The Genius of Ayn Rand ...

... was her ability to persuade the rentier class that they are productive and necessary, and that they are entitled to rule.

The Sixties

A yoga class in Aspen, Colorado, 1969

Wagner Park in Aspen Colorado, 1969

It is said that if you remember the Sixties, then you weren’t really there.  I should point out that I wasn’t really there.  I was a kid living in suburban Texas during the whole period of The Sixties.  As far as I was concerned, The Sixties was something that happened on tee vee that made no discernable impact upon the environment I lived in.  My first tangible contacts with The Sixties came as they were ending and after they were over.  Our annual summer family road trip in 1969 took us to Aspen, Colorado, to the ski lodge my grandparents still owned at the time.  We arrived in an Aspen crowded with hippies.  Their VW vans parked everywhere, and there were always 10 frisbees in the air at any one time in the parks.  I remember the wool ponchos, the jeans, the long hair, and the bare feet black with dirt. My parents were appalled.  Eleven year old me was horrified … and a little intrigued.  I had older cousins who joined the hippies in Aspen.  Later in life, I had a good friend who was a serious hippy in those days, long before I knew him.  In his teens and early twenties, he regularly hitchhiked from his home in St. Louis to San Francisco to join friends in the Haight.  I had friends later in life that went through the Vietnam War at about the same time.  One of them joined the Navy hoping to avoid combat.  He ended up on river patrol in the Mekong Delta and told some horrific stories.  Another one I knew whose major passion in life was German literature, found himself snapped up by the draft after he earned his master’s, and right in the middle of the Tet Offensive.  He never talked about his wartime experiences and never recovered from them.  He never achieved that academic career and the scholar’s life he long wanted, though he never lost his passion for German literature.

By the time I came of age, and discovered The Sixties, the counter-culture, the anti-war movement, etc. were all coming to an end, and the long reaction against them was beginning.  Those my age who shared my interests were very few and thoroughly marginalized.  Most of the rest of Texas suburban kids I knew shared the conviction of their parents, that the turmoil and violence of the Sixties vindicated the Conventional Order.  Like French conservatives during the Bourbon Restoration of 1814 – 1830, they fully expected a return to the status quo ante as if nothing had happened.  Their expectation of restoration turned out to be as frustrated as my expectation of revolution.

Jefferson Airplane poster;  I confess a certain fondness for these old psychedelic posters.  Art Nouveau and Symbolist designs redone in Dayglo colors

The Sixties was a revolution.  It was not the political revolution many expected.  As a political revolution it was a total failure.  The people who own and run the United States now are the same people who have always owned and run it.  No real power changed hands.  The Sixties was a profound social and cultural revolution that dramatically altered people’s expectations out of life down to the present day and far into the future.  During the 1960s, the Victorian era and its cultural legacy finally ended in the USA.  That culture ended in Europe much earlier with the First World War.

Alexis de Tocqueville said that expectation is the spark of revolution.  Indeed, it was expectation that drove the turmoil of The Sixties.  Expectations that were sown in the experience of World War II came to fruition in the 1960s after having lain dormant (though far from dead) in the 1950s.  As in the First World War, African Americans served in the Second World War with distinction and expected an end to segregation as their just and overdue compensation.  After World War I, they returned to violent white resistance and repression in the wave of lynchings and racist violence of the 1920s.  They returned from World War II determined to prevail in the struggle this time around.  When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, everything was ready for the long struggle that followed.  Women entered a workforce with acute manpower shortages created by the war.  They did what was long considered “man’s work,” and they did so quite successfully for high wages, sometimes higher than what their husbands earned.  Many began to feel that baby-raising and housekeeping were not necessarily destiny after all.  Gays and lesbians who long felt isolated and were invisible to each other as much as to society, found each other and discovered their numbers in the wartime mobilization.  Some gay veterans described visiting Paris’ once famous gay nightspots as a transformative experience.  The gay clubs and cabarets of Paris reopened immediately after Liberation and were packed with soldiers dancing with each other, a first glimpse of substantial numbers of men and women who shared their same feelings and the first suggestion of potential political power.

