If institutions of higher learning that teach the “Mother Art” - architecture see fit to offer courses in the business of architecture perhaps our art departments in these same universities could offer a course called “Flash Management” - How to leverage one’s fifteen minutes of fame into an entire career in the fine arts. It is the fate of most artists to lack the skills or interest in the world outside of their zone of creation to even support themselves.
Garth Brooks: Let Them Eat Cake
Garth Brooks has sold more albums than any other solo artist in history. The great majority of these fans are hardworking middle-class American men and women i.e. scrimpers and savers struggling to survive from payday to payday. If one votes with one’s pocketbook then Garth Brooks has ridden this enormous wave of populist support to the presidency of all recorded music. Now, after ten years of rest, Mr. Brooks is singing better than ever and wants to perform again. He has made a deal with Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn to play Las Vegas fifteen or twenty weekends a year to small audiences who pay $150. Per ticket i.e. the rich. Garth is abandoning the people who created his popularity and wealth, following the footsteps of many elected leaders who, once they are ensconced in the halls of power, sell out their constituents via lobbyists for global corporations and financial interests that victimize the people who empowered them - the average hardworking American. Garth Brooks is now committing his artistry to his friends in high places. Garth - say it isn’t so!
Late Cezanne
One of the reason’s Cezanne’s late paintings are great is that they so deeply involve the viewer. This work demands that the viewer align the painted objects and spatial effects with one’s internalized notions of linear and aerial perspective. It demands that the sketchy trees be fully foliated, the earth solidified, the sky pasted into uniform atmosphere. One’s brain strives to deny the objectness of the painting and to establish pictorial space. It is as if the painting is a dehydrated sponge ripe with potential and our act of seeing adds water creating a full, round esthetic experience. Magic happens as we look. It is this tension, generated by a will to complete the work, to participate, that so fully engages us in these paintings.
First Tier Painting: A Definition
We celebrate many first tier artists who are second-tier painters. Second-tier painting is a closed system. Loose ends are all tied up, all ambiguity is resolved, Chuck Close, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Estes and John Currin come to mind. Each of these painters has proved that second tier painting can be first tier art. It takes a particular strain of courage to leave room in the work for viewer participation. When the viewer is included you double the brain waves in the art experience. Second-tier / closed-system painters erect barriers around their work that says: “Keep your distance - admire my skill, my obsessive tenacity, my hard work - don’t stand too close (pun intended), don’t block the sunlight - I’m the artist - you’re not - I’ve got to spell this whole thing out for you” or perhaps “I’m just insecure and must prove to myself that I have the skill to resolve all ambiguity as if it were a sign of weakness not to have all the answers. The top rank of painters do not pretend to have all of the answers. They admit they are not God even on their own small model of the universe, their canvas. Great painters invite the viewer to help them close the gap and thus invited, the viewer engages the work, looks more closely, he can’t help himself. The mind of the viewer must try to fill the voids that remain perhaps unconsciously as a seductive invitation by its author. It is this subliminal interplay between a painting and a viewer that sets off the spark of life in the work. This spark is rarely contained in the work alone no matter how many amazing picture-making strategies are employed. This explains why so much truly mind-bending photorealism leaves one undernourished. A painter might ask herself: how might I offer this invitation in my work because painting elk nostril vapor at sunrise is not enough.A late Cezanne painting looks very finished to us now, as does a Monet or a Rose Period Picasso. At the time these were created they were seen by many as mere daubs, far from completed work. We have been trained throughout the past one hundred years to see a lot with little modeling of form or rendering of space. We now see with potent suggestions only. Picasso and Braque taught us a code for human body parts: faces, hands, hair, limbs, therefore, the amount of visual information required to start a dialogue with the average gallery / museum visitor becomes reduced over time. This leads to engagement occurring in work that is entirely non-representational, non-narrative, non-anecdotal. Paintings such as de Kooning’s “Women” of the early 1950s now appear as fleshed out as a Rococo maiden (Boucher, Fragonard).
