People's Republic of Art

David Reid-Marr's "Sleeping Navy Seal"

"I am a man, upon the land,
And I am a silkie in the sea..."
-The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry
  Child ballad #113

Back in the late 1960's, a friend and I were drinking in the Enlisted Men's Club on the Navy base on San Clemente Island. There were maybe a dozen men in the club and the usual grousing about dumbass officers, the lack of women on the island and the general unfairness of life. Walker, a sailor from L.A., and I were discussing a plan to steal a launch and rob the lobster traps out in the channel when a group of dripping-wet, heavily armed men with blackened faces burst though the door. The men were U.S. Navy Seals on an exercise and we were being invaded. Walker and I quickly turned our table on its side and hunkered down behind it, sipping our beers while the Seals "interrogated" terrified enlisted men, hanging one of them by his heels from the ceiling rafters, and empty bottles flew and shattered around the room like grenades in a firefight. At the time, I felt a sense of pity for any poor Vietnamese bastards who might be so unlucky as to fall into the clutches of these remorseless seal-men.

Forty years later, I still feel a supernatural presence when I think of them.

Which is why there is something both deeply moving and profoundly unsettling about David Reid-Marr's Sleeping Navy Seal. The installation was most recently to be seen in the Idyllwild Arts Faculty Show in the Parks Gallery last December.

The sleeping form of a Navy Seal, wrapped in seaweed, lies suspended over his bunk as if in a dream. His dream and ours, too, if we risk it. The tightly made sailor'€™s bed betrays no impression of his body and the pillow soars above his head like a scudding cloud. The effect is compelling. We wonder at what the boy, perhaps so recently a fumbling adolescent, urgently trying to convince his date in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen, now become half-implacable sea creature, might be dreaming. Is it a sea dream or a land dream? Hell, can we even remember the salt world of coral blooms and shark teeth as well as he knows it now? We become impatient to walk softly away, lest he awake, see intruders, and turn furious again.

I know the inspiration for this piece. David'€™s son, Adam, a former student at the Idyllwild Arts Academy where he teaches, had recently enlisted in the Coast Guard. Both David and Adam had taken the move pretty seriously. David is an Englishman, descendant of a proud seafaring people who know both the heady memories of Trafalgar as well as the bitter tragedy of so many sailors who never came home. Adam is a teen-age American, with motives so idealistic and hormonal that those of us north of fifty might have trouble remembering what caused us to do the things we did.

As for me, I found myself wondering at the mystery of sleep.

And I don't know if David Reid-Marr might have been thinking of Shakespeare, too. After all, in his Henry IV, Part 2, Shakespeare's king, robbed of sleep by crushing responsibility, considers how this time of night must be for the simple deck hand.

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep! O gentle sleep!...
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deaf'ning clamour in the slippery clouds,
That with the hurly death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude...?

Forget Henry. I'm thinking of the ship-boy and the sleeping seal-man, dreaming of the land. Dreaming of the sea.

Robert Irwin’s “Primaries and Secondaries”

“I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then”
-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I went with friends to see the Robert Irwin exhibit, “Primaries and Secondaries,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego which, unfortunately, closes today. We went in expecting an interesting exhibit by a renowned contemporary artist and came out having experienced something quite different.

“Primaries and Secondaries” spans 50 years of Irwin’s work, including pieces which helped to define the West Coast “Light and Space Movement” and its concern with how our perceptions of things are altered by consciousness.

      

Light and Space, 2007

The exhibit is housed in a former baggage terminal for the Santa Fe Railroad. To install the show in a location that has served transition for decades could not have been more apt.

In begins chronologically, with paintings from Irwin’s abstract expressionist period in the 50’s and 60’s. Lots of impasto and gestural brushstrokes here. “Load up your brush or knife with several colors, apply this glob to the canvas, scrape ‘em down and see what you get.” Ribbons of blue, black and orange: I think Mr. Irwin was already enchanted by the possibilities.