Most veterans after the war wanted to return to some kind of structure and stability after the experiences of combat and dislocation, and welcomed the “normalcy” of the late 1940s and 1950s.  Other veterans had a taste of a larger world and of possibilities in life beyond the conventional expectations of a still very insular United States.  They congregated in port cities like New York and San Francisco and created the first bohemias in the USA since the 1920s.  The Beats created that yearning for freedom, adventure, and authenticity that would be central to the later Counter-Culture.

Expectation may be the spark of revolution, but there is nothing more combustible than frustrated expectation (as the rulers of the Arab world are now finding out).  That same frustrated expectation drove the racial violence of the 1960s, and the later turmoil of the antiwar movement.

Captain Beefheart poster

The now much vilified sexual revolution of the 1960s was perhaps the most far-reaching and profound transformation of the era.  The taboos that surrounded sex in the Victorian era dropped.  People pulled back the curtain, hiked up their dresses, pulled down their pants, and took a good look.  No fault divorce became law in state after state, and with it came a dramatic increase in divorce rates and a corresponding sharp drop in rates of domestic violence.  Pre-marital sex was always more common than people assumed, and now it was no longer secret.  The Pill transformed sex and what people expected from it.  The Pill made it possible for the first time in history for women to control their cycles of fertility, and to have the final and decisive say in the decision to have children.  Biology was no longer destiny.  This opened up worlds of new opportunities for women, and forever changed traditional gender roles.  I suspect that this might have happened in some form even without The Pill.  Since World War II, women pushed ever further outward beyond the roles traditionally assigned to them, even in the face of resistance.  Feminism remains under-rated as a major force in Post World War II history, nationally and internationally.  I strongly suspect that reaction against feminism, and fear of the expectations it creates, drive religious fundamentalist movements around the world.  It was the combination of the inspiration of the Civil Rights Movement and the sexual revolution that dramatically transformed the tiny marginalized movement for homosexual rights into a global popular movement for gay rights in the Stonewall riots of 1969.  Family life will never be the same again.  The old Victorian domestic ideal of the Master of the Castle and the Angel of the Home with silent obedient cherubic children is gone forever.  The family today is more egalitarian and democratic with spouses thinking of themselves as partners sharing the responsibilities of raising children and maintaining the household.  That spouses are two different genders or the same gender hardly matters anymore.  The stability once provided by the clear Victorian hierarchy of pater familias on top of a descending order based on age and gender that safeguards its members against life’s uncertainties was replaced by the home as a less clearly structured and more vulnerable loving community facing the contingencies of life together however imperfectly.

The high culture of the 1960s may have been cool (from formalist criticism to Pop Art), but its popular culture was hotly Romantic.  Thousands upon thousands of young men who never heard of Goethe lived out The Sorrows of Young Werther in The Sixties.  The old Beat idea of life as a never-ending adventure, once confined to a small marginal population, now became the expectation of millions of people.  Those old conventional satisfactions of a comfortable home and happy family were not enough anymore.  People woke up to a modern world full of social and legal constraints that no longer seemed legitimate.  This desire to be absolutely free was anarchic and had a corresponding longing for the authentic in a commercial world where language and imagery were entirely manipulative.  Ironically, the always adaptable culture of commercialism found ways to transform these very deep desires for liberation and authenticity into sales pitches.  The anarchism of the Counter-Culture could also take some very dark turns when people threw off all restraints as Charles Manson reminds us.  This popular culture is still very much with us, though much transformed.  Now everyone is in some measure a heroic outsider.  The grungy jeans from the Army Navy surplus store with a tee shirt tie-dyed in a tub of Ritt Dye look that began as a rejection of consumer culture now comes tailored and costs a fortune in a high end boutique.

We usually associate The Sixties and its counter-cultures with the Left, but it transformed the expectations of the Right as well.  The Romantic hero defying corrupted convention shades easily into Ayn Rand libertarianism and even into far right supremacism.  Ted Nugent’s far right machismo is as far removed from the old 1950s domestic ideal as any group of Vegans in an Occupy encampment.

