Arts
Musical Inspirations: Punk & Post-Punk
Friday, December 13th, 2013: Arts, Music & Dance.
Calendar collage by Max and Mark, 1980
A Golden Age
My generation was too young to play an active role in the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, but we had our own moment of glory in the aftermath of punk music, as part of an urban youth culture more creative and energetic than anything I’ve seen since.
Punk embodied a cultural, political, and economic rebellion: against mainstream commercialized music and lifestyles, against government and authority figures, and in protest of working-class poverty and hopelessness. Post-punk took its rebellious, do-it-yourself ethic from punk, but post-punk music was less a genre than the musical component of a continuous, open-ended underground arts scene committed to exploration and experimentation.
It was a time of economic hopelessness in the cities and disillusionment in society, a few years before personal computers and the digital revolution, bookended between the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster and the regressive Reagan presidency, when young people felt betrayed rather than empowered by technology, and the media were relentlessly promoting a shallow, meaningless consumer lifestyle. So urban young people, instead of focusing on their careers, focused on their “free time” when they could collectively create or participate in their own alternative culture.
It was a unique, magical time resulting from a rare combination of factors: disaffected youth, cheap urban rents, and the late-70s vanguard of punk music as a unifying inspiration. It may seem paradoxical to some, but poverty and mind-numbing jobs, rather than affluence and economic opportunity, inspired creativity, because we were forced to create our own culture with much more limited resources than the youth of today, and without access to the infinite interwebs, we had to work hard to discover and share new ideas.
My experience was limited to San Francisco and Los Angeles, but our local scenes were connected to the distant cities like New York, London and Berlin via friendships, record shops (like our SF outpost of London’s Rough Trade), zines, artist tours and festivals. All of this occurred “under the radar” of mainstream media, so that it was a true underground phenomenon, and unlike today’s urban art scene, it was the only game in town for young people, the only challenging and meaningful way to spend your time, and unlike the rave scene of the late 90s it was participatory, with more creators and fewer spectators.
For a few short years in San Francisco, my fellow artists and I opened and maintained dozens of underground venues which hosted a continuous lineup of shows, salons, parties and large-scale events eagerly supported and attended by our crowd of thousands of roving cultural explorers, so that any night of the week it was hard to choose, and groups of us ranged deliriously back and forth from the Mission to scary South of Market tenements, finally stumbling home in the wee hours of the morning.
Our culture, documented in forgotten zines like San Francisco’s Search & Destroy, Damage and Re/Search, was open-endedly eclectic, embracing minimal rock, African music, industrial noise, electronic experimentation and sampling, video and performance art, free jazz and chamber folk. We were passionate about anything that wasn’t mainstream.
Cover of Damage, December 1980
Cover of Re/Search, first issue, featuring The Slits, Throbbing Gristle, and Sun Ra
Rotten to the Core
My own coming-of-age began in 1978. I was living in a group house south of the city, where I had been playing and listening to nothing but bluegrass, convinced that popular music was a wasteland. But my roommate James, an older anti-war rebel and environmental activist from the hippie generation, suddenly started playing the records of the Modern Lovers, the Ramones and the Sex Pistols nonstop, all day long, and my mind was blown.
The following year, I moved to CalArts in Valencia, north of Los Angeles, where I squatted in an art studio, living on welfare and food stamps, wrote punk songs, played in my friend Mark’s punk-inspired new wave group, and saw the LA band X performing in a small classroom. Newscasts were bludgeoning us with the Three Mile Island apocalypse, the Iranian revolution, the mass suicide of Jim Jones’s People’s Temple cult, the assassination of gay activist Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, and the unfolding, gruesome stories of serial killers in the U.S., when the first recordings of the definitive British post-punk bands, Public Image Ltd and Joy Division, appeared and became the soundtracks of our nihilistic parties and road trips and the main inspirations for our own music.
Max’s drawing of Los Angeles band X performing in a CalArts classroom, 1979
One of Max’s early punk lyrics, set to music in 2010:
Tracks like PIL’s Swan Lake and Poptones, and Joy Division’s Transmission and Love Will Tear Us Apart, were our anthems, simultaneously angry, cynical, and energizing. Our society was rotten to the core, and as PIL’s John Lydon sang, “anger is an energy.”
Burning Brightly
The following year, I got a boring day job in the tech industry that took me to San Francisco, where I immediately found myself in the midst of a cultural explosion. I was going to shows several nights a week at venues like Jetwave and Target Video that hadn’t existed the year before, and writing songs and putting together a band on the other nights, making new art and meeting dozens of kindred spirits and bursting with new ideas.
Ad in Damage for Max’s first group art show, at Target Video in San Francisco, October 1980
New York experimental dance band Liquid Idiot playing an after-hours set in the basement of Valencia Tool & Die, August 1980
The tracks Nightcrawling and Too Close, sharing the dark visions of post-punk bands like Joy Division and PIL, were composed in 1980 by overdubbing repeatedly between stereo cassette decks, using primitive sound makers and ambient audio samples.