Things begin to get interesting with one of his illusionistic acrylic discs: a concave shape attached to the wall behind which seems to be a sphere suspended in the air. As with Alice, having just stepped through the looking glass, you know at this point that the world is about to get “curiouser and curiouser .”

The weird thing is, Irwin performs his magic without any help from fancy computer generated effects or other trickery. His materials are just paint, plastic, wire and wood, no big deal, you’d think.

Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, 2006

Irwin’s 5 x 5, is a set of huge floor-to-ceiling scrims, one set of five white and the other set black, which invite the viewer to travel in between them and view the constantly changing environment from within. Light and Space features a room with one wall covered with 115 fluorescent lights arranged in geometric patterns, inviting the viewer to contemplate the lights or groove on the shadows.

But the star of the show is undoubtedly his 2006 installation, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue,” a reference to Barnett Newman’s painting. Three huge acrylic panels, one in each color, are suspended over a matching panel on the floor. The resulting illusion brought on by gazing into the panels can cause a sensation of vertigo, as if one were staring into a clear, watery abyss, with your fellow viewers swimming in the depths. Although you can experience something of this effect on the surface of any window, believe me when I say that Irwin’s is much, much cooler.

After a while, you get it: “the look of reality depends on how you look at it.” Especially when you’ve fallen down Irwin’s rabbit hole.

For most art shows as rewarding as this one, I usually stop by the museum bookshop to pick up the guide so I can relive the exhibit long after I’ve returned home. Not this time. To apply the lessons of Irwin’s show, all my friends and I had to do was leave the exhibit and marvel at the other one beyond the doors.

Jacques-Louis David and Madame Seriziat

In 1794, Jacques-Louis David, superstar painter of the Old Regime as well as the new French Republic, found himself in prison. It wasn’t that his work was in disfavor. Indeed, he had been riding a heady wave of popular approval ever since The Oath of the Horatii, his first blockbuster painting in 1784. The problem was that David, the prototype of the artiste engagé, had been an enthusiastic revolutionary, follower of the recently executed Robespierre, a member of the feared Committee of Public Safety, and had signed the death warrant of Louis XVI. Now, with his political allies either dead or out of power, the karmic wheel had turned full circle and David found himself facing a possible sentence of death.

As frightening as his situation was, David’s accommodations were hardly Bastille-like. Arrested in May, released, then rearrested in August, he was taken to the House of Detention at the Hotel des Fermes on the rue de Grenelle. Instead of a cell, he was given a small studio belonging to a student of his who was serving in the army. His wife, from whom he had been divorced since March, took their children to visit. Another of his students brought him painting materials and the mirror in front of which he executed this self-portrait.

In it, he appears the handsome, fiercely passionate and intensely focused artist who had been the toast of the nation, that is until reaction to the excesses of the Revolution set in and the radical’s heads began to fall. Although it’s a strong and beautifully-executed self-portrait in the tradition of Rembrandt and Titian, the image is not altogether a true one. Missing is a prominent facial deformity caused by fencing scar on his right cheek suffered in his youth. Worse, a tumor had developed over the years, causing the cheek to swell even more. To his credit, it remains the only portrait detail he ever touched up.

If David may have been painting his epitaph, it transpired that he had many more miles to go than he realized at the time.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries who died beneath the blade of the guillotine, David was lucky in his relations. His brother-in-law, Charles Seriziat, was well-connected and intervened on David’s behalf, securing his release. The grateful painter immediately repaired to the Seriziat estate at Saint-Ouen. It was here he painted the fresh and tender portrait of his sister-in-law Emilie, Madame Seriziat.

Was ever a portrait more affectionate?

One can almost feel the artist’s relief and his reengagement with life in this image of a woman in springtime. We can guess that she has just come in from a walk in the garden. Her cheeks are flushed from the weather and she holds a bouquet of gathered flowers in one hand and the hand of her child in the other. The tones are red, green and pink, skillfully harmonized in a way that appears completely natural. Emilie rests on the edge of a table, shyly asking perhaps, what pose she should assume. The child stares at the painter with a child’s questions. “What is uncle Jacques doing? Is he finished? Can I play now?”

