Schadenfreude: It Only Gets Better!

It's now been over three weeks since President Barack Obama's decisive victory over Mitt Romney and the army of Right Wing haters.  Never have so many failed so miserably.  And fail they did on Novemeber 6--from the filthy greedy plutocrats,  to the religious right,  to the Tea Party phonies unhinged by a liberal president of color.

The delusion about what happened continues. They think they just have to run a right wing Latino like Marco Rubio and all will be fine.  For the right wing in America, their small minded philosophy of conservatism never fails, it is mortal men that fail it.  Conservatism has always been with us--to oppose freedom for blacks, workers, women, immigrants, gays et al.  It's always there with its boot on the necks of the underclass; its always at the ready to do the bidding of the rich and powerful.  On November 6, 2012 a huge majority for these polarized times told the right wing and its minions to go fuck itself.

Of course, when you are funded by billionaires the threat is always omnipresent especially in off-year elections.  But liberalism triumphed on Novemeber 6 in a way it had not since November 1964 when LBJ destroyed Goldwater.  That is why the wingnuts are devastated.  They know what happened a few weeks ago.  They can blame all the poor people and welfare grabbing moochers all they want--except when its pointed out that the only age group Romney carried contained most of his government dependent  47%--the over 65 crowd.

The wingnuts hate Obama and hate liberal America and want it to fail. That's how they think.  They are tribal, they are insular and they are still in shock.  They are still unskewing Nate Silvers polls.  Right now, they are still counting votes nearly a month afte rthe election. Obama is at 51% of the vote and Romney is slipping at close to 47%., and the votes from California keep coming.   Watching them suffer is as great a pleasure and one can imagine.

Hard Surge

The battering that New York and New Jersey received at the hands of Hurricane Sandy has been devastating.  I live on the far west side near the Javits Center in one of the new towers that has sprung up in the growing Hudson Yards neighborhood over the past few years.  In the crucial hours when the storm pounded the Hudson I could see the water rising and flooding into Hudson River Park in the areas where the Circle Line, World Yacht and the NJ Ferries are docked.  But  just a few blocks south on 31st Street I could see that  Ohm, a tall residential tower that unfortunately has gone dark since Monday night.  I feel very fortunate I'm not one of them.  Con Ed has yet to restore power to hundreds of thousands of residents in lower Manhattan.

Yesterday, I decided after being cooped up inside since Sunday afternoon, I got onto my bike and rode downtown through Battery Park City and then followed the river line past the South Street Seaport and then up through the Lower East Side, the East Village and Murray Hill.  All the areas I rode through were dark.  You could tell people were getting frustrated.  I saw some filling up their large water cooler sized plastic jugs from an open fire hydrant.

One other remarkable site, at least for Manhattan, was what I saw at one of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel entrances--a truck submerged in water.  Lots of water.

George McGovern: An American Hero

While that paragon of right-wing macho and bravado Ronald Wilson Reagan spent World War II on the backlot of a San Fernando Valley movie studio, George McGovern was killing Nazis while flying risky raids into Germany.  You see, Ronnie was always an actor and always a coward.  That is the essence of contemporary conservatism as evidenced by chicken hawks like Cheney, Limbaugh or Romney.  McGovern a man horrified by war, because he actually experienced it was too modest and too unchauvinistic to make his service in WW II an inoculation against charges of pacifism due to his ardent opposition to the disastrous war in Vietnam. 

Many of my progressive elders cut their teeth in politics in the McGovern campaign of 1972.  He was and is the most liberal/progressive major party candidate in the history of the United States.  I was only 7 at the time, and was not on his side then but I always remember something beguiling about him, his name and the alternate devotion and antipathy he engendered.  One Bright Shining Moment (2005) Stephen Vittorio's magnificent documentary on McGovern captures the highlights of the '72 campaign.  1972 was still the 60s and it wasn't until Nixon's resignation in disgrace in 1974 did that wild ride from 1963 to 1974 end. 

The good Senator standing next to Warhol's brilliant silkscreen for the '72 campaign

Dan Flavin's  untitled (to a man, George McGovern) 

The McGovern campain of 1972 was innovative and novel in so many ways--from reforming the Democratic Party to organizing in the Iowa caucuses, and pioneering a direct mail donor base of small contributors among other things.  But one overlooked aspect of the campaign was the enlistment of the creative community.  It wasn't just Shirley MacLaine, Warren Beatty, Gloria Steinhem and the rest. The leading contemporary artists of the day were onboard from Warhol to Flavin and both created iconic works for the campaign with Warhol's wickedly cutting "Vote McGovern" silkscreen featuring a scary looking Richard Nixon among the finest political works of the past half century.

