peach halves, at three feet across take on the monolithic proportions. They’re imposing sumptuous, borderline sexual entities affecting a blushing response when taken to such human scale. Upside down and floating against them is a 1964 Lincoln Continental, silvery and mirrored against the convention of early sixties autos that were normally muted pastels, white or black. The car is both coveted object and reflection of the infinite and intangible. A spidery pattern of starbursts float above the peaches and Lincoln like a transparent linoleum appliqué. This fragmented scene pushes right against an erotic pink nude kneeling and bent between the rails of a swimming pool ladder. The ladder and woman are abruptly segmented a la Magritte by a penetrating blue sky holding a floating half pencil. In this painting Rosenquist thoroughly captures the American, suburban dream of the early ‘60's. The pedantic pseudo-luxury of canned fruits sweet in their syrup sexuality and the automobile as spaceship, twisting its mirrored finish in the glow of the peaches, making a fleshy sun. The unveiled, and unfurled nude whose coifed hair curls up as an expression of domestic bliss. The voyeuristic Hugh Hefner-like day dream of the housewife-whore, bending over in supplication offering the unseen pool dweller (or is it sky dweller?) a cigarette (or is it fellatio?) All is bacchanalian overkill as advertising billboard. Imagine a world where advertisements were surrealist renditions of the secret collective suburban unconscious.

Rosenquist rightly saw the open range as a fever dream vision of American idealism taken far too seriously. Billboard scale represented a forced perspective that mimicked the open landscape of the plains and demonstrated the false conquering spirit of post-war America of the 1950s. The idealism of the great plains could be seen as the endless breadbasket of American prosperity or the harsh reality of natures infinite power, a great ocean of grasses and petulant weather capable of crushing the hardiest of individuals beneath its churlish sky. The gigantism of billboard advertising was the perfect venue to express the hubris and irony of American. Billboards arose in concert with the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System in the 50s. Eisenhower developed the freeway system in response to his exposure to the German Autobahn and its necessity as a national defense construct. The highway system provided both a gateway to the American landscape for the newly prosperous, and a vast network of access for rapid military deployment. Paranoia and pleasure. Whether Rosenquist intended it or not, the billboard painting became an ironic statement for the suburban sequestration of fear in the face of growing unrest. Irony is ultimately quieted by blurring its sharp edges. Ramming huge strands of spaghetti against F-111 fighter aircraft or peaches bleeding into silvery Lincoln Continentals forced the viewer to confront the idolatry of consumer objects as dream-state meanderings in an otherwise natural persistence. Where the plains of the Midwest form an illusory vision, unconquerable and dwarfing in its scale, the urban landscape offers a mash-up of manufactured imagery that becomes a living collage. Rosenquist transferred the urban living collage to his billboard canvases, recontextualizing them as billboard dreams.

Art can reinforce the notions of nostalgia or obliterate them. Advertising only reinforces them. Think of the last commercial you watched that represented women in a realistic light. We are still living in a post-war 50s misogynist, reactionary dream state where women are servants. As we watch, sometimes in laughter and more often lately in subdued horror at the machinations of the characters in Matthew Weiner’s creation Mad Men, we should reflect upon that subtext. What Weiner is suggesting, in part, is an examination of our past in order to gain insight into our future. We can continue to embrace our mindless consumer-capitalist system reinforced by the masters of simulacra (advertisers) or we can make our own world, shaped by the entirety of our surroundings. As The Sopranos exposed gangster mythos by showing the human dilemma of mobster family life, Mad Men does so by exposing the dark underbelly of Madison Avenue advertising and its ironic juxtaposition to the lives of the creatives who make the ads. Creativity used as propaganda, however splendid, is still disease — still kitsch. Rosenquist sees the irony of consumer icons and modern advertising as surrealistic expressions of our own fears and desires. The simulacra becomes a symbolic exchange for freedom through purchase.  Advertising is reality now, even as we understand it to be false. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek describes advertising’s driving motivation;

“They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?”