Jacques-Louis David was to live another thirty years, shine anew during the reign of Bonaparte and die in exile in Brussels in 1825. Although his considerable skills were to diminish at the end and over two centuries have passed since these portraits were painted, we are yet moved in our own time as if terrors were memories, spring was in our cheeks and loved ones were all young and alive again.

Eric Metzler’s "Lathing Lilies"

Lathing, n. 1. The act or process of building with laths. 2. Work made of laths. 3. To cut or shape with a lathe.

Eric Metzler bought his first camera in the 1970’s while serving in the Air Force, a Canon FTb which he still owns. It’s a classic instrument which requires the photographer to make pictures, not just shoot them.

In this case, it turned out to be the perfect marriage of a tool to an artist’s purpose.

For it’s Metzler’s hard-working, cut-no-corners attitude that’s driven him to achieve a high level of artistry in a remarkably short time. And the surprising evolution of that artistry was recently on display in Lathing Lilies, Metzler’s 20 year retrospective at the Parks Exhibition Center, on the campus of Idyllwild Arts.

The show was assembled by decade: photography in the 80’s, and photography, collage and assemblage from the 90’s on. All in all, the history of a developing vision, realized one step at a time.

It began heavily enough, his 1980’s work seeming to shoulder the gigantic influences of 20^th century American photography. As in Lilies #3: the introduction of a favorite icon in the style of Paul Strand and “straight photography,” or Tyler: a cowboy leaning against a weathered wooden doorway in the manner of Jay Dusard, and Wire Fence in Snow: a spare, ghostly image that Minor White might have composed.

The shades of Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham seem to haunt Nude #8 and Bok Choi, the latter a stunningly crisp study in which Chinese vegetables achieve monumental status.

Impending Storm is the most nostalgic of the lot. In it, a lone cowboy poses with his Chevy pick-up, regarding the lowering storm clouds with an insouciant air. “Go ahead and rain, you ol’ storm. You don’t scare me a bit,” he might be saying. The dramatic narrative recalls a host of great mid-20^th century American photographers, from Walker Evans to Robert Frank, and the wryness of Cindy Sherman.

If the 90’s section of the retrospective seemed to chronicle Metzler’s school days, the rest of the exhibit demonstrated that he was soon on his own.

While not completely abandoning photography, Metzler increasingly employed the detritus of the natural and manufactured worlds to create the battlefields of his newer vision.

He explained this radical departure in his artist’s statement. “Bored by more traditional work, I began to experiment with expressive, experimental and conceptual ideas. The figurative work became ultimately symbolic, design was a visual structure for collaged material. Abstraction became a pallet to challenging the viewer’s perceptions.”

Typical of this period is Butterfly’s Dilemma. A huge moth seems to hover over a black rectangle and a menacing arrangement of saw-toothed shapes. A broken pair of butterfly wings appear as the wreckage of a previous unwary flier, shot down by industrial ground fire. The dial-less faceplate of a voltmeter is there to record it all.

In the grimly beautiful Surrounded, colorful images of tropical birds that might have been lifted from a 19^th century field guide are circled by shadowy bits of gear wheels and other threatening geometries of modern times. Though these birds are in a hell of a fix, it’s a lovely picture, nonetheless. Audubon meets Fernand Léger.

Clearly, by this time Metzler had developed a theme.

“From the late 1990’s to present, my work has employed an overwhelming amount of conceptual interpretations of the technical world and its affects on nature and man,” he explains. “The technical world has become the religion, the philosophy and politics of our time.” Although a closet romantic like Metzler could have chosen to escape it all, bunker up and shoot photos of saguaro cactus in the Arizona desert, his work during this period seems to be a serious search for reconciliation. 

World Numbers 1 continues this leitmotif and stands as a fair representative of Metzler’s current work. Here, the subject moves from fauna to the human body, flensed as if an image of a living man had been ripped away to reveal a cadaver from an anatomy text. The cold numbers might be measurements of muscles, vessels and bones. Or a digital countdown.