Bravura Skill
Bravura skill has become an ugly trap in the world of drawing and painting over the course of the past century. It is now seen as post-Cezanne seduction. The possessor of such skill seduces not only the general civilian public but often himself as well. Dash, flash, dynamic line, painterly touch (on the money with hue and placement) why? What’s not to love about this sort of work? Cezanne cracked this nut wide open and brushed it off the table. With no bravura skill or much skill at all he became the greatest painter and artist of his age or any and all ages. Cezanne proved that the deep truth and communion with universal energy was independent of physical pyrotechnics. Young Picasso had the bravura skill of his more mature and internationally successful countryman Sorolla but after seeing Cezanne in 1905 Picasso searched for deeper, more exotic sources for his work. He began to pursue ancient Iberian sculpture and sub-Saharan tribal art - a deeper vein that, when conflated with the heresies of late Cezanne, gave birth to Cubism.
Artists: Explorers and Miners
There are two types of artists: miners and explorers. Miners discover a conceptual lode and work it throughout their careers with adjustments to their work to give an appearance of creative development - Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Norman Rockwell, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, John Currin. Explorers are always seeking new territory like Lewis and Clark or The Spanish explorers of the sixteenth century (minus the genocide). Picasso was an explorer for many years prior to his late phase when he was mining an idiosyncratic private language. Most of the artists whose names and work we know are miners. It seems to require the relentless telling of the same story to break through. One might think that there are far more miners than explorers but this is not true. It is that explorers remain obscure because their names are rarely associated with a personal style. Most miners endured an intense explorer phase, usually in art school and accompanied by anxiety, fear and poverty - there was nothing to lose by bold experimentation. Why not try a bit of everything - see what sticks to the wall. Once recognition strikes (often along with some money), the artist puts down a claim on their idea and they begin to mine it to both their exhaustion and ours. There may be an x curve at work here with the depth of the anxiety of ignominy in inverse proportion to the desire to remain an explorer once “discovered” Picasso was discovered as a little boy and didn’t have an explosive emotional event as a young man when someone first paid some money and attention to his work thus freeing him psychically to explore throughout most of his career. Edward Baum, one of my Harvard architecture professors said to me “One can measure the quality of a creative mind by how long the person can remain in a state of uncertainty.” How long can one continue exploring without having an answer, a solution, either to a specific problem or to the challenge of an entire career. Does one have the guts for the anxiety of exploration. Exploring is more admirable than mining. The art establishment and our galaxy of art galleries make little money from explorers. These entities, for the most part, encourage one to become a miner ASAP. Galleries and explorers are almost always adversaries with some brave and notable exceptions. For a gallery, art is a commodity and if the brand represents something different every season it is hard to market. There’s room for one or two Picasso scale explorers in a generation and everyone else who wishes to make a living in art is advised to get in line - start to mine.