Don Draper’s secret life is a metaphor for our collective lies and majestic hypocrisies. He is trapped between the nostalgic, falsehood of a past he never lived, a past emulated in the father-figure of Roger Sterling and the future that is Peggy Olson and Pete Campbell. Cinema and television are the medium that was the Caravaggio and Rembrandt paintings of the past. They are telling us stories which inform our collective conscious and offer options for other choices. At their best they fracture our protective spaces and push toward a more intellectually rich, creative space. Rosenquist’s billboard scale paintings were narratives that in the sixties offered us an opportunity to view our flaws objectively as the fragments of our daily experiences rather than the carefully fashioned dream states of advertising symbolism. Rosenquist said; “I got below nothing by introducing imagery again...That nothing came from painting advertisements up-close so they didn’t mean anything to me but color and form. They were recognizable imagery again, but I thought of them as completely nonobjective.” As a novel provides narrative that we must build visuals around, Rosenquist sought to deconstruct the modern life of bombarding visual distractions and carefully constructed realities by juxtaposing them on canvases that mimicked the imposing billboard dream scale of color and form. His aim was to remove the forced semiotics of advertising by blurring the lines between it and our own everyday reality. He obliterates nostalgia through scale and the masterful use of collage. James Rosenquist saw advertising as brainwashing and sought to unravel its message using one of its original mediums, the billboard. Scale was also a nod to the hegemony of abstract expressionism and the way large canvases by Kelly, de Kooning and Pollock could immerse their viewers in the mélange of modern imagery until it blurred into an internal dialogue that forced reflection. This is in opposition to Draper’s “carousel” as Rosenquist used his inherited Midwestern roots as a lens to observe the underlying deceptions of big city pathos and cynicism rather than a means to wallow in nostalgia.

Mad Men mimics Rosenquist’s paintings in its portrayal of the fragmented array of personalities that lay behind the creative vision of sixties advertising. As with Richard Yates’ tragic book Revolutionary Road, Mad Men is a study in the duality of America’s hopeful wishes and deepest fears in the wash of enormous prosperity. The realization of newfound prosperity in the 1950’s and 60’s brought with it the oppressive environment of the corporate workplace. Serving the master of success required long hours away from one’s own life, family and more often than not the quashing of youthful dreams. Draper’s “carousel” is a metaphor for the trap of modernity, the endless round-about that comes with Draper’s alcohol fueled hallucinations of suburban disillusionment. We mustn't be completely seduced by the constructs of Rosenquist as a perfect alternative either. At their best Rosenquist’s paintings underline our weaknesses, fears and desires within the context of modern living, but at no point does he escape this way of living either. Rosenquist sits not as some ascetic on his judgmental dais; he too was an adherent to the Cedar Bar’s collection of rough and tumble abstractionists who found solace at the bottom of a whiskey glass. He worshipped the work of Willem de Kooning and spent a great deal of time with the artists responsible for turning the art world on its head in 1949. He was (and possibly still is) a hard living, hard drinking man’s man. If his aim is to reveal the extant melancholy of modern advertising and its adherent suburban lifestyle, it’s because he is fomenting his own nightmares. Jackson Pollock revealed to us that after the Bomb and the foibles of consumer prosperity we are left alone in the dark with our own thoughts. Abstract expressionism annealed the irony of our manifestations and Rosenquist reaffirmed those ironic moments in the context of the existential crisis that would define the later half of 20th century America. The advertising creatives emulated in Don Draper’s character are projecting dreams onto a public in response to their inability to look inward. There is only one brief period of reflection in Draper’s life, when he finishes reading Frank O’Hara’s poetry collection Meditations in an Emergency after feeling intellectually taunted in a bar by a young intellectual. He meanders off in California and considers building hot rods and avoiding his family forever, awash in the baptism of southern California surf. Unfortunately his own fears bear down on him and he seeks the comfort of the smooth thighs and white bed linens of a wandering rich girl who finds him beguiling. This only serves to reinforce his ego and results in a return to the cynical hubris of Madison Avenue, and drowns a chance at self examination in Scotch. Draper sees nothing but the pastoral grandeur of idyllic imaginings in the creative campaigns he produces as a replacement for living, whereas Rosenquist accepts the impossibility of nostalgia and exposes advertising for the ugly, suffocating ironic expression it is. Mad Men reminds us to re-read Frank O’hara and Richard Yates so that we remember the foundations of our current malaise and somehow find the creative spirit to face it and change the course we’re on. The irony of a Mark Rothko hanging in the office of Bert Cooper is not lost on Weiner as he hints at the knowing duality of the men who craft the lesser dream for the rest of us, just as the paintings of Rosenquist have done for a half century.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of

pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of

perverted acts in pastures.  No.  One need never leave the

confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't

even enjoy a blade of grass unless i know there's a subway

handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not

totally _regret_ life.  It is more important to affirm theleast sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and

even they continue to pass.  Do they know what they're missing?

Uh huh.

— Frank O’hara, from Meditations in an Emergency, 1957

Image at the top of the page; Lanai by James Rosenquist, 1964, Oil on canvas, 5'2" x 15'6" (157.5 x 472.4 cm). Private Collection