There was much in the show that I haven’t reported. His 3-D assemblages, for instance, feature Japanese dolls, baseball and hockey players, nautilus shells and other found objects in pieces that are as warmly humorous as they are thoughtful.

Though there were disturbing images aplenty in Eric Metzler’s retrospective, I think Lathing Lilies was a fundamentally hopeful show. After all, the lily is a traditional symbol of resurrection. And whether Metzler has devoted his artistic life to lathing these flowers down to their essential forms, or reconstructing them from industrial laths and building a house in which he can live, they are beautiful lilies still.

Don’t Say "Cheese": Portraits by Yousuf Karsh

"Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize."
- Yousuf Karsh

I don’t know who invented the infamous phrase “say cheese” as a way of prompting those about to be photographed to simulate happiness, but I’ll bet my Kodak Instamatic that Yousuf Karsh never used it.

Perhaps the most famous portrait photographer of all time, Karsh made his reputation by skillfully prying the masks off the prominent and humble, allowing us to know them more deeply than his subjects might ever have permitted.

Winston Churchill by Yousuf Karsch

Armenian by birth and Canadian by choice, Karsh achieved undying fame with his 1941 photograph of Winston Churchill, taken after the British Prime Minister had given a speech to the Canadian House of Commons. As Karsh tells the story, Churchill entered the studio in a foul mood, his bulldog scowl already in place. The famous man regarded "my camera as he might regard the German enemy." Although Churchill’s expression was exactly what the photographer was looking for, the cigar stuck between his teeth seemed too informal. "Instinctively, I removed the cigar. At this the Churchillian scowl deepened, the head was thrust forward belligerently, and the hand placed on the hip in an attitude of anger." The image that resulted may be the most reproduced portrait photograph in history.

In his long career, Karsh photographed some of the most celebrated subjects of the 20th century. Among these were Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Andy Warhol, Audrey Hepburn, Clark Gable, Dwight Eisenhower, Ernest Hemingway, Fidel Castro, Jacqueline Kennedy, Frank Lloyd Wright, George Bernard Shaw, Georgia O'Keeffe, Helen Keller, Humphrey Bogart, John F. Kennedy, Laurence Olivier, Marian Anderson, Muhammad Ali, Pablo Casals, Pandit Nehru, Paul Robeson, Joan Baez, Picasso, Pope Pius XII, Princess Elizabeth, Princess Grace, and Robert Frost.

But my favorite is of a man whose name I don’t even know.

Also, I don’t know the story behind Farmer and His House, except that it was taken somewhere in Canada in the early 1950’s. I do know that Karsh’s portrait of the monumental farmer with the bulging gut and partly unbuttoned pants, posed with the Hopperesque house in the background, is one of the most engaging studies of prairie character you're likely to see.

I imagine the photo session might have gone something like this:

Karsh: I’d like to take your picture.
Farmer: I’d like you to get the hell off my land.
Karsh: This will only take a second.
Farmer: Ok. Just let me fetch my shotgun from the house.

And talk about scowls. Winston Churchill may look like he could take down the Luftwaffe single-handedly, all right, but I’ll bet this guy could kick Winston's upper crust ass.

Yousuf  Karsh once said, “There is a brief moment when all there is in a man's mind and soul and spirit is reflected through his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record.”

So, next time you’re going to snap the family at Disneyworld, avoid the “cheese” thing. Tell ‘em instead that you have another family in the Philippines. That’ll be a “moment.”

Wangechi Mutu

The news from Kenya is bad. As the crisis over a contested election persists, more than 500 people have been killed so far, and 250,000 driven from their homes. On New Years Day reports arrived that over 100 people, at least 80 of them children, burned to death as the church they had fled to for refuge was set afire. There are reports of more atrocities every day as the specter of civil war stalks the streets and savannas of this African nation.

While we in other countries are safe from these terrible events, I’ve been thinking of my friend Wangechi Mutu, glad that she’s in Brooklyn and not in her native Nairobi.