One of the things that I always admired about the TV drama Madmen was its very original vantage point for looking at The Sixties.  Instead of the usual Vietnam War soldier, Civil Rights protester, or peace activist, the creators of the show chose a Madison Avenue advertising firm.  In a business very sensitive to transformations in popular culture and public expectations, the show took a very clear eyed and somewhat jaundiced view of both the conservative idea of the world before the Sixties as some kind of prelapsarian paradise of social stability, and the left idea of the Sixties as an entirely benevolent transformation.  The show very ably pointed out the pervasive and casual brutality of that ancien regime with its old boy networks and its racism and sexism.   It also demonstrated that while some of the transformations of the era were very brave and full of promise, especially for women and minorities, others opened up new and unexpected opportunities for cynical exploitation and cruelty.  Self-actualization can easily degenerate into selfishness and self-absorption


I know a lot of you out there lived through The Sixties and saw a lot more of it than I did.  What do you remember and what do you think of it now?

Sympathy

The Golden Temple at Amritsar, India

Sympathy and solidarity with the Sikhs of Oak Creek, Wisconsin in their time of loss and grief.

"Aae-i-aa marann dhuraahu houmai roee-ai ||
From the very beginning death is ordained, but egotism causes one to bewail.

Gurmukh naam dhi-aa-e asthir hoee-ai ||1||
By remembering the Name, through the Guru, one becomes eternal. ||1||

Gur poorae saabaas chalan jaan-i-aa||
Blessed is the Perfect Guru, through whom the way of Death is known.

Laahaa naam su saar sabad samaan-i-aa||1|| rehaao ||
The sublime persons earn the profit of the Lord’s Name and in the divine word are absorbed. ||1||Pause||

Poorab likh-ae ddaeh se aa-ae maa-i-aa||
The days of one's life are pre-ordained, they do come to their end, O mother.

Chalan aj ke kaleh dhurahu furamaa-i-aa||2||
One must depart, today or tomorrow, according to the Lord's Primal Order. ||2||

Birthaa janam tinaa jinhee naam visaar-i-aa||
In vain are the lives of those who have forgotten the Lord’s Name.

Jooai khaelan jag ke ehu man haar-i-aa||3||
Playing the game of chance, in this world they lose their soul. ||3||

Jeevan maran sukh hoe jinhaa gur paa-i-aa||
In life and in death peace resides with those who attain their Guru.

Naanak sachae sach sach samaa-i-aa||4||12||64||
O Nanak, the true ones are truly absorbed into the True Lord."

Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes died yesterday at the age of 74.  He was a writer, and for many years a widely read and controversial art critic for Time magazine, among other publications.  He was originally from Sydney, Australia where he once had ambitions to be an artist.

I know a lot of artists who really didn't like Hughes.  Others artists I knew loved him.  Some thought his views were remarkably bigoted, and he did indeed have a habit of making sweeping pronouncements that he sometimes had to walk back, and also sometimes regretted.  He could be strikingly insensitive when it came to women and gay men.  And yet, as much as he complained about "political correctness," he insisted that the United States was nothing if not multicultural, and that it was always such, to the great irritation of very conservative critics like Hilton Kramer.  Other artists I knew thought his views were remarkably refreshing, and relished his regular skewering of more conventional art criticism.

Like Hilton Kramer, Hughes is considered a conservative art critic, though no one could be more caustic in his criticism of the intersection of the Free Market with Fine Art than him.  Hughes' politics, unlike Kramer's, were not right wing.  He had no illusions about Morning Again in Reagan era America.  If anything, the Reagan years were for him the nadir of the American art industry, when the distortions wrought by easy money, hype, investment mania, greed, and ambition were at their most grotesque.  Hughes kept his distance from the right wing intellectuals over at The New Criterion and The National Review.  Hilton Kramer was one of them.  Hughes was not.

I began reading Hughes' reviews in Time magazine even before my art student days.  He was something most writers about art are not, really fun to read.  He insisted on putting modern and contemporary art into larger contexts of history and meaning, something that is usually the domain of more Marxist critics.  Hughes began writing during the later days of the domination of formalist criticism that insisted on reductivism; everything "extraneous" to pure form was to be ruthlessly purged.  Hughes built his career by challenging those conventional assumptions.  His writing suggested to very young artists like me (and others) a bigger world filled with possibilities beyond the narrow constraints of ideological formalism.
His book The Shock of the New suggested to artists like me a very different way of thinking about modern art, as less about the search for pure and meaningful form, and more about a complex engagement with modern history that was far more interesting and satisfying, and -- unlike the work of  more learned art historians of the time -- accessible.

What made Hughes conservative in the best sense was his insistence that art stick to certain basic criteria that were tried and true throughout history.  Art should keep criteria that were refined by experience, not ideology.  Hughes believed first and foremost that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the recipe.  A bad work of art was a bad work of art no matter what kind of critical or historical justification could be concocted for it.  He rejected the aesthetics of failure (as did, surprisingly, that arch-minimalist painter Agnes Martin).

His hero was the great Spaniard Francisco de Goya, the living embodiment of what Hughes believed was best in art:  an authentic vision made powerful and compelling through formal excellence, and an engagement with history, not as ideology, but as witness.  Looking at Goya's best work, it is hard to argue with success.



The Shock of the New began as a series on modern art on the BBC in the 1970s.

What I'm Working On

These are some photographs that I took yesterday with my trusty little digital camera of a painting project I've been working on for some time now.  I'm remaking a series of paintings that I finished more than ten years ago about the artist and writer David Wojnarowicz.  I've posted about that earlier series before.
In this version, I'm making him a little less of a martyr and more of an artist and adventurer.

Some of these paintings are finished and others are not yet.

Painting David.  

I never met the man, but here I am painting him.

The Green Pterodactyl.

David Wojnarowicz was a regular at the West Side piers, a now destroyed ruin that was for decades a gay cruising area.  He painted many works of the walls that were all destroyed when the piers were torn down.  He painted at least one large painting of pterodactyl there.

What Is This Little Guy's Job in the World?

I can never get the colors to come out right whenever I photograph this painting.  I'll have to wait for my professional photographer Steven Bates to get these colors right.

This painting is based on this text by Wojnarowicz:

What is this little guy's job in the world.  If this little guy dies does the world know?   Does the world feel this?  Does something get displaced?  If this little guy dies does the world get a little lighter?  Does the planet rotate a little faster?  If this little guy dies, without his body to shift the currents of air, does the air flow perceptibly faster?  What shifts if this little guy dies?  Do people speak language a little bit differently?  If this little guy dies does some little kid somewhere wake up with a bad dream?  Does an almost imperceptible link in the chain snap?  Will civilization stumble?

Krazy Kat Landscape

This painting is not finished and will undergo a lot of changes.

David Wojnarowicz traveled frequently in the west, usually by hitchhiking or hopping freight trains.  In later years, he drove a motorcycle out to the western desert which he loved.  He said that the desert reminded him of the background landscapes in George Herriman's comic strip Krazy Kat from 1913 to 1944.  Wojnarowicz was a big fan of Krazy Kat, and quoted that cartoon strip frequently in his paintings.

David Acts Up

This painting is also unfinished and still has to go through several changes.

David was active in ACT UP, and took part in many ACT UP actions, including stopping traffic as in this painting.

Here is a life study for a future painting in the series.

Here is the same model, the same pose, in pencil.

My messy studio

Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe died today in 1962. It's hard to believe she's been gone for 50 years.

I still miss her.











Marilyn Monroe was famously difficult for directors to work with.  Billy Wilder swore he would never work with her again after making Some Like It Hot.  "I'm too old and too rich" he said.  And yet, that movie would be unthinkable without her.  She really makes it.  She was a great comic actress, a fine singer, and an unforgettable presence where ever she appeared, on the screen, in public, or in the pages of celebrity gossip mags and Playboy.  Celebrities now like to project cool, from Lady Gaga (who can also be wickedly funny) to Uma Thurman (who is wickedly beautiful).  Marilyn projected warmth, especially in her movies.  Maybe that's why we miss her so much.



Artists loved Marilyn.

Marilyn by Willem deKooning

Marilyn by James Rosenquist

Andy Warhol painted his first painting of Marilyn shortly after her death.  He always used the same publicity photo copied and silkscreened hundreds of times in hundreds of variations.

It's Hot As Blue Blazes

Today was like a sauna here in New York.  I know most of the rest of you out there are going through a lot worse than us this summer.
So, here's some spectacular cool wet thoughts from Esther Williams in 1946.  So pour yourself a tall iced tea with plenty of shaved ice and enjoy.