No Sooner Asked for Than Done; Done Already, Actually, Even Before I Asked

"In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor" at Laguna Art Museum is a survey of 150 artists and a first effort at a history, so in due course I suppose the multiple interactions I discussed in the Andy Howell post will find their way into art discourse. But damned slowly. Catalogue TK from the museum, according to their website.

The show was probably announced elsewhere in the issue of Juxtapoz that carried the Andy Howell interview.

Recontextualizing Andy Howell, or, How Can I Make This Essay Sound Even More Unappealing Than It Already Is?

Art, Skateboarding, and Life: Belated Notes on Andy Howell


Jerry Cullum


My chief professional distraction from practicing intellectual history and exploring the condition of consciousness studies consists of the need to visit more or less non-mainstream galleries, in search of two-hundred-word writeups for the entertainment section of the daily print medium.

I have, for years now, been slightly baffled by the question of where such an obviously coherent alternative aesthetic came from, in terms of skatepunk, hip-hop visuals, and many assorted other movements that are associated with, but not really part of, the greater Lowbrow movement.

Few things are more annoying to would-be art historians than art movements whose history has not been adequately chronicled. And this set of them seems particularly under-researched.

So imagine my surprise when I finally discovered, on perusing the interview with Andy Howell in the June 2008 issue of Juxtapoz, that a significant part of this international aesthetic was birthed in Atlanta circa 1991 when skateboarder Andy Howell got to know hip-hop artist Lil Jon, who worked at Skate Escape.

Howell says that in 1991 he was “fusing Sesame Street beats with GI Joe music and adding punk beats and making this weird hybrid that ended up sounding like carnival hip-hop with ADD.” Which beats all hollow the kind of cultural fusion that James Clifford was then recording in anthropological circles, but who knew?

The cartoony creatures crawling across the iconography of this mash-up (before we learned to refer to hybridity as mash-up) were enough to keep the uninitiated at bay. Heck, we hadn’t quite picked up on “hybridity” yet, even if Les Magiciens de la Terre in Paris and New York’s three-venue extravaganza The Decade Show had cued us in to the possibility that there were more ways of putting the pieces together than we had previously thought.

Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic was still a couple of years away, Cornel West was still pretty much doing liberation theology coupled with deconstruction, and nobody, but nobody, was noticing the creative output of guys working at skate shops in Atlanta, Georgia.

But Howell and Co. brought forth Ma$$ Prophets t-shirts and music that, as Lil Jon put it in 2008, “sounded really good for 1991.”

And, Howell testifies, the birth of the politically minded Zero Sophisto came about in this wise: “Zero Sophisto started as a reflection of Atlanta and us all skating the city with everyone in our crew. Skateboarding was universal. All sorts of different races and cultures together, and in the middle of Atlanta? That was an anomaly. …I started drawing graphics with crayons for clothes to make it appear as if all these political statements were coming from a kid writing them on the street in the middle of the city. I wanted to show that this new language, which I called Zero Sophisto, was being created by kids with skateboards and paint cans.” [p. 64 of article cited below]

And in the fullness of time Mary Jane Jacob brought the globally approved version of public and political art to town for the Cultural Olympiad, and meanwhile a whole movement remained underground in spite of all the declarations that “the underground” was, like, so over.
It was, but apparently the systematically overlooked was not.

And outsiders could peruse all the near-illegible little magazines (literally little…a friend remarked that the type on the tiny pages was too small to be read by anyone over thirty), and still have no clear idea what was going on. Graffiti continued as it had for decades (and still continues, wild style and the rest being some thirty years old this year), but the other meldings and fusings and gatherings-up were something else entirely. Except when they weren’t.

Howell, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere. “New York influenced me a lot. … The hip-hop kids in NY were really looking across the club at that point [“between ’89 and ’92,” he says elsewhere] and kind of nodding to the skate kids. There was no crossover, just a mutual respect creatively. It was an infant scene at the time of hip-hop kids, skaters, and street artists. It was even smaller in Atlanta at the time, but there were a group of us making beats and skating and writing graffiti. Of course my graffiti became skateboard graphics, and then started getting into some of the original art shows at Alleged Gallery on Stanton and Ludlow.” And the Atlanta music scene was birthed “even more underground, and just dirty and raw like the South was at that time. Jon actually branded the ATL sound in a way with Crunk.” [p. 67, op.cit.]

All of which would find its way, distorted and in pieces, into the mainstream media with terminology that now functions as a set of marketing tools. But there were Howell and Jon, out in front without quite intending it, and Shepard Fairey remarks admiringly, “Seeing the connection between music, skateboarding, and art, and seeing how you took creative control of the cultures you were participating in was always something that was huge for me. Especially how you were one of the first people to really embrace graphic design intertwined with illustration. You seized the coming of digital media and art really seamlessly.” [p. 67 of “You Will Be the Guest of a Gracious Host: Andy Howell interview by Shepard Fairey, Lil Jon, and Evan Pricco,” Juxtapoz vol. 15, no. 6 (June 2008), 58-73.]

