San Francisco
It was raining when I arrived here last
night, but today the weather has cleared up and this city sparkles
with that crystalline northern Californian light that makes
everything pop out from the background. All the buildings and
people have hard, crisp edges. It’s bucolic and hard to believe—a
picture postcard, unreal. The folding bike I brought will come in
handy.
San Francisco is philosophically and politically
bike-friendly, but not geographically—the famous hills can make one
think twice about some trips around town, even though the city
proper is concentrated like Manhattan, or a European city. The
local cycling organization has issued a wonderful map that shows,
by the deepness of the red shading, the steepness of the streets. A
street shaded light pink is a mild slope, but a dark red street is
a major hill to be avoided unless you’re a masochist. Luckily, this
map allows one to plan a hill-free trip at a glance. I wouldn’t
have thought so, but one can plot a route to and from almost
anywhere and avoid the worst hills—almost.
My friend Melanie C arranges a field trip to Apple
headquarters in Cupertino, just south of here, and lunch with their
chief designer Jonathan Ive. Ive’s team designed the original iMac
and its successors, the original iBook and its successors, the
Power Mac, the Power Mac G4 Cube, the PowerBook, the iPod family,
and more.
Ive does a brief show-and-tell with a deconstructed
PowerBook, showing us how even the inside is thoughtfully and
elegantly designed. He seems as proud of the intricate foldings and
stampings of the invisible insides as he is of the elegant
exterior. His point is that the design goes clear through: it’s not
merely an appliqué on the outside to make it all seem groovy, but
extends into stuff most of us will never ever see. In the Bauhaus
and Wiener Werkstätte circles, extraneous decoration was
verboten—thought to be inessential and superfluous to the integrity
of the object or architecture—and therefore it had to go. Adolf
Loos famously equated decoration with the devil. Might Ive’s pride
at the thorough design of the PowerBooks harbor a little of that
legacy?
I don’t think this show-and-tell is all just ego
and pride. Ive implies that the elegant insides actually make the
thing work better too—that good design equals better
functioning—that if the true path of good design is followed
scrupulously, then not only does the thing look very cool, but it
is also a better object all around. Not only has the devil of
superfluous decor been banished, but there is also the implication
that good design is therefore morally good too—it’s on the side of
the angels. It feels a little bit like he’s done this presentation
before, but it’s a beautiful piece of work all the same. I suspect,
however, that we’re not going to hear him or anyone else think out
loud about what they’re actually working on at the moment, and say,
for example, “Now if we could get all this into a phone . . .”
(This was pre-iPhone, mind you.)
I mention that I am in the midst of a collaboration
with Fatboy Slim (whose real name is Norman Cook) and Jonathan says
he is having dinner tonight with his friend John Digweed, one of
the world’s top electronic DJs and a pal of Norman’s. At first I am
mildly surprised. I wonder if Jonathan listens to dance music as he
designs? But then I see this guy in front of me with short-cropped
hair and a T-shirt and realize that, yeah, he looks like a slightly
older version of any British club kid. Wonder if it gets boring for
him here in Cupertino?
Cupertino is south of San Francisco and west of San
Jose. What little town there is lies nestled among the coastal
hills and wineries. There isn’t much here—some business campuses,
malls, and an amazing Asian grocery store. The rolling hills to the
west are home to many of the new mansions that the technocrats have
built. Not so far away are Hewlett-Packard, Google, Sun
Microsystems, and the other Silicon Valley companies that have
turned the area that previously was known as the home of Stanford
University and the sleepy little town of San Jose into a computer
and IT powerhouse. The area features an intense confluence of
engineers, nerds, techies, entrepreneurs, visionaries, and
hangers-on.
From what I can tell, there’s really not much to do
around this part of the bay. I ride my bike fairly aimlessly down
clean, spotless arteries and see no one around—not walking or
biking anyway. All roads lead to places that are versions of what I
just left. I ask if folks here go up to San Francisco to catch
shows, exhibits, or to sample the wildly innovative cuisine in the
San Francisco restaurants. Nope, these folks just love their work,
so they stay put here in the beautiful suburbs, working late, or
they take their work home.
There are massive amounts of money here. In the era
of the Carnegies, Fricks, Mellons, Dukes, and Lauders, billionaires
would make a visible fuss of supporting the local art museum,
hospital, library, or other charitable institution or cause—as Bill
Gates has done with his Gates Foundation and Paul Allen did with
the Experience Music Project. But for the most part I get the
feeling that this bunch prefers facing the challenges within their
own chosen fields—software development, Internet technology, cool
gizmos, and what happens when you bring all those together. I get
the feeling that at least some of them don’t really care that much
about all the money they are making either—they’re too busy to
count it. It’s all about as real as Second Life.