Wangechi is an artist whose reputation has blossomed into celebrity over the past ten years and whose works can be seen in galleries and museums including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Miami Art Museum, Tate Modern in London, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, Kunstpalast Dusseldorf in Germany, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her works will soon be on public display at The New Museum in New York City in a show entitled, Collage: The Unmonumental Picture, from January 16 to March 23.

Collage is what she’s known for. She creates them by combining clippings from fashion magazines, the National Geographic and other sources, with ink drawing and acrylic painting. The results are lyrical and deeply unsettling.

In her Untitled from 2004, she employs ink, acrylic, photocollage, and contact paper on mylar to create an image every bit as beautiful and disturbing as Kenya itself.

In it, we are confronted with a woman in a spun dress, spangled and helmeted like a futuristic warrior queen. Her outsized, almond eyes are focused on something overhead while her tongue is extended in defiance, or agony, or sexual enticement, or all of the above. But it’s at the ends of her elbows that the killing begins. The flesh of her forearms has been flensed away, or the limbs replaced, perhaps. The muscles might be ropes or cables, and the hands, well, there are no hands. Instead there is a raised stiletto on a circular swivel at the end of one arm and a sling-like apparatus at the end of the other. The knife might be pointed at God and why not? She is woman becoming lethal machine and who could blame her for feeling vengeful towards her Creator.

Speaking of her work which deals with women’s bodies, Mutu has said, “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.” If Untitled is about the possible lasting effects of being female, what grim promises has the future made to the women of Kenya?

I met Wangechi last summer when she was a visiting artist at Paintings Edge, an annual offering of the Idyllwild Arts Summer Program in Southern California. When the program concluded, I drove her back to La Jolla from whence she was off to Los Angeles and points beyond. We talked of art, our lives, and Africa. At one point, I asked if we could sing the “Nkosi Sikeleli” together, the national anthem of many African nations, and well known in Kenya. It’s a beautifully simple song and moving in its hopeful lyric-my favorite of all the national anthems. She agreed and so we sang, rolling down the I 15, past the avocado groves and suburban developments, with the Navy jets from Miramar thundering overhead. “Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika, Maluphakanyisw' uphondo lwayo …”

Lord, bless Africa.
May her spirit rise high up,
Hear thou our prayers,
Lord bless us.

Descend, O Spirit
Descend, O Holy Spirit
Lord bless us
Your family.

I love this anthem because it doesn’t remember a furious siege, as in the American national song, or demand that we water our gardens with Prussian blood, as in La Marseilles. There is no bluster in it. Enoch Sontanga, who wrote the song, asks only for the simple gift of God’s blessing on a continent and her people. They could use it right now.

The Woman in the Garden

Woman’s role in the world is changing and rapidly, too. With the strong possibility that a woman might be the next the American president, it may be high time to reexamine our myths about gender. The most influential of these in the Judeo-Christian world is that of Eve, the very first woman.

The story is told in the book of Genesis. God creates Adam and later, makes Eve from Adam's rib. They live in the Garden of Eden where God provides for all their needs and they haven’t a worry in the world. But, there’s a catch. God forbids Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, warning that if they do they will die. Along comes a serpent who talks Eve into eating the forbidden fruit and she shares it with Adam. God expels them both from the Garden and curses the ground which Adam is to work. Having discovered sex in this harsh environment, they have children who then go forth and populate the world.

By this time, of course, life has gotten, in Hobbes words, “nasty, brutish, and short” and Eve gets the blame.

It’s an important myth, though the emphasis is usually placed on what we lost by disobeying God.

I take a different view.