Yin (art) Yang (viewer)
Metamimesis: The abstraction of abstraction i.e. Picasso abstracting Cezanne who abstracted nature and what is nature an abstraction of? God? Pure energy? Every artwork contains its yin - the work itself and its yang - the consciousness of the viewer. In the pre-World War One era in Paris, all viewers carried a firm knowledge of the history of western painting from their visits to the Louvre as well as visits to annual Beaux Arts exhibitions - the official, state-sponsored salons. This was a very astute audience whose forward thinking members could see that the work of Cezanne Matisse, Picasso, and Braque was extending a great tradition, that these artists were pioneers, breaking the bonds of a stagnant realm of ideas about painting. If an artist knows that his/her audience is informed, educated, trained and curious for the new, he can explore more boldly without being completely divorced from fellow humans. The esthetic, intellectual fertility of the Paris citizen inspired adventure in their avante-garde artists. The game was on. When a community of artists can depend on an educated adventurous audience, their ideas can flourish. In a hermetic pressure cooker like New York City, where the level of education and the taste for esthetic adventure spikes far above the provincial norm and you add feisty, ambitious, erudite and voluble art critics, the dance between yin(artist and his work)and yang (audience ) becomes extreme, thus events like Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Newman, Rothko can occur followed by a fevered yin/yang tango with Warhol, Lichtenstein and Stella. Then the stakes get even higher and inaccessible to the flyovers: Judd, Andre, and Flavin. Thomas Kinkaide works just as hard as Chuck Close every day at his easel but he gets no respect from the cognoscenti. Kinkaide is playing to an unschooled yang. To people who have not studied art. Kinkaide must stock each painting with its own yang - its own apologists, its own total story. His audience brings so little to his party that he must help them and they respond to his efforts by purchasing his work in monumental quantities. In the art establishment there is an assumption of yang level that makes Kinkaide uncool and Warhol or now, Richard Prince, king. You must at least know the Greenberg/ Rosenberg stable of artists as well as Duchamp to “get” Andy Warhol. You must be trained in contemporary art and theory. People whose parents spent the money to ensure their children’s training do not want to waste that intellectual capital by diffusing the heft of their yang on the likes of Thomas Kinkaide. How does one explain John Currin? Or the narrative, anecdotal hyperglycemic work that fills the walls of the Mary Boone Gallery or L.A. Louver? How does one explain David Hockney’s pastoral mimesis? It’s the New Feudalism -every ship on its own bottom - the group- grope conceptual / ironic yang-fest of the 50s through 90s is over. We are now in a moment when even our most prominent new York galleries, the inner circle of the avante-garde art world, valorizes obsessive miners of a nineteenth century tradition rather than explorers. As evidence of the New Feudalism, our streets are filled with thirty-something men in their big, noisy trucks. Every one a feudal lord with no interest or faith in government on any level. There is no community either in new York City or Redwood City or anywhere in-between. The vampire squid (corporatocracy / financial industry) has had its way with us. Our blood is gone. Art is getting dumber.
Dang the yang - full steam ahead!
Dylan and Picasso - late work
Bob Dylan’s recent relationship to his music / lyrics is similar to that of late Picasso in that they both evince a casual-seeming language of expression. Perhaps the reason Dylan doesn’t think too much of late Picasso is that he sees too much of his own relentlessly casual yet urgent laziness in him. Advice to Bob: take a six month vacation from the road, study art / painting, write some great songs (music and lyrics) If I want to hear Robert Hunter’s lyrics, I’ll buy a Robert Hunter CD. Calling in a co-writer for one’s lyrics is like calling in a trusted colleague to make love to your girlfriend. I doubt that Picasso ever did this. However, I love the new Dylan CD “Together Through Life” especially “It’s All Good” and “My Wife’s Hometown” these two songs are among Dylan’s best of past twenty years.It is perplexing to see a legendary artist in one field holding forth on adjacent art (Dylan on painting) and reveal themselves a tyro. Unless Bob Dylan must crank out an album a year to keep a mobster from breaking his knees, he should slow down, relax and let his innate wisdom emerge. It would be a shame to see an artist as great as Dylan fall into the Clancy / Patterson zone where he calls in others to write his material just to have something for the voracious entertainment maw. On the other hand, there are hundreds of songwriters in America, (*myself included), who would love to write a song for or with Dylan. Let the co-writing continue. Dylan as messenger rather than oracle. In order to do great things, artists need great critics. Dylan’s biggest handicap at present is that his legend status dissolves all constructive criticism into either fawning encomiums or dismissal. Has Dylan entered the late Picasso zone where there is no effective criticism and the art wanders loosely? Picasso did his finest thinking / painting from 1905 - 1914 when surrounded by his viciously critical friends, his Bande au Picasso. Where is the Bande au Bob Dylan who would kick his artistic ass in order to inspire a few late great works that surpass all that has gone before, like late Rembrandt or the Turner paintings that Dylan so admires. To date, Dylan’s late phase resembles that of Picasso for whom he has little regard. I treasure late Picasso. It is painting as speech. Whether it is “sloppy” or not is beside the point. It is the work of a great artist in his maturity, speaking a casual, conversational style. He is no longer trying to be great here but he is great. This late work of Picasso will someday get its due. I’m struggling here. Is the most recent Dylan work among his best? Is the recent work very high quality? Given the late Picasso framework, it is songwriting of the highest order - it is simply no longer revolutionary. It is the work of an elderly artist speaking in a more private language. Dylan is on shaky ground (he should co-write with Neil Young) when he voices disregard for late Picasso because he is revealing a lack of regard for his own estimable work.