I remember San Francisco during the earlier dot-com
boom. Back then everyone was going to start their own online
business and the world was going to change overnight and investors
were lining up to throw money at every geek with a vague idea, a
pitch, and some programming skills. The fervor and enthusiasm at
that time might have had parallels with the Manhattan Project and
the zeal focused on developing the atomic bomb. That is, it was
exciting and potentially world changing. But here that same
missionary passion was embodied in the wacky inventor/entrepreneur.
There were Web site proposals for anything and everything—services
for your pets or ones that would run all your errands for you. The
future seemed preordained—no one was ever going to have to leave
their house ever again. Every idea was a great idea, earthshaking,
revolutionary. It’s no wonder the Web world is sometimes described
as a legacy of the hippie era—but with more expensive toys.
It’s no accident that the humble garage where Bill
Hewlett and Dave Packard began their partnership in Palo Alto is an
icon here. Like Sun Studio in Memphis, where rock and roll was
born, or Menlo Park, New Jersey, where Edison lit up the world,
this funky little garage is revered partly because it’s nothing
special. Its ordinariness is the point. Their first product was an
audio oscillator for testing sound equipment. HP refers to it as
“the tone heard round the world.”
The garage is considered the birthplace of Silicon
Valley, which makes it the perfect visual metaphor for the
anyone-can-do-it doctrine that is still alive and well around here.
Start small, think big. Think out of the box. Think
different.
They’re all hippie sentiments, reworded.
In the first dot-com boom, real estate prices in a
hemmed-in city like San Francisco (or Manhattan) naturally went
through the roof. Kids just out of school who were outside the
dot-com world—young artists, musicians, writers, actors,
eccentrics, and bohemians, the kind of folks for which this city
was previously known (and who may have been the inspiration for the
dot-commers)—got pushed to the margins or over to Oakland and
elsewhere.
In the late 1990s it all crashed, but the real
estate prices never went back down to what they once were. The vast
numbers of bohemian free spirits never moved back after they’d been
displaced. The world did change quite a bit in the first dot-com
revolution, but not as thoroughly, radically, and completely as
some imagined. Not everyone was ready to live entirely online quite
as fast as some had wagered.
Maybe with Web 2.0, with its more socially
interactive and responsive commerce-based Web sites—and with WiFi
and faster bandwidth more widely available—some of those imagined
changes in our lives might actually occur, but not with the stuff
the first revolution promised. Who wants videocassettes delivered
to their house in under fifteen minutes anymore?
Paradoxically, as it does get easier and easier to
marshal all sorts of services from our phones or laptops and access
limitless information, the interest and demand for the stuff that
can’t be digitized becomes greater: live performances, face-to-face
gatherings, interactions, experiences, taste, tranquility. Those
who frequent social networking sites come to value authenticity as
a kind of compensation, since those qualities can be faked all too
easily online.
Let’s Get Lost
The proselytizing and the
we’re-gonna-change-the-world fervor, the ardor, and the nerdy zeal
of the digerati do indeed seem to have been carried over from the
various streams of eccentric enthusiasms endemic to this neck of
the woods.
Fringe groups have long been a tradition here. Even
if it’s exaggerated by those who aren’t comfortable in this town
(land of fruits and nuts) the Bay Area has a reputation for hosting
cosmic anarchic spectacles of all types. Years ago there was the
Temple of the People—not to be confused with the People’s Temple
and the Kool-Aid of death. This earlier temple was originally based
near Pismo Beach and was mainly influenced by theosophy, a kind of
ad hoc mishmash of many religions and philosophies founded by Madam
Helena Blavatsky in the 1870s.
From a very different impulse and world came a
not-so-dissimilar group. The Bohemian Grove encampments—rural
retreats for the rich and powerful members of the San
Francisco-based Bohemian Club—were also begun in the 1870s and
still exist today. They feature performances and rituals in a
woodland grove. Many U.S. presidents have attended these events,
and the planning of the Manhattan Project began there. It’s all
very secretive, and although networking is strongly discouraged,
it’s hard to imagine that some bonds don’t get cemented out among
the redwoods. If you went camping with Henry Kissinger wouldn’t you
feel like you’d shared a common experience?
Though the Beats were largely based in New York it
was in San Francisco that many of the readings and settings for
their books took place—here the Wild West met the cosmic East. So
North Beach, with its Italian espresso bars and the nearby seedy
dives of Broadway, is often more identified with that movement than
New York is. Somehow the perception is that there was also an
unbroken flow from the Beat generation straight on to the peace and
love era a decade later. Neal Cassady—Jack Kerouac’s model for
On the Road’s Dean Moriarty—was indeed “on the bus” with Ken
Kesey, whose legendary acid tests featured the Grateful Dead—so
it’s not that far-fetched an idea. The ’60s here produced the
psychedelic rock movement, underground comics, psychedelic posters,
the Whole Earth Catalog, be-ins, and the anarchic camp
spectaculars created by the Cockettes, a legendary drag musical
theatrical troupe.