 

THE WOMAN IN THE GARDEN

Do not touch nor eat of the fruit, He had said
And threatened death.
But surely He was offering a bargain,
Said the serpent, speaking softly for fear
Of waking the man, no doubt dreaming
He had found where God had hidden the beer.
Possibly, said the woman,
For east and west, far and close at hand
Were piping bird and berry bush, sweet-water rivers
And other proofs, but still the question
Dangled from a branch of the serpent’s tongue,
For doesn’t He know that if you eat of this fruit
Your eyes will be opened,
Knowing good and evil, to vault at once from child to god,
From one to all, though death be the price?
He had her then as well he might have you and I,
For she did not wait on ceremony but plucked the fruit, an apple
It might as well have been an apple,
Woke the man, he asked no questions, was right to trust her,
And sat with her in the cooler shade of the tree.
They ate,
The sweet pulp spilling from their lips,
Slipping down their naked bellies,
Biting as well the bitter seeds, but not all,
Spitting some out to germinate,
Root and make more trees
To tempt the sons and daughters of men.

And when, at point of a flaming sword,
Michael showed them the door,
Out in that wasteland, God in His mercy
Did not wipe the juice from their lips
Nor sweep away
The thorns they trod, painful as love.

An Obituary for All: Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin

MADELINE JUNE HENSON 91, passed away peacefully January 5, 2008. She was born June 6, 1916 and resided in Hemet since 1994. Madeline is survived by a daughter, Patsy Friend, of Hemet, 2 Granddaughters, Michelle Haubrick of Corona, and Leeanne Adams of Hemet, 3 Great Grandsons, 1 great granddaughter, and 2 great great granddaughters.

-Riverside Press-Enterprise, January 9, 2008

 The notice of Madeline Henson’s passing in the Press-Enterprise is only one of the many thousands of obituaries which must have been printed in newspapers all over the world on January 9th. We learn nothing remarkable about Mrs. Henson save that she lived ninety-one years in which she bore a daughter and was blessed with two generations of grandchildren. As to her doubtless adventures, loves, heartbreaks, failures and triumphs, we have no knowledge.

Unlike the gallons on ink spilled over the passings of the famous, Mrs. Henson’s death, like those of the millions of us who are born, toil and die in relative anonymity, if we are officially mourned at all, was apportioned the minimum amount.

Which is why Caravaggio’s painting, The Death of the Virgin, was considered so scandalous in the early 1600’s and is so important to us now.

The painter’s name was Michelangelo Merisi. He was born in Milan in 1571, but because his family moved to the village of Caravaggio to escape the plague when he was young, he became known to the world as Caravaggio. As Lady Caroline Lamb famously said of Lord Byron, he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” A man of violent temper, Caravaggio once killed a man in an argument and was himself probably the target of attempts on his life. His work was no less volcanic, combining highly detailed realism with a dramatic, theatrical intensity. It was considered revolutionary in his time and it still has the capacity to shake us.

The Death of the Virgin was commissioned in 1601 by a wealthy patron for his private chapel in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala. The Carmelites promptly rejected it. A close look might tell us why.

The large vertical surface of the painting can be neatly divided in two. In the top half, a cloud-like drapery of cloth, the color of blood, hangs like shroud ready to drop. A blinding shaft of light illuminates the bottom half where the Virgin Mary lies dead. She wears a plain red dress, a color coding of the time symbolizing flesh and human vulnerability. The head lolls to the side, the powerless hand dangles, and the feet protrude from over the bed’s edge. Unlike in the depiction of the event by Titian before, there is no assumption into Heaven on a cloud, surrounded by choirs of angels here. Caravaggio’s Mary is as dead as any mortal ever was. Her sacred status is signified only by a thin slice of halo. The aging apostles clustered around the body are washed in shadow, their grieving faces hidden by hands. The woman in the foreground is probably Mary Magdalene in a familiar pose.

There is little suggestion of sacredness in this painting or of the celebrity of the event. This alone could have caused the Carmelites to reject it. What might have sent them over the edge was the rumor that the model for the Blessed Virgin was a Roman prostitute who had committed suicide by drowning herself in the Tiber River.