Our local scene peaked in October 1980 with the Western Front festival, which demonstrated the unity of punk, post-punk, street art, performance art, film and video art, supporting local artists and introducing us to exciting touring acts like New York’s DNA and England’s Delta 5. My new roommate and future bandmate Gary introduced me to the brilliant, totally unique Welsh chamber group Young Marble Giants, who became one of my biggest inspirations.
18″ x 24″ poster for the Western Front festival, San Francisco, October 1980
Max’s drawing of the New York no-wave band DNA, 1980
Max’s drawing of the Welsh band Young Marble Giants, 1980
The Terra Incognita tracks Love Chant and Wireless took the minimalist aesthetic of Young Marble Giants in a more experimental direction.
Our local luminaries included electronic pioneers Rhythm & Noise, the chamber trio Minimal Man, the atmospheric trio Tuxedomoon, the politically offensive Dead Kennedys, and the perpetually fucked up Flipper. They were all inspiring in different ways, and we all hung out together at after-hours parties and neighborhood clubs like the Mission’s Valencia Tool & Die and South of Market’s notorious A-Hole Gallery, where you often stumbled over underage junkies nodding out as you climbed the four flights of dingy stairs to the illegal speakeasy.
Max’s drawing of the San Francisco post-punk band Tuxedomoon, 1980
Within the next year, I got to see both New Order (the successor of Joy Division) and Public Image Ltd, but I had already organized my own band and performance art group, Terra Incognita, which was to last the rest of the decade, repeatedly morphing into completely different styles and lineups, all inspired in some way by that short-lived cultural revolution, which had all but faded away by 1983.
Max’s poster for Terra Incognita’s first show, 1981
Max onstage with his gear at a Terra Incognita show, 1981
Jon and Max performing in the Terra Incognita loft, 1982
It simply burned too brightly while it lasted, and it couldn’t be sustained. But from 1979 to 1982, it produced a major segment of my mature repertoire, from early songs like Nightcrawling and Hand Over Hand to the later Terra Incognita instrumentals Black Water and Plains of Abraham. And it continued to have repercussions in my creative work, as in 1985 I met Katie, a Los Angeles artist who introduced me to the music of the Arizona cowpunk band Meat Puppets, and 1986 we met Sebastian, a Portuguese artist who introduced us to the music of England’s Penguin Cafe Orchestra, which had started at the same time as the Sex Pistols, because he thought we sounded like them. Who would have thought that something as brutal as punk music could open the way to a genre as delicate as chamber folk?
Our friend Sebastian brought us a cassette of Penguin Cafe Orchestra after hearing us perform songs like The Sheep.
Lasting Legacy
The post-punk scene introduced African music to Western audiences. In early 1981, my new bandmate Jon gave me a cassette of West African highlife music, so that when a few months later Talking Heads came out with their African-inspired Remain in Light album, I was already on the path to learning and absorbing African styles, which I learned directly from West African luminaries OJ Ekemode, Joni Haastrup and Malonga Casquelourd in jams and performances at my loft in early 1982.
Some post-punk bands, like New Order and Gang of Four, joined mainstream artists like Michael Jackson and new wave acts like Eurythmics in the club scene, which for us survivors of the dying cultural revolution was one way to keep some of that energy going – we still loved to dance!
Punk and post-punk music established the DIY paradigm for all the “alternative” and “indie” artists to follow, from the 80s until now. The early electronic experimentation of artists like Rhythm & Noise and Cabaret Voltaire, nurtured by the post-punk scene, evolved into the vast, diverse electronic music and dance culture of today.
Although the tight-knit post-punk youth culture collapsed in the early 80s, its ripples continued to inspire new music throughout the decade, so that in Terra Incognita’s most visible phase, from 1986-1990, we always had plenty of good company in a vibrant local music scene, from hard-core experimentalists like Bardo and the Invertebrates, to our friends American Music Club, who gained a worldwide audience.
The Meat Puppets are still around, after polishing their sound and surviving various traumas, and in the 90s they became my favorite rock band, inspiring my songs Yellow Mud and Drivin’ Round Loaded. And New Order evolved into pillars of the urban club scene during the late 80s and early 90s, releasing classic-sounding tracks like Waiting for the Siren’s Call and Krafty well into the aughts.
Although Yellow Mud may not sound anything like the Meat Puppets, the lyrics were inspired by Curt Kirkwood’s mystical, childlike style of writing.
The main riff in Go to Them was inspired by the simple, catchy rhythmic phrases in New Order’s classic songs.
Three decades after the post-punk era, we live in an era of widespread complacency. Unlike my generation, young people in the affluent cities of the First World seem happy to immerse themselves in their careers, media, and technology, trusting that they can solve the world’s problems just by making those wonderful, “democratic” gadgets and apps available to everyone, with Google wifi balloons hanging over every African village. Gone are the hopelessness, anger and cynicism that drove the creativity of the early 80s, to be replaced by the boundless optimism of the