To imply that there is a link between the Cockettes
and the dot-com world might seem a stretch to some, but the
underlying theme of revolution for the hell of it runs straight
through them all. The free-for-all of the blogosphere and the sheer
nuttiness of the stuff that people post online partakes of a
fair-sized hit of whatever. The sense of anarchic freedom prevails
. . . and, I have to add, this bunch is okay with bicycles.
I first came out here in the early ’70s, lured by
the hippie eco techno worldview embodied by the Whole Earth
Catalog. I joined a friend in an attempt to build a dome in a
field up in Napa County. I eventually lost focus on the dome
project and ended up busking with another friend on the streets of
Berkeley—he played accordion, I played violin and ukulele and
struck ironic poses. It was successful. I realized that at that
time I was more interested in irony than utopia.
The Dark Heart of Peace and Love
I visit Mark Pauline at the warehouse base of his
art performance organization Survival Research Laboratories. I’ve
never managed to catch one of their public spectacles, but have
read loads of interviews, watched videos, and heard accounts of
awe-inspiring mayhem.
On arrival, the place looks like an ordinary urban
low-industrial building with an awful lot of machinery scattered
here and there outside, most of it under wraps. Mark leads me from
machine to machine explaining what each one does. One shoots balls
of molten copper hundreds of feet and another shoots a giant flame
eighty-some feet. They’re glorious and frightening. Shock and awe
for the hell of it. Well, it is beautiful too.
The following comes from their Web site:
One of the main projects at SRL over the past year
has been rebuilding the V-1. The V-1 was manufactured at SRL in
1990. It has served as both a high-powered, low frequency generator
and a flamethrower/shockwave device in many SRL shows since that
time. The design of the SRL V-1 pulsejet itself was based on
dimensions gathered by American military and intelligence teams
following WW2. It is an exact replica of the original German
design.
The [SRL] makeshift assembly worked well enough,
other than the unnerving fact that each time the engine was run for
any length of time, several valves would break off and disappear.
This would reduce the output of the machine after about 30 minutes
of use—enough operating time for an SRL show, but a potential
safety hazard for the audience.
These little hints about safety hazards and looming
danger of course make the SRL projects all the more alluring. One
unusual machine shoots a doughnut of compressed air. Mark described
it as a kind of high-velocity, doughnut-shaped tornado. It can
shatter glass when it hits a sheet of it flat on, but, when
directed at people, Mark says it’s like being hit by a pillow. Of
course, after witnessing an invisible burst shatter some glass,
most people are terrified of this thing, even though, not being
rigid like a piece of glass, they can’t be hurt.
One of the most unusual items is the pitching
machine (see next page). It uses a V-8 car engine to rev up two
wheels, one on top of the other, to a superhigh speed. Then
two-by-fours are fed into the gap and—wham!—they’re ejected
at incredible speed. An ejected two-by-four can penetrate steel.
This machine, made out of commercially available car parts, is a
serious weapon.
Needless to say, not too many museums or public
programs are open to the idea of hosting an SRL show these days. It
probably looks to an official arts organization like something that
could easily be misconstrued as a how-to manual for maniacs and
terrorists. Even though they take all necessary precautions to
ensure that spectators can’t be hurt, the very nature of their
performances are about extreme power, violence, and danger—and our
attraction to those things.
San Francisco has always had its dark side. There
have always been gangs, subcultures, and fringe weirdness coupled
with a desire to flirt with the forbidden and dangerous. Sometimes
this impulse was about the idea that everything and every
experience should be available to be known and that nothing should
be forbidden. In this view one certainly couldn’t trust the
government or the church to dictate what experiences might be
pleasurable or useful, so best to just allow or try everything.
Some experiential and psychic explorers had wonderful insights and
epiphanies, and they did break through to the other side, and some
ended up with Jim Jones at the People’s Temple. The openness to the
world of experience and to wide varieties of expression in this
beautiful city can easily spill over into playing with fire—and
denying that you might get seriously burned. Not that Mark and the
SRL folks are dark or evil, but their machines certainly flirt with
that power and mythology. It’s potent stuff.
San Francisco isn’t the only place where light and
dark are equally alluring, but it does seem that maybe here, more
than in many other places—with the bright Mediterranean light,
nearby ocean, and tolerant atmosphere—those forbidden fruits really
flourish. Is it the fact that this town is about as far as you can
get from Europe and the East Coast and still be on the mainland
that allows all those groups to be semi-accepted and tolerated?