Whether or not the rumor was true, I like to think that Caravaggio wasn’t engaged in anything as juvenile as flipping off the Church. I think his purpose was deeper and more humane than that. After all, Mary remains the most popular figure in the communion of Catholic saints. In Mexico, images of her are much more numerous than those of her Son. She’s mom. Growing up Catholic, Mary was the one I always turned to if I needed something or I’d screwed up. Because of this, the death of Caravaggio’s Mary is a sacred event not because of her exalted status, but because she is a human woman. Even if that woman is a prostitute and a suicide.

When my own mother died, there were no angels in attendance that I saw, and she deserved them as much as anyone ever did. I think that Caravaggio’s Mary, in her death, became all mothers, all women and, by extension, all of us. I think Caravaggio is saying that there is no death within the wide boneyard of planet Earth that is not sacred. Not my mother’s. Not Madeline Henson’s.

Cthulhu vs. Mr. Potato Head

Thomas Claburn’s entertaining web log, Lot 49, features a photograph entitled Cthulhu vs. Mr. Potato Head by Bill O'Leary of the Washington Post. In it, poor Mr.Head is being attacked by Cthulhu, a squid-like creature who likes his tubers raw.

It’s a wonderful piece of assemblage, a frenchified term for art that’s made from stuff you find laying around.

But I was drawn to it because of Cthulhu, the horrific monster featured in many of    H. P. Lovecraft’s stories. In 60 years of reading, he’s the creepiest figure in horror fiction I’ve ever encountered. I’ve always thought that Lovecraft himself was probably a deeply troubled man who might have dined on bats and kept his dead mommy in the closet, but there’s no question that he could scare the pants off his readers. Although he died in 1937 and his style is dated, he still can. If you don’t believe me, try reading The Colour Out of Space, The Rats in the Walls, or The Call of Cthulhu and see if you don’t leave the light on when you roll over to sleep.

Although O’Leary’s Cthulhu is a tiny creature, fit only for assaulting spud-sized victims, Lovecraft’s horror is anything but. In The Call of Cthulhu, his movements are described as if "a mountain walked or stumbled," which is also a clue to his size. As for his appearance, Lovecraft describes him as having "flabby claws" and an "awful squid-head with writhing feelers." Elsewhere in the book, a sculptor depicts him with a “pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings." Finally, having run out of adjectives, Lovecraft admits the “thing cannot be described.” All in all, I wouldn’t want to meet him although, judging by its actions, I fear he found a home in the Bush administration some years back.

In contrast, kindly old Mr. Potato Head, a Democrat for sure, was made to be eaten. I mean, just look at the guy. The spindly arms mark him as a man foreign to exercise, who probably spends his days listening to Pacifica radio and sipping a latte while reading the Daily Kos on his laptop. That toothy smile, optimistic even while being consumed, could only be smiled by a man who believes the Bill of Rights could never be abridged and that the United States is a great nation so everything will turn out all right. And the old world mustache? He’s an immigrant, Macedonian, probably.

Yup, the iconography of Mr. O’Leary’s art is obvious. America is divided between two kinds of people. Some of us are Cthulhus while the rest are Mr. Potato Heads: the diners and their dinner. It’s clear that if Potato Head tried to run for office, he’d be Swift-boated in a Texas minute.

So, H.P. Lovecraft may have been more prescient than anyone imagined.

My ex-wife, a terrific writer herself and a huge Lovecraft fan, introduced me to the Cthulhu mythos back when we were dating. She had a taste for the gothic and a weird sense of humor. From out of nowhere, she’d sometimes look at me with a serious expression and say, “Cthulhu, I hear him calling.” The name cracked her up and she was just kidding, I think.

The Eyes of Night: Frederic Remington’s Moonlight, Wolf.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Sheltered for many years by federal species protection law, the gray wolves of the West are about to step out onto the high wire of life in the real world, when their status as endangered animals formally comes to an end early this year.

-Kirk Johnson,New York Times
January 2, 2008

Once hunted to the point of extinction, wolves are returning to the American West. And they are being treated as suspiciously as Mexican immigrants.