On page 64, the large quote, which is all some people notice while they look at the pictures, reads “For me everything culturally, artistically, and even technologically has merged.” And it has, for sure.

Now, my actual point is fairly elementary. Howell addresses his interviewers thus: “Jon, you never thought you were going to create a new genre of music when you were listening to punk and skating; Shepard never expected to inspire a wheatpaste and stencil movement when [he] first put up those stickers in Providence; and I never thought I’d help influence the fusion of art, skateboarding, and hip-hop culture when I was rapping in my high school art class. We all ping-ponged ideas off each other over and over again, indirectly at times, which is how popular culture evolves.” [pp. 67, 70]

Well, actually, that’s how culture evolves in general, as anyone who has ever put together a collaborative art or performance piece or work of scholarship can testify. And there are loads of theoreticians whose insights could be applied to understanding the history of all this stuff.

But first somebody has to wade through enough issues of Juxtapoz to do it, and that will require a Ph.D. candidate who grew up with the stuff instead of being turned on by the idea that there were the Cantos and The Waste Land to be had instead of the Top 40 rock crap on their smalltown radio stations. It will require somebody who grew up on the far side of the dissolution of the old high-low distinctions and somebody who likes low and high together from the times before.

And to quote the prophet of my elderly generation, it ain’t me, babe. No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe. It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.

Rajni Shah's Dinner With America(ns)

Rajni Shah's dinners with Americans (a fair number of Atlantans in particular) were used as raw material for her Dinner With America performance piece in the United Kingdom, which has gotten a significant review that should be of interest to those Atlantans who recall Shah's long residence here, and to those readers who just want an insight into how one culture takes an unconventional look at another:


http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/dinner_with_america/

gnomonics

"The Gnomon Show" at Railroad Earth on Saturday was apparently unattended by any of the blogging public, so I shall self-advertise that the multimedia combination successfully re-invented the Chautauqua for the twenty-first century, though whether the genre needed to be brought back is dependent on whether anybody had missed the notion of live performance combining lecture, poetry, video, digital images, and sensory overload with ideas tacked on as an essential component, the paradoxical combination being essential to the nature of the Chautauqua in a time in which live performance is an anachronism pursued only by obsolete hipsters and antique elders, for opposite but possibly equal reactive reasons.

art and money

I am reminded, on perusing the most recent issue of the unaffordable Art Newspaper (roughly $200 for 11 issues), of just how isolated the vast majority of the art world really is. I have been trying without success to acquire the catalogue of the show of Finno-Ugric artists in Estonia (the catalogue costs US$15 but shipping costs US$100), and a brief perusal of the Art Newspaper exhibition calendar for the summer reveals a host of major shows in the world's major cities that one ought to attend, if one had any money at all for travel.

But of course none of us do, and that is why we look for ways of responding to the global condition of online visual communication combined with physical isolation. Things like videos from installations rendered on YouTube so change the conditions of scale and surroundings that they are fundamentally a different experience (and cf. such sensurround events as Olafur Eliasson's installation in the Tate Modern turbine hall a few years ago, which we know well from photographs, which means we do not know it at all).

It is why I cannot condemn blatant knockoffs if the knockoffs show some genuine familiarity with the original being knocked off, rather than with the magazine photos or online videos of the original that is being knocked off. Imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery, it is the only way most of us will ever get more than a miniaturized, digitized idea of what is going on out there in the vast stretches of the planet where we are not.

Hence my fascination with the stretches of the planet that definitely do not make it to the global biennials. The art may be less interesting, indeed it frequently is, but it is something regarding which all of us stand on a more or less equal basis because we not only have not made it to the Finno-Ugrian republics of the Russian Federation, we have not made it to the museum show in Estonia either.

I am but mad north by northwest

...though sometimes I do have trouble telling the difference between hawks and handsaws.

Anyway, I would commend to the reader Mircea Eliade's odd dictum that it is important to find mythic patterns in experience even if they aren't there. Richard Sudden has imposed an order on his experience that would do the Modernists proud, and his enterprise is even more Modernist than he intended, for he wasn't fully aware of just how much it echoes the great imaginative monuments of the twentieth century, Modernist or not.

she's as fine as Tupelo honey: Richard Sudden suddenly remembers, and kicks our butts at Whitespace

And then:













Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, that we do not learn but only remember that which was already embedded archetypally in us, is rightly derided by empiricists. Plato probably had his head up his posterior, a posture that can only be assumed by those philosophers who, as Friedrich Engels said of Hegel, are standing on their idealist heads and need to be turned round and set on their material feet.

