September 2024
Landscape and Archaeology
Shameless self-promotion first:
The Knoxville Girl series will be displayed at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia as part of the Strange Narratives/Resilient Bodies exhibition. The show opens on September 28 and runs through May 15, with a reception on October 5 from 1:00-4:00. Thank you to Robert Cozzolino for including this series. I made this series of drawings in 2007. It is hard to explain- I knew why I was making the drawings but did not know if that justified making them. The drawings are minimal compared to everything else I made then, yet they required more planning than anything I had made. It was like researching and writing a book, planning illustrations, and then throwing away the book. It was worth the effort to build a relatively complex narrative and get it on paper, but it would be the last time I worked on a “story.” Instead, my work became images that hinted at a narrative but nothing more. There is much to say about Knoxville Girl, but a Substack post is the wrong venue.
Strange Narratives is one of three upcoming shows featuring old works of mine, specifically the graphite drawings. It is nice to see the drawings pulled out of storage. This has dovetailed with a personal reassessment of my work. So far, I have failed to put this into words successfully. The one time I tried to explain it to someone, they pointed at my head and said, “It must be terrible being in there.” This reaction is because they had to hear me explain that I am temporarily (?) setting aside abstraction to return to working on a small scale and returning to the landscape. In a confusing train of thought, I am returning to landscape to escape the idea of creating images. Somehow, I feel like I am creating less of an image by working with landscape than if I were working in abstraction. That logic is the thought process of a person who does not have all his ideas in a solid form yet. It will come as the work develops.
My lightbulb moment came recently when looking at a Google Earth view of my hometown. The building where I went to high school is now a middle school. When it was a high school, there was an auxiliary building with an auditorium and a secondary gym. The auxiliary building was torn down sometime in 1994 or 1995, I assume to give the incoming middle school a practice area for outdoor sports.
There is a branch of archaeology executed via satellite imagery. A range of images (infrared, multispectral, etc.) are collected from a camera in space targeting a site. From that, archaeologists can detect structures buried under the Earth’s surface. Understanding how buried foundations can affect what grows above them is not difficult. When looking at my old school’s property in a satellite photo, I did not need infrared imagery to see the outline of the old auxiliary building and the parking lot surrounding it. If you know what to look for, it is obvious. Why was this a moment for me? I have no idea. Hendersonville just gives to me, man. It is about time, layering, and investment. Nothing goes away. It becomes less visible while still shaping what comes after it.
It may be as simple as realizing for the first time in over ten years that the patience required for me to work on something for hundreds of hours has returned. I remember reading Bob Dylan talking about his writing process when he was young. He could sit and type, and the songs would flow. You can see it in one of those 60s documentaries, typing away, unbothered by Joan Baez playing her guitar and singing songs ten feet away. At some point, this left him. I assume it happens to all artists. Whatever I read about Dylan (maybe his book Chronicles), he said that ability was gone. He had to teach himself what he could have previously done on instinct. In essence, Bob Dylan had to teach himself how to be Bob Dylan. After a decade, I think I am ready to do that for myself. I have started a couple of paintings, and they both feel like something that will drive me crazy in the best way for a long time. There is a good chance I told myself this two years ago with the work I did then.
Part of it is age. Maybe my midlife crisis was being worried that all I would leave behind would be a box of laborious graphite drawings. With ten years of large paintings piling up, a box full of drawings and a shelf of paintings seems ok. At some point, do you think it does not matter if you ever finish another piece? Are you free after that?
Nashville’s fall art season jumped out of the gate last weekend. I only had time for four shows, but they were all great. Sam Dunson at Julia Martin Gallery, Bill Killebrew at David Lusk, Brady Haston at Zeitgeist, and Karen Seapker/Linda Lopez at Red Arrow Gallery. I still need to see Arden Bendler Browning at Tinney Contemporary. Aside from Dunson, that adds up to several interpretations of the landscape. I recommend all of those shows.
I listened to Orlando Whitfield’s All That Glitters audiobook. It is the second “art world” book I have read this year. The first was Bianca Bosker’s Get the Picture, which captured Bosker’s attempt to understand contemporary art and the art world. She found what any artist would expect: the good and the bad. The committed artists, the passionate galleries, the absurdity of the market, and the charlatans. All That Glitters is more personal and sadder. Nothing surprised me aside from some of the auction-house manipulations. But I also felt a bit dirty while listening. Bosker’s book was one of discovery but detached. She could have walked away at any time. Whitfield’s account is in the trenches. Plus, one reads the book knowing that the book’s existence means that relationships are permanently severed.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released Wild God.