Since 41 wolves were released inside Yellowstone National Park from 1995 to 1997, the wolf population has soared to more than 1,500 today in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. According to the New York Times article, “The wolves have spread across an area twice the size of New York State and are growing at a rate of about 24 percent a year, according to federal wolf-counts.” The problem is that economic development along with the human population is growing, too.

Because of this and the traditional attitudes of long-time ranchers, battle lines have been drawn in Wyoming.

After a lengthy court fight, the removal of the gray wolves from the federal endangered species list will occur in late March and ranchers are understandably jubilant. But it’s not the West of Bill Hickok or Charlie Goodnight anymore, and environmentalists and many newly arrived residents are strongly objecting.

Read the entire article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/us/02wolves.html.

Admittedly, it’s a question of priorities, but whichever side of the issue you come down on, the looming, Paleolithic presence of the wolf can’t be ignored.

Several years ago, my friend Olivia Redwine and I were down in the village of Mata Ortiz, Mexico, visiting Juan Quezada, the famous potter. At that time Mata Ortiz was small and largely undeveloped, not the celebrated center of Casas Grandes style pottery-making it is now. It was night, the village was asleep and Olivia and I were outside, enjoying the soft spring air. She mentioned that she had recently been involved in a project dealing with wolves in the wild, had recorded some of their sounds and would I like to hear them? “Sure,” I said. She fetched a cassette player from the truck, placed in on the roof of the cab, inserted a tape and hit ‘play.’ Immediately, the voice of a wolf in full cry filled the air. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I wasn’t the only one so affected. Lights came on all over the village. Worried-looking people in their night shirts appeared in the doorways, intently scanning the darkness. Some may have been armed.

Olivia quickly turned off the tape machine and tossed it in the truck. We tried our best to look innocent. “My goodness, what the heck was that?” Now, I doubt that wolves have roamed the Sierra Madre of north Mexico in any numbers for a century or more, or that any of us, besides Olivia, had ever actually heard one in the wild. Still, there was something in that howl that spoke directly to the DNA in every one of us. You didn’t have to be Red Riding Hood to know that a wolf could eat you.

This being said, I know for a fact that we, the dominant species and conquerors of the planet, have killed a lot more of them than they have of us. After all, we’ve been at each other’s throats, tooth and claw, spear and gun, since the dinosaurs abandoned the stage. Perhaps we’ve evolved the way we have because of each other.

Whatever our histories, it remains that now that the wolves are a factor again, we need to be honest and brave, put aside our political convictions and deal once more with a primitive, deeply ingrained fear.

Looking at Frederic Remington’s 1909 painting, Moonlight, Wolf, might not help.

 

Frederic Remington, Moonlight, Wolf oil on canvas, C.1909

The composition is starkly simple. The bank of a lake zigzags from lower left to upper right, concluding in a gap between hills which frames a star-filled sky. Standing on the shore and squarely facing us, is a Western Gray Wolf. His eyes shine as if reflecting fire, or, more menacingly still, glow with the heat of a far more powerful, inner furnace.

Remington, who was one of the most popular American painters and illustrators of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, was known largely for his renderings of cowboys, Indians and hell-for-leather cavalry charges. But it’s his nocturnes that draw our attention these days. In the decade preceding his death in 1909, Remington produced over 70 canvases that explore the challenges of depicting the outside world at night. And they are among the most innovative representational works of his time. In 2003, the National Gallery of Art presented a major exhibition of these nocturnes, wonderfully entitled, The Color of Night.

As for our relationship with canis lupus, this composition provides no answers, but merely poses an old question anew.

And God knows, as a 21^st century man, I’d like to live in harmony with the wolves. I certainly wouldn’t want to shoot one. As a matter of fact, I’d like to have a wolf-pal who would accompany me wherever I went. Especially when paying bills. “Gosh, Mr. Creditor, this seems excessive. Caligula and I were just wondering if perhaps there’d been a mistake.”

So, if you’ve struggled with the political question, examined Remington’s painting, delved the substrata of your unconscious, and find the spread of wolves disturbing still, consider a world without them. And without the wolves, would we still be as human?