There’s almost an admiration and respect for eccentricity and
obsessive independent spirits here, whereas in a lot of other
places independence and freedom are given lip service but that’s
about it.
I bike over to an alternative arts center called
CELLspace where the publisher McSweeney’s has organized an event.
The venue is a warehouse in a neighborhood of warehouses. I read
from a book I’ve written and show PowerPoint slides as if I am a
somewhat deranged motivational or religious speaker. Afterward all
the other participants and I sign our books at a table, which is a
little bit of a letdown after the nuttiness of the main event. Just
as I become resigned to the business of signing books, a marching
band bursts through the front doors and begins to play and
“parade.” The Extra Action Marching Band has been at a street
festival nearby and decided to stage an “intervention,” as they do
from time to time—bringing a pleasant dose of music, anarchy, and
baton-twirling girls in skimpy outfits to random events that they
have decided need enlivening. Their playing has a great
groove—Brazilian, Balkan, and original tunes all mashed together.
The flag girls and boys and the baton girls are all in real
marching band outfits combined with sequined G-strings, and somehow
their twisted and skewed take on this all-American institution
brings together a natural nostalgia for the thrilling sound of
marching bands and the hedonistic sensual and sexual anarchy that
is endemic to the Bay Area. Before too long I end up standing on a
table dancing.
After the show is over I go to the band’s
rehearsal/living space in the Bernal Heights neighborhood where the
Extra Action folks and their pals are having a party with live
music—one band called Loop!Station consists of a guy playing cello
through electronics accompanied by a young woman who manages to
smile almost all the time while she sings. She says hi afterward
and is still grinning. There is a genuine San Francisco light show
in one room. Part of it consists of two movies projected onto the
same screen on top of each other. And on another wall a projection
through oil and water makes an old-school light show of blobby
shapes. The Extra Action band regroup and perform another short
set—how they have the energy after having played twice earlier (it
is after two AM at this point) I don’t know. Their music and show
seem to generate energy rather than use it up.
I have the feeling I have entered a chaotic and
somewhat sexy utopia. People have on all sorts of getups—Victorian
hats and fake mustaches on some of the men, wigs on some of the
women, and some folks wear not much at all. Haircut styles are all
over the place. I am in a baby blue western jacket and golf shoes.
The music is varied, and it is made with and generates sheer
joy—that singer isn’t the only one smiling.
Why do scenes like this develop here more than
elsewhere? One of the Extra Action players has some connection with
Survival Research Laboratories, which might be seen as a slightly
more dangerous variation of this same impulse for release; a
similar liberating, wild energy is let loose in both cases.
Machines That Deceive
Somehow, all this ecstatic anarchy leads me to
wonder if the computational models of the brain have reached a
stumbling block, a dead end, with recent attempts to untangle
creativity. I suspect that to imagine, and thus to create, one has
to envision something that doesn’t exist yet. Fictionalizing is
thus very close to lying—it’s imagining the existence of something
that isn’t literally true, and writing or speaking about it as if
it is real. Most fiction aims to tell us a story in a way that
leads us to believe it is happening or has happened. The
motivations behind storytelling and lying are different, but the
creative process behind them is the same.
To have a truly creative machine we will inevitably
end up with something like HAL, one that cannot only compute,
calculate, and sort through a massive amount of information, but
can also imagine, create, lie, and deceive. From the machine’s
point of view there might not be any way of telling the difference
between imagining and fibbing.
We meat puppets have our morals, instincts, laws,
and taboos to keep us in line, which are by nature human centered
and therefore not universal. We would like to think that morals and
taboos are God given and applicable to all human beings, but they
really are just what’s good for us as a species—or sometimes only
good for our tribe, nation, or particular geographical area. Well,
this creative machine will have to be endowed with some equivalent
to those laws and injunctions too. In addition, if it is to create
in a way that we recognize it will also need to experience fear,
love, hunger, and sadness. Our instincts and impulses, our gut
feelings, are all part of how we think, how we make decisions and
reason. We are guided by irrational impulses and emotions just as
much as by logical analysis, so for a machine to truly think like
us it will have to think emotionally at least as much as it does
rationally. You can probably see where this argument is
going.
Machines that create might then need the whole kit
and caboodle of human institutions—genetic motivations, social
lives, and even a form of sex (desire, longing, mating,
offspring)—in order to evolve religious and social networks that
might serve, as they do for us, to temper the hatreds, deceptions,
and narcissism that will inevitably emerge from this Pandora’s box.
These social structures would only mitigate antisocial tendencies
somewhat, as those same structures do with people. We can only make
creatures in our own image—we cannot do otherwise—and the shit we
sometimes get up to will be passed on to these “beings” as
well.
A counterargument to that sad conclusion might
claim that if a bicycle is, for example, an improvement on legs,
then maybe we can indeed invent some things that are better than
ourselves? Well, physically, anyway. That’s toolmaking, I guess.
Crows and chimps both fashion devices that reach where their beaks
or fingers cannot, but that’s hardly godlike. For that, one would
have to make a machine that is emotionally and cre atively “better”
than we are. If it was, if we succeeded, there’s a good chance we
probably wouldn’t be able to recognize the improvement.
Escape from Alcatraz
I bike over to the Taqueria Cancun, which has
incredible tacos and burritos. Your choice of meat fillings—carne
asada, pork, or chicken, naturally, but also head, tongue, and
brains. Then I put the bike onto a Muni bus, all of which have bike
racks up front (!). The bus I’ve chosen heads across the Golden
Gate Bridge to Sausalito and Marin County. There are bike trails
all over the headlands and around western Marin, much of which has
been left as national preserve. One can spot hawks, vultures,
mountain lions, and seals. The trails swoop and drop around and
over the fog-swept barren hills. Eventually most of the paths end
up dipping down to some little cove or hidden beach. From inside
the headland hills you can’t see the city at all; even the Golden
Gate Bridge is hidden.
With the brisk air and the mist it reminds me of
the bleak but beautiful Scottish highlands, though the rain
drizzles less often here. In Scotland, as in Iceland and Ireland,
there were once forests that covered the hills, but gradually they
were all cut down, leaving a beautiful and strangely otherworldly
terrain. There’s no denying that the legacy of man’s destruction is
sometimes beautiful. Strip mines and dams are powerfully
impressive. The sheep that now graze on the windswept slopes of
Scotland ensure that no tree will manage to grow higher than a
shoot, so even if a sapling could manage to get a grip on the boggy
soil its chances of survival are slim.
Here it is not as rainy, so the hills have not
turned to peat bogs, and there are clumps of trees in the valleys
among the scattered bunkers—built to defend against the imminent
Japanese invasion.
Inside and Outside
I bike down Mission Street into the SoMa district.
It’s midday and fairly warm, but passing an area of leather bars I
see there are guys standing outside in full macho gay regalia. They
must be suffering on a hot day like this, but maybe that’s the
point. This part of town is flat, as it was created by landfill
dumped over the rotting hulls of ships, so it feels different,
slightly outside of the center of town, even though it’s right next
to it. I stop to see an art show at the Yerba Buena Center
featuring work that comes out of a place in Oakland called Creative
Growth. Creative Growth is a visual arts center for people who are
mentally and/or psychologically challenged. As a fan of a lot of
what is often called outsider art I love some of this work.
One of these artists, Judith Scott, obsessively
wrapped things in yarn and twine, creating almost life-sized
cocoons that are powerful, affecting, and sort of creepy. Giant
totemic objects, talismans that seem to hold some mysterious
personal juju.
Another man, Dwight Mackintosh, did drawings that,
as one studies them, are revealed to be composed of many layers of
images, like stop-motion photos, all transparent and superimposed.
They’re like those images that we’ve seen in old animated cartoons
when a character moves super-rapidly and you see a dozen images of
the character’s legs simultaneously, all overlapping to indicate
speed. In Mackintosh’s line drawings there are so many arms and
legs overlapping it’s hard at first to tell exactly what motion is
being depicted or what the character is doing. Then it becomes
clear—that’s a hand, that’s a . . . oh, it’s a penis. They’re all
masturbating. At high speed, it seems.
The term outsider, as it is used in the art
world, means “we are not sure this belongs in here, the artist is
untrained, and maybe naive, but have a look.” It also sometimes
implies self-taught and probably insane or not socially functioning
in the accepted sense. (That could include a lot of us.)
On a nearby wall there are a series of
black-and-white photos of the Creative Growth artists. Some of
these photos I find disturbing. Not having seen what the artists
look like previously, just having been moved deeply by their work,
I mentally place and rank them alongside the best contemporary
artists practicing today. Qualitatively, objectively, I don’t see
any difference between their work and that of mainstream fine
artists—except for the fact that there is no work here that deals
with the hermetic and convoluted dramas of the art world itself.
This, for me, is no great loss; in fact it’s more or less a
plus—though some self-reflexive art is indeed funny. Anyway, I half
expect them to look “normal,” or at least like other artists I
know.
However, seeing the picture of Judith Scott, who
has Down syndrome, makes me realize that many of these folks could
never function in the gallery/museum system.
There, then, is what relegates them as outsiders.
These artists may not have the perspective on their work that we
expect a professional artist to have—not that most professional
artists can talk lucidly about their own work either, but
professionals at least have a sense of how their work fits into the
world at large, or into the art market, and can fake the talk
pretty well. We presume that the work of a professional artist is
slightly separate from the artist as a person—you don’t have to
know about Picasso’s mistresses and his psychological hang-ups and
obsessions to like his paintings. With the Creative Growth artists
and some other outsiders, however, it seems that for many people,
personal information about the artist is considered essential to
judging, evaluating, and understanding her work. The fact that they
are self-taught, “crazy,” grew up in a swamp, or worked during the
day as a janitor is somehow considered relevant. Jackson Pollock
worked as a janitor at an elementary school in New York, and
probably stole some paint from there too, but wall plaques in
museums don’t describe him as a former janitor. While professional
artists distance themselves and their lives somewhat from their
work, Judith obviously has an intimate relationship with hers that
I imagine many professionals might envy and wish they could
have.
Though some professionals claim they’d like to
eliminate the gap, and work in the territory between art and life
as Bob Rauschenberg once claimed, these folks have never even left
that gap—for them it’s not a gap but a deep chasm.
Comparisons between these artists and art
professionals begs the question: what is sanity, and does being
dysfunctional sometimes make you a better artist? I don’t think it
does, though the Van Gogh myth of the crazy (genius) artist remains
alive and well. I think those questions, that dichotomy between
intention and result, might be irrelevant. For me, a stain on the
sidewalk or a blob of construction insulation may have an aesthetic
value equal to some works by Franz West, for example. One just
happens to be on a stand in a museum and the other is usually found
discarded in a vacant lot. My definition of what is good art is,
I’m afraid, pretty wide, and it isn’t determined by the biography
of its creator. Sometimes, for me, art doesn’t even need an author.
I don’t care who or what made it. For me the art happens between
the thing—any thing—and the viewer’s eye (or mind). Who or what
made it is irrelevant. I don’t need to see their CV to like it. But
I have to admit that sometimes the artist’s story, if I am informed
of it, adds to and affects what I see.
If you obsessively scribble on bits of paper, as
hugely successful artist Louise Bourgeois does some of the time (to
pick an obvious example), is your work better than some very
similar work by one of the folks at Creative Growth because you
have more objectivity about your own work? Is scribbling better art
when it has a conscious intention? Is it better work when you’re
aware that you’re scribbling and could do other kinds of drawing if
you really wanted to? I don’t think there is any way one could
objectively say that of the two works one is better or worse than
the other. Louise Bourgeois certainly does other kinds of work too,
which might make some kind of difference, at least to some people,
but the biggest difference I can come up with is that presumably
she decided to make her obsessive scribbles consciously, and
deliberately, and, we assume (big assumption here), wasn’t simply
driven to make the marks by some unconscious impulse. This is
really a big assumption, especially in her case, because she makes
a big deal about her fucked-up childhood, so maybe she needs to
scribble just as much as the Creative Growth folks.
And the real question is, would it make any
difference if she does?
Social functionality, to me, is the key word in the
inside/ outside dichotomy, not sanity. Many “sophisticated” and
successful gallery artists are quite mad, lost in their own worlds,
and often they are emotional wrecks—but they do know how to
navigate the shoals and reefs of the art world. Well, a bit. They
can compose themselves and posture sufficiently to get by, to talk
the talk and walk the walk, though some of the successful ones
might also be drooling drug addicts and conversational
incompetents.
For the folks at Creative Growth making art is
therapeutic. I would argue that it is equally therapeutic for the
professional artist. I can personally testify that making music and
performing have kept me more or less sane and allowed me a measure
of social contact I might otherwise never have had. (Viewing art,
however, is not therapeutic, nor does collecting art have any
morally uplifting value—but that’s another topic. But the act of
making it is.)
I’m not sure I know anyone, anyone at all, who is
completely sane. Sure, I know plenty of people who play the sanity
game with skill and daring. Their masks of having it together are
well secured, and they don’t spit out profanities or stare
googly-eyed into space. Above all they have learned to function
well enough socially to be accepted as “normal.” My friends are not
an exclusively eccentric arty crowd either—most are what would be
referred to as normal.
The poor outsiders never learned or mastered those
social skills. Even a would-be self-marketer like the Reverend
Howard Finster of Somerville, Georgia, never quite got that part
right. Either his preaching and ranting got in the way—fire and
brimstone don’t mix well with white wine and cheese—or he didn’t
realize that in the art world, one simply can’t be seen as
blatantly hawking one’s wares, which Howard didn’t mind doing
because he saw his work as serving a greater glory. He was
proselytizing; he wasn’t really pushing “himself.”
There’s an elaborate song and dance involved in
passing for a professional artist. One needs to veil the sales
pitch, for starters, and that protocol, those dance steps, must be
mastered, as is true in any profession. But one can be mad and
self-obsessed, can believe in other worlds and the influence of
supernatural forces, and still be regarded as a respected, “sane”
artist—no problem.
Sophisticated artists who can draw well—Klee,
Basquiat, Twombly, Dubuffet—often intentionally draw in a more
“primitive” manner. They are seen, partly due to the rough nature
of their mark making, as tapping into something deep and profound.
The crude lines imply that one is in touch with unconscious forces
that won’t submit to the urgings and smoothing tendencies of craft
and skill. It’s not an unreasonable or completely untrue idea,
either; funky drawing does push some elemental buttons, and maybe
the work of these artists does come from a deep and profound place
that won’t submit to polishing. I’m not saying they’re fakers. I’m
simply noting what their kind of gestures connote.
The generally accepted idea is that if it’s rough,
it must be more real, more authentic. Yet the poor outsiders, whose
marks are very often every bit as unpolished, can’t help how they
draw—they couldn’t make a clean line if they had to. So they are
left out of the art “club.” They are doing the very best they can
but because their lack of exhibited drafting skill is, we believe,
not their choice, they are often viewed as lesser artists. They
can’t help drawing crazy shit, while the sophisticated artists
could, at least so we imagine, draw a nice puppy if they had to. It
would seem to be all about intention. And yet, these outsider
artists most certainly have intention. They know when a line is
right or when it’s “untrue” according to their personal standards.
They have definite intentions to achieve a very specific visual
look and effect—at least one would assume so given that they often
labor mightily to re-create that look again and again.
This aesthetic segregation seems perverse. I enjoy
much of the work of the four very successful professional artists
mentioned above, but probably what moves me is when their work
touches something deep that we all have in common. It is the same
something that the outsiders sometimes tickle and activate in the
very same way—proof that these charged marks and images can
resonate with nearly anyone. They touch those same deep, dark parts
of themselves and ourselves. The difference is the poor loonies
can’t remove themselves from the experience of communicating with
extremes of dark or light and step back and away from it. To
distance oneself, to feign objectivity, this, then, is the mark of
a “civilized” person. It’s a useful, possibly essential, social
skill to have, but it’s not, in my opinion, a criterion by which to
judge creative work.
The great works of antiquity, the classics, could
have been made by nameless (to us) skilled obsessive nutters—many
of their personal stories are certainly lost to history. So maybe
they could have been complete misfits too—but who cares?
On the next page is a painting made by a migraine
sufferer. It depicts—so we are told—not a metaphorical
interpretation of the headache but a realistic depiction of what
the sufferer sees when the migraine strikes.
It makes one wonder if Braque and other cubists
suffered from migraines and were painting what they actually saw.
Would that make a difference? Would we think less of them as
artists if that were the case?
The crossover between inside and out is not just
confined to the visual arts. Beckett, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein
produced obsessive and inscrutable works—but they managed to
function and even won prizes for work that many still call mad.
Whether something is made by a sophisticate or by a person who is
functionally challenged, in recent decades it often comes out the
same. And, as time passes, traditional skill and craft become less
desirable qualities, and expression, truth, and emotion are deemed
more important. Artists and writers are encouraged to dive into
their inner depths, so it shouldn’t be surprising at all if some of
the same strange fish are caught. The creatures from the deep can
be pretty disturbing and wacky, but we all recognize some part of
ourselves in them, no matter who dragged them up.
As my friend C points out, it’s fairly common for
someone to attempt to denigrate someone else’s creative work by
claiming, “They’re not a nice person.” It’s as if the fact that
someone has a lousy personality, is a bad father, engages in phone
sex, or is obsessed with little boys or little girls implies that
their work is therefore less good. Does it? Surely no one cares if
an artist is merely a little stingy or is gay or not anymore. Most
people would say that those bits of information are often
irrelevant and have no bearing on whether they like the work or
not, or whether it should be taken seriously or not.
But doesn’t the fact that Ezra Pound made radio
broadcasts in support of the Fascists or that Neil Young was a
Ronald Reagan supporter or that some composers and artists
apologized for Stalin—or even for Hitler—make their work suspect,
even worthless in some cases for many of us? At what point does the
extra-creative activity of the person begin to make a difference in
how we perceive their work? This question presumes that those
political sympathies or sexual perversions actually show up in the
work—and I’m not even talking about work that is blatantly
propagandistic. If we opt to denigrate Speer’s monumental
architecture then there are a whole lot of other architects who,
judging by the way their work looks, are equally “Fascist,” and
many of them are working today.
Where does one draw the line? Should we only judge
by what is in front of us?
A History of PowerPoint
I do a talk about the computer presentation
program PowerPoint at the University of California in Berkeley for
an audience of IT legends and academics. I have, over a couple of
years, made little “films” in this program normally used by
businesspeople or academics for slide shows and presentations. In
my pieces I made the graphic arrows and the corny backgrounds
dissolve and change without anyone having to click on the next
slide. These content-less “presentations” run by themselves. I also
attached music files—sound tracks—so the pieces are like little
abstract art films that play off the familiar (to some people)
style of this program. I removed, or rather never included, what is
usually considered “content,” and what is left is the medium that
delivers that content. In a situation like this one here in
Berkeley one is usually asked to talk about one’s work, but rather
than do that I have decided to tell the history of the computer
program itself. I tell who invented it and who refined it and I
offer some subjective views on the program—my own and those of its
critics and supporters.
I am terrified. Many of the guys that originally
turned PowerPoint into a software program are present. What are
they going to think of what I did with their invention? Well,
couldn’t they just get up to talk about it? They could call me out
and denounce me!
Luckily, I’m not talking about the details of the
programming but about the ubiquity of the software and how, because
of what it does and how it does it, it limits what can be
presented—and therefore what is discussed. All media do this to
some extent—they do certain things well and leave other things out
altogether. This is not news, but by bringing this up, reminding
everyone, I hope to help dispel the myth of neutrality that
surrounds many software programs.
I also propose that a slide talk, the context in
which this software is used, is a form of contemporary theater—a
kind of ritual theater that has developed in boardrooms and
academia rather than on the Broadway stage. No one can deny that a
talk is a performance, but again there is a pervasive myth of
objectivity and neutrality to deal with. There is an unspoken
prejudice at work in those corporate and academic “performance
spaces”—that performing is acting and therefore it’s not “real.”
Acknowledging a talk as a performance is therefore anathema. I want
to dispel this myth of authenticity somewhat, in an entertaining
and gentle way.
The talk goes fine. I can relax, they’re laughing.
Bob Gaskins, Dennis Austin, and Peter Norvig are all here. Bob
Gaskins was one of the guys who refined the original program and
realized its potential. Bob declined to be introduced, so I stick
with a picture of a concertina when I mention his name. (He’s
retired and buys and sells antique concertinas now.) That gets a
laugh. He tells me afterward that he likes the
PowerPoint-as-theater idea, which is a relief. I mean, there is a
lot of hatred for this program out there, and a lot of people laugh
at the mere mention of bullet points, so he must feel kind of
vulnerable.
In working on these pieces, and others, I have
become aware that there is a pyramid of control and influence that
exists between text, image, and sound. I note that today we give
text a preferential position: a label under an image “defines” that
image even if it contradicts what we can see. I wonder, in a time
before text became ubiquitous, was image (a symbol, a gesture, a
sign) the most influential medium? Did sound—singing, chanting,
rhythm—come in second, and text, limited as it might have been
thousands of years ago, come in third? Was text once a handmaiden
to image and sound and then gradually managed to usurp their places
and take control? Did the pyramid of communicative power at some
point become inverted?
Wittgenstein famously said, “The limits of my
language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words
for.” I am a prisoner of my language.
This presupposes that conscious thought cannot
happen without verbal or written language. I disagree. I sense a
lot of communication goes on nonverbally—and I don’t mean winks and
nods. I mean images get ahold of us, as do sounds. They grab and
hold us emotionally. Smells too. They can grip in a way that is
hard to elucidate verbally. But maybe for Ludwig it just wasn’t
happening. Or maybe because he couldn’t express what sounds,
smells, and images do in words he chose to ignore them, to deny
that they were communicating.
Let’s Open a Club!
I hail a cab and fold my bike, throw it in the
trunk, and head back to San Francisco. The cabdriver would be
perfect cast as Ignatius from the novel A Confederacy of
Dunces. He’s a large man wearing big shades, with a shaved head
and, on this unusually hot day for San Francisco, a rolled-up,
wooly winter hat. He recognizes me and tells me he knows that the
lead guitarist from Talking Heads lives in Marin (he means Jerry
Harrison). He also knows where Dana Carvey lives, so he proceeds to
try to convince me to get together with Dana and start a club.
“Nice tables, some drinks, some comedy, and good, wholesome music:
how could we lose?”
Then he moves on to discuss the “negro infection,”
by which I think he means the lewd and violent lyrics of gangsta
rap. His own musical favorite is Huey Lewis, whom he thinks needs
to be played on the radio more. He suggests that maybe Huey and I
could both play at the club, yeah!
At the airport, my flight is delayed, and I can
hear the businessman behind me saying, “Isn’t that the worst slide
you’ve ever seen?” as he holds up a printout of a PowerPoint
slide—a triangle with words on it.