I had the good fortune of speaking to McGovern in the '90s and I asked him a question he graciously called a great question that not many people had asked him before.  My question was  why he didn't run for president in 1976  after having been vindicated by the debacle of Nixon's second term?  He answered that he considered it and had wanted to do it himself and regrets not having tried, but that he couldn't muster much enthusiasm from his family and close supporters.  Many try to imagine the world if McGovern had won in 1972, but then we probably don't get the full story of Watergate and the disgraceful Indochina exits would have happened on his watch.  But a President McGovern in January 1977 would have been a fascinating prospect indeed.  

Summer 2012 Photos

Summer

Summer is obviously here with record temperatures throughout the entire country. Blog postings will be sporadic. Have a wonderful July!

In the Studio with Mary Jones

Only 10 blocks south of my apartment, I recently went to the 26^th Street, ground zero for what would become the West Chelsea art district.  Mary Jones has had a lovely, light-filled atelier in the Greene-Naftali building for years. 

I first saw the paintings of Mary Jones nearly 30 years ago in Los Angeles, when I was a student and she herself was not too far removed from school.  Her work then was an original amalgam of various tendencies within the dialogue of painting in the late 70s and early 80s with elements of P&D,  New Image,  and even Neo-Ex.  But it was all put through her cool, deliberate painting style and the results were some of the best painting around in those days. 

By the end of the 80s she had moved to New York and she had emptied her paintings of representational elements but retained her regularized hard-edged non-painterly facture.  It was not long after that that she started to move into the territory of a much looser gestural abstraction.  She described this change as becoming consumed by the under-painting of her previous canvases. 

The preoccupation with developing new possibilities for gestural abstraction has concerned her since.  Her paintings have been exhibited in New York in many solo and group exhibitions and having seen nearly all of her shows, the paintings I saw a couple of days ago in her studio are among the best paintings she has ever created and a brilliant new direction for her work.

These paintings seem to synthesize all of her concerns for the past decades into her most complete and varied paintings.  They are her most muscular paintings with form and mass dominating where once thin washes of paint predominated.  Her introduction a few years ago of spray paint is now incorporated seamlessly and some of the schematic ghosts from her earliest work have reappeared. 

Despite the fact that these paintings contain more traditional figure/ground relationships, color continues to play an important role.   The newest paintings have large swaths of paint applied with a roller, but not so much rolled as troweled.  Upon seeing one where pink predominated, I asked her if the deKooning show had been an inspiration and indeed it had been she replied.  The paintings look nothing like deKooning’s but the confidence and depth of the paintings recall late deKooning. 

With a few more paintings of this size or larger (the ones I saw were 6’ x 5’ ft) and equal in quality, Mary Jones will surely have one killer show of new paintings.  I can’t wait to see that exhibition.

A new work on paper

A small painting from 2010

ICFF: New York

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair is an annual affair held every May at the Jacob Javits Center.   I have been attending every year for over a decade and this year's edition was probably the least exciting both in terms of actual designs and in the ambition of the exhibitors.  Many major furniture manufacturers have been dropping out year after year.  
Since there was little of any real interest, the ICFF affords me the opportunity to discuss the state of  domestic design.  Gone are the heady days of the late 90s and early 00s when furniture design was following the lead of the hyper-modernist revival occurring in architecture.
The turn of the century saw the rise of Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic, and the Bouroullec Brothers paralleling the starchitects who were transforming the skylines of world cities.  But while architecture continues in the present, design has in the past 10 years slipped into complacency and nostalgia for the past (grandma chic).   The art world is even worse as it  long ago turned it's back on modernist form and innovation. 

The relationship of modernist art and design has long dovetailed ever since  cubism and its Bauhaus progeny.  The early post-war period saw a symbiosis between Abstract Expressionist organicism and the designs of Charles Eames.  This relationship continued into the 1960s with both Pop and Minimalism inspiring various developments.  But eventually John Pawson and Steven Holl modernist houses were filled with stuff by the likes of Dana Schutz.  This has never made sense to me.