But one almost has to suppose that Sudden has remembered a good many things he claims he never knew, in order to explain the cumulative impact of “For the Waters of Lethe,” one of the great accomplishments of mythic thought in recent times in this benightedly flatfooted burg called Atlanta.

In addition to providing a spectacular number of full-scale symbolic and sometimes also functional kayaks (about which, more below), Sudden set out to make his myth of Mnemosyne into a black-and-white film that was a conscious homage to Ingmar Bergman. Thus, his star and Swedish translator Ms Liselott Johnsson (whose Madison Contemporary art center in Madison, GA is a venture for which we need to be on the lookout) and his film editor Jason Vise collaborated with Sudden's deliberately Bergmanesque camera work to produce a myth for our times that is also an echo of an earlier cinematic one. As is appropriate for a tale about memory.

Johnsson provided the voiceover and the Swedish, but it was Sudden who wrote the story in English, and a good story it is, too. An old story, skating along the edge of twice-told tales told two times too many, but his use of resonantly archetypal shapes helps give appealing form to the narrative…kayaks like ritual coffins returning the dead to their mortal domain in an act of contrition, undoing a goddess’s rash magic. Memory/Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses of art and science, repents in time to rescue from forgetfulness the artist and wife/personal muse whom she has driven to suicide, and they return to earth recollecting their fortune because they have not drunk of the waters of Lethe.

The task of memory is what Rainer Maria Rilke says we’re here for, and which the Duino Elegies is all about. As Rilke wrote to his Polish translator, “It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise 'invisibly' inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great, golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show us at this work ...”

Well, Sudden has the relevant volume of Rilke on his bookshelf right next to the collected poems of yours truly Jerry Cullum in which the Elegies form the scaffolding for my poem of memory in Atlanta and the Balkans, “Skateboarding in Sarajevo.” So there’s a pretty good chance he saw at some point that famous footnote to Rilke’s poem, because the boats (built from kayak plans) that are the major sculptural aspect of his exhibition include an homage to the shifting seasons in which illuminated honeycombs are a major focal point.

But he had forgotten having read Rilke’s claim that we are the bees of the invisible, even though his whole metaphor of memory is that we are, in fact, the gatherers up of the visible aspects of the world, turning it into the invisibility of what we recollect because we collected it in the first place.

Sudden’s beeswax-covered drawings in the Whitespec project space continue the metaphor of human beings as bees of the invisible, as well as voyagers on the waters.

But we are, he implies, blind voyagers, because his drawings of the meanings of myth are done on Braille paper. (I have no idea, being sighted, what the Braille text on the paper actually says. Like those nonsense Chinese characters used in hip interior design or the nonsense English words that appear on European sweatshirts, the Braille is there to deliver a metaphor, not a message...but Sudden informs me that the pages that I cannot read are from the Book of Psalms.)

Sudden’s extraordinarily delicate drawings are shorthand symbols for the wanderings of Odysseus and a couple other of the odysseys of mythic heroes, involving arrival at the Isles of the Blessed or other risks of the underworld, of departure and return, of the hero’s journey not as a macho conquest of obstacles but a risk-laden search for knowledge and return to an original home that has been lost and must be found again. And found, perhaps, without all the senses that one would need to find it with clarity.

Odysseus bound to the mast, with his men's ears stopped up with beeswax(!), the neo-Platonic allegorists knew, is a type of the searcher who must learn to overcome the lures of the senses in order to stay focused on the goal (and to make sure his associates avoid temptation, while he is at it). And the same lesson is taught by the Asian models of spiritual search that Sudden also knows and loves…Tibetan tantricism and Late Antique neo-Platonism preach parallel doctrines of liberation, though they are not identical doctrines of liberation.

So Sudden has got it all together, although he may not know why or even whether he has got it all together. And he certainly doesn’t communicate his intuitions with any degree of clarity. They sink in slowly, and it takes several viewings and a few days of contemplation before there is any confirmation of the initial reaction that this is so emotionally overwhelming that it must all add up to something.

And as in any traditional tale, in which figures drop in and leave the story at will, there are probably still loose ends left hanging. But the human story is a tale of unfinished ventures, and none of us can be expected to remember enough to recall our real destiny and what all this assorted pile of fragments shored against our ruin has to do with it.

There are traditional spiritual techniques by which memory can be and should be extended. But there is also the hard reality of the decay of our brain’s neurons and synaptic connections: it was watching a case of Alzheimer’s that set Sudden off on his latest symbolic quest, and we do well to remember that this vast mythic apparatus stems from a very specific and mundane pain. This huge array of sculpture and cinema springs from what Yeats called “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”