Has any other musician consistently produced work in the 21st century better than Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, and the rest of the Bad Seeds? You are probably laughing at that question if you are younger than me. I know I am getting older, but I see artists who have been at it for almost 50 years putting out more consistent quality work than many of the younger crowd. We are almost 25 years into this century, and Cave has continued to push himself and his audience with little time between projects. Bad Seeds albums, movie scores, Grinderman albums, novels, an interview book, screenplays, and a respectable ceramics show.
Wild God is another solid piece of work. “Joy” is the album’s anchor for me.
The first Bad Seeds record I bought was Henry’s Dream. Time changes things, and he may feel differently now, but Cave has stated he did not like that record or its making. It was the best entry for me in 1992. The album’s opener, “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry,” ranks among the most punishing delivery of lyrics in the history of recorded ballads, and it fed into what I did not understand at the time was my interest in Southern Gothic expression. I would not have been open to their first few albums without hearing Henry’s Dream. I kept up with him but did not dive into his work until 2004, when Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus was released. And that only came after talking to a postman on a bus in London.
You can check out this interview via the Reason podcast, but I recommend reading the book-length interview, Faith Hope, and Carnage, which deals with most of his career from the perspective of a 60-something-year-old man taking stock of his youth, his career, the loss of one of his sons, the pandemic, and how joy can only be experienced through loss. Happiness is cheap and conditional. Joy. That is tougher. It is difficult to imagine another musician going through this interview process and being so eloquent in responding to questions.
Cave seems to talk himself into becoming a Christian as the 40 hours of interviews unfold.
In the Reason podcast, he declares the world “systemically beautiful.” He attends an Anglican church regularly. His attendance appears to be anchored in the benefits of ritual more than that of Anglican belief, but I do not think he would flip a coin if you asked him if he believed in God. Jesus? That would be a different wager. But the right church is a great place for an agnostic to sit.
What Cave does while he is there other than listen to organ music is unknown to me. But participating in a community is a good thing. The problem is finding a good community, no matter how imperfect. There is no perfect church for the same reason that AA meetings are not filled with people who have never had a problem with alcohol. It’s like Leonard says on an episode of The Big Bang Theory: “What are you looking at? You’ve never seen a hypocrite before?”
The most difficult place for me to hear the true meaning of Christianity is the southern part of the United States. I saw a “God, Guns and America” bumper sticker last week. The South has many Protestant churches that operate independently without accountability to a larger network. I teach students who have suffered emotional abuse from these places. Aside from a handful of important people in the congregation, I grew up in a church like that. At some point, I thought, “Whatever this is, it is not what has been spreading throughout the globe for almost 2,000 years.” I was fortunate enough to find something closer to that. Still, I once read a story about a guy in Vancouver being told not to wear jeans to church, so maybe bad religion is everywhere, not just in the South. Anyway, Nick. Keep going. As the old saying goes, God loves you for who you are and loves you too much to let you stay there.
The summer slump of album releases is giving way to fall albums. Some albums came out in the late spring and summer that did not strike me as music I wanted to listen to at the time of year when the sun sets at 9:00 PM, so I delayed getting into them until recently:
Arooj Aftab - Night Reign
M. Haiux - Summer Nights and Still Water
Wishy - Triple Seven
Nala Sinephro - Endlessness
Danish String Quartet - Keel Road
I have seen two movies. They exist at opposite ends of the cinematic experience. Sing Sing is a drama based on the experiences of prisoners in the theatrical rehabilitation program at Sing Sing prison in New York. It was written by and stars actors who were once part of the theater program at Sing Sing. It is a lot to think about for the days after you watch it. It is a great movie and worth finding.
The other was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It was fun, as intended. It was a wild mix of Burtonesque imagery. It felt like 20 years of ideas he had been sitting on while making Disney movies. Maybe it is a chance to reclaim his 80s self. The third act of the original Beetlejuice is rushed, frantic, and a bit of a mess. So it was kind of charming that this movie suffers (or flourishes) from the same fate. It is not even a two-hour movie, so there was time if they wanted it. It was the first of the multi-decade reboots that left me thinking, “We are getting old.”
The worst cinematic news I have seen recently is that someone is remaking the Tom Hanks movie, The ‘Burbs, potentially ruining that B-movie classic. But if more people see the Hanks version as a result of the remake, so be it. The Jerry Goldsmith score is enough to make the whole thing work.
The best cinematic news I have seen is the upcoming Powell and Pressburger film festival at the Belcourt. Some of these rank among my favorites, and I have never had the chance to see any of them in a theater.
See you in October.