Bob Dylan - droite de Seigneur
Bob Dylan creates a large musical playing field in the 1960s, a field upon which a generation of talented singer / songwriters played. Tom Waits is one of these artists playing on the field of Bob. It is interesting that after forty years Dylan has his pick of which of his students to mimic for his own uses. Dylan’s current mumbly, croaky voice singing low-life stories is a big page out of his student Tom Waits’ book. This is exactly what Frank Lloyd Wright did when, after inventing the playing field for twentieth century architecture, he goes to school on two of his best students, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler. Inspired by their work which was directly derived from the work of Frank Lloyd Wright (they both worked in his office), Wright creates his masterpiece - Fallingwater. Wright and Dylan are exercising their artistic * “Droite de seigneur” or * “Jus primae noctis” over their most talented minions. It’s funny that when Picasso tried this with young Diego Rivera during the late cubist years he almost got shot by Rivera, who didn’t take kindly to Pablo visiting his studio and stealing his latest cubist spatial inventions or flirting with his girlfriend. * The right of the king to sleep with your wife on your wedding night.
Celebrate Cubism Centennial
We are entering the zone of the one hundredth anniversary of the epochal pan-cultural paradigm shift that changed all art and science. The year 1912 is the locus of revolutions in painting, physics, music, dance, fiction, poetry, politics and technology. It was as if the earth passed through an intergalactic cloud whose molecules shook our civilization to its roots. Imagine a gas was inhaled by creative geniuses of the time: Picasso and Braque invent Cubism, Einstein develops the Special Theory of Relativity, Stravinsky and Schoenberg develop new tonal systems for making music, Isadora Duncan unpins Baroque dance (classical ballet), the Wright Brothers introduce pitch, yaw and roll simultaneously into the possibilities of human mechanized movement, James Joyce experiments with fictional expression, motion pictures are invented and all of life begins to accelerate intensely.It is time to celebrate one of the more potent of these manifestations of the 1912 shift - Cubism. Locating the locus of the birth of Cubism (rather than the proto-Cubism of “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon”) in the work done by Picasso in the mountain village of Gosol in the summer of 1909 and spring of 1910 when he painted “Portrait of Fanny Tellier”. The autumn of 2009 and spring of 2010 is the one hundredth anniversary of this epochal group of paintings. Let’s celebrate this development, Cubism, that revolutionized all visual art and architecture. As a painter and architect, Cubism is my slice of the paradigm shift pie.
Artwork: quasi-cubist inspired painting: Jim Blake 2009
"Water Bearers" - 5' x 7' - 1985 - oil on canvas
Kooper Rico Ratso - 1970
"Residual Fish" - 5' x 7' - 1985 - oil on canvas
"Six Nudes" early phase- 5' x 7' - 1985 - oil on canvas
Koons - Hirst - Murakami
The celebration of machine finish in the work of Judd, Koons, Murakami and Hirst removes the only qualifier, touch, that could tell us if bliss were present or not, in the end product. Machine finish is a useful trope in the world of big-time, celebrated commodity art. If we can deny touch as a component of the most esteemed work then second rate work can pass as masterpieces. This work may have had sublime touch, thus qualifying it for the pantheon but we’ll never know. These artists have become like architects i.e. executives in an object delivery system. There is no “touch” in a work of architecture other than that of the anonymous workmen who build it. Lack of touch in a building does not edit it from consideration from the pantheon of the sublime but it does edit out a work of art.
Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn’s first New York gallery show was in 1954. It sold out. It was a big hit, why? Matisse had recently died and was on everyone’s mind and Diebenkorn’s work looked as if he were channeling early Matisse. The bold color, the brushwork, composition / geometries and line. RD arrived on the New York art scene with work that was as familiar as an old shoe to the New York art cognoscenti and as seductive as sex. Just as Diebenkorn capitalized on a brand that had been road/culture/market tested, so did Andy Warhol but where RD rode on the back of the 20th Century’s most hallowed art world brand -Henri Matisse, Warhol expanded his scope to encompass the great brands of all consumer culture. In 1954 Richard Diebenkorn was scanning Matisse’s early years for inspiration. During the “Ocean Park” years in his Venice, California studio Diebenkorn had narrowed his focus on Matisse to a single painting, “Zora on the Terrace” painted in 1912. The entire Ocean Park series, considered to be masterpieces by many-not me, though they are certainly beautiful, is based on just the background of this single painting. Diebenkorn looked as closely at and borrowed from Matisse as though Matisse were nature itself - metamimesis.
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg’s * mystification in the face of Picasso and Braque’s invention of Cubism is analogous to a U.S. Supreme Court justice finding Marbury v Madison a big mystery. It is odd that an art critic and theorist widely hailed as the most powerful and influential of the twentieth century can be mystified by the foundations of his chosen field. Evidence of Greenberg’s mis-framing of Cubism is that he viewed Cubism as something transcendent, a higher synthesis of previous recent avante-garde art developments in painting. Cubism is a devolution from Cezanne, a Cliff’s notes, a Cezanne for Dummies, A complete idiot’s guide to Cezanne’s paradigm shattering art. Cubism is an abstract shorthand of the salient features of late Cezanne’s skewed linear perspective, the passage, the facture and the crippled drawing, strategies that conflated pictorial space and the surface of the canvas. The profound Godliness of Cezanne was inaccessible to ambitious youth in a hurry but his strategies had to be assimilated and demonstrated thus Cubism’s unpinned station point, simultaneity and constricted narrative content. Talented and ambitious young artists in Paris were not about to spend ten years in isolation in the countryside with an umbrella, a canvas stool and a box of paints in order to commune with God. They were, however, glad someone had done as much and were all happy to acknowledge the monumental achievement. Cubism was a tool for instant access to Cezanne, a shorthand, Cezanne light.It helps me to have struggled as a painter with Cubism for many years, not limited to intellectual/ literary devices only. Reading and looking are not enough to grasp Cubism fully - one must have two sets of knowledge: the theory and graphic procedures of linear perspective and experience as a painter investigating ideas of pictorial space otherwise one gets bogged down in semantics and vaporous musing - see: everything ever written about Cubism from day one until now.
* “How Picasso and Braque got to their Cubism in 1910 and proceeded thence to 1914 remains unimaginable to me” - Greenberg’s 1980 essay in Late Writings, ed. Robert C. Morgan, Janice Van Hoove, Univ. of MN Press, 2003
I owe Clement Greenberg a big posthumous thank you for selecting a suite of nine of my drawings, “Korean Airliner Disaster series” for a nationwide drawing competition in 1985. The Syracuse University “Drawing National.” This exhibit toured the nation with stops at a dozen major art museums. "The Korean Airliner Disaster" series can be seen on my art website: jimblakeart.com
The Beatles and the Law
An idea for a take home final exam in Law School. Calculate the county jail, state and federal prison exposure for crimes committed, threatened or implied in the lyrics of the Beatles song catalog between 1962 and 1970. The low-hanging fruit: Maxwell Addison - murder one with circumstances - life in prison - that silver hammer stunt. The theft by Lovely Rita of the poor guy’s heart - six months in the county jail - larceny. Rocky Racoon gets punched in the eye by his rival - assault and battery - six months suspended sentence - electronic monitoring - three years probation with one year of anger management class. We all live in a yellow submarine - one of you are distributing prescription pharmaceuticals. Were these “mother’s little helpers”? Did you steal them from her medicine chest? Did you distribute them to minors? Just exactly who got on board? Were these people over eighteen? - six months in county jail, three years probation , drug treatment program. “Run for Your Life”- felony domestic abuse threatening bodily harm “catch you with another man - that’s the end- a - little girl” the prosecutor in the D.A.’s office sees a murder threat and also felony child endangerment if the victim is indeed a “Little Girl”. Defense claimed that “that’s the end -a “ only refers to the romance - they’ll lose in California - two years in state prison - one year to serve with five years probation. “Till there was you” those bells on a hill that you always heard ringing, were they your bells? - violation of noise ordinance - reprimand, court costs - remove bells. “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” who exactly is this “Henry the Horse”? Horse is a name for heroin - dances the waltz? Injected? Snorted? Smoked? It’s all gonna get you in big trouble. “Get high with a little help from my friends” depends on which state and how many friends. “Roll up - Roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour” Roll what up? Some Mary Jane? Mystery Tour - you bet, with munchies on the back end. - six months in the county jail for possession of a controlled substance or alternately, must be addressing a small army of the physically challenged in their wheelchairs - ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) violations abound - are there curb cuts? What is the slope of the ramp to the door of the bus? Surface texture? Coefficient of friction of pavement? Seat spacing on the bus? “Step right this way” any truncated cones for the visually impaired, license for operating a tour bus, special use permit for public gathering over ten persons and with music -all misdemeanors. “Semolina Pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower” disturbing the peace, public nuisance, trespassing on public monument. “Why don’t we do it in the road?” - better not - indecent exposure - two counts - six month suspended sentence with fifty hours of trash clean up along said road. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” how high was Lucy? If over five hundred feet she would need clearance from local airport tower and a license to be an ultra-light aircraft. Were diamonds attached to her body or clothing or free floating - if the latter then they are at risk of being sucked into engines of a passing jetliner - crash risk. VFR or IFR conditions? If Lucy is in the sky in low-visibility, she is a very hazardous object - six month suspended sentence for interfering with commercial air traffic. Walking along a “Long and Winding Road?” - are you white or black? North of the Mason Dixon line or south? If between 1900 and 1945 and if black you are picked up and charged with loitering and sentenced to thirty days at the county work farm. While there, you are “sold” to a labor broker who, in turn, sells you to the Steel plant in Big City, Southern State where you are worked to death with no medical care while being beaten and starved - i.e. a death sentence. You never made it to her door. “Happiness is a Warm Gun” If the gun is warm because you fired it you are in a boatload of trouble depending on your jurisdiction. Possession of a firearm? Unauthorized discharge of a firearm? If the gun is warm because it is in your pocket - concealed firearm - six months in county jail with one year probation. “Bungalow Bill went out tiger hunting” - threatening an endangered species - throw the book at him. There is a mock trial - defendant- Maxwell Addison. He is charged with first degree murder. “Made sure she was dead” Maxwell is a medical student and a painter “…testimonial pictures - Joan” his defense asserts that Maxwell’s deranged mental state was from unreasonable hours as an intern in a big city hospital ”majoring in medicine” and his temporary insanity at the time of killing was due to inhalation of volatile vapor from his oil painting materials in his unventilated garretstudio.
Motherhood in America
The following is a letter to the author of a book on raising children in America, an acquaintance. I read this book in manuscript form and do not remember the author’s name. She’ll be glad I forgot. While your observations regarding the lack of acknowledgment and proper respect for particular mothers in specific circumstances throughout the land ring true and unassailable,, it seems to me that you are seeing the forest and that the forest is beautiful and nourishing and custom made for motherhood. While I’m creating analogies, picture a vast, slowly spinning spiral galaxy way off in the distance, far enough so that its astounding magnificence is fully perceivable - surely one of the most striking, mind-numbing wonders of our universe. Such is motherhood in America. Our entire culture, with its vast economic structures and mores, its complex legal system, its patterns of socialization of the young, of marriage, work and war, are all geared to create the best of all possible worlds for the mothers of America. Our Western Culture is that nebula and it spins for motherhood. Upon closer inspection, this galaxy is composed of stars that will burn you if you get too close, of planets whose atmosphere is not suitable for a breath and even our own hospitable planer Earth has very cold polar regions and equatorial zones that are too hot. The oceans are large and not suitable places to live either. There are relatively few nice places for people to live on Earth but they exist and in these places, life can be beautifully, gracefully explored.
In my experience, including first-hand observation of a mother in great turmoil, it appears to me that our culture rewards those who buy into motherhood and it destroys those who do not and it destroys many innocents who are not given a chance to demonstrate a leaning one way or another - for or against motherhood. The executive suites of a thousand corporations are occupied by men who obeyed their mothers, who sublimated their innate propensity for physical mayhem and focused their energy on achieving social status and the hard work and subtlety required to achieve it. They have lived lives of delayed or transmuted gratification of violence in order to propagate our way of life and its proven success in providing homes in the suburbs and big SUVs for mothers and their young.
The prisons of the United States are filled with millions of men who failed to get the word that their country is all about the mothers. American cemeteries are filled with the remains of young men who were called to defend the economic entities that were providing so well for American mothers. While the United States provides for its mothers in a bountiful way, it is clear that women who have overtly abandoned the mother path are ostracized. We are good to our mothers but the ferocity of the pressure for women to conform to motherhood is disturbing. The essence of your book is that women who wish to participate in the world of men are not vigorously encouraged until recently. It was odd that you selected Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton as poets of the trials of motherhood. These two women had much deeper issues with their brain chemistry that colored their views of their children that go far beyond the normal miseries of raising young children. You are hitting below the belt here with Ann and Sylvia although the notion of using poetry and poets to make your points is laudable. I do not believe for an instant that the United States is an inherently inhospitable culture in which to be a mother and raise children, as you assert, even after reading your book. I do believe that the path to savoring the opportunities of U.S. motherhood is very straight, very narrow and very white but our entire civilization is geared to providing that path. Your premise appears to be that our culture is headed in one direction and mothers are left out in the suburban wasteland to fend for themselves.
My mother attempted suicide three times before I was six and twice more before I left home. My eldest sister had her first child at age seventeen, her second at twenty. My second eldest sister gave birth at sixteen as an unwed mother and gave her baby up to adoption. I can see from immediate experience that motherhood is no picnic. I am aware of the turmoil among mothers in America but it is still clear that our entire galaxy is tailored for motherhood. The cliff along that straight, white, narrow path is steep and ugly. The women in my family lived hanging onto various ledges and scratchy side clinging sagebrush for most of their lives, nonetheless, the great beast that is America serves the mother in its own crude and ugly way.
In a final note, many of your complaints about life in America for mothers smacked of kvetching. Soldiers die in battle, men slave away in the corporate jungle chewing each other up and the citizens of the second and third world are harnessed into submission by American corporate interests to make clothing, toasters and dolls for American mothers and these mothers still gripe because there is no award ceremony for “Most Patience During the Terrible Twos” or “Most Meals Prepared for Ungrateful Brats”. There is a point, and it is not very distant at any given moment, where life is simply very difficult whether one is a mother or a corporate / academic soldier or an artist - life is tough - people suffer. It’s tough on mothers high up on the straight and narrow and it is tough in the ghetto. Whether a mother is generally happy or not happy is related more to her own level of resolution of unresolved swaths of blackness in her own heart that will haunt her on sunny days and lie heavy on her heart in the midst of what should be happy times. There has never been a more mother-friendly society in the history of civilization than our own.
"Dancin'" - 18" x 24" - ink on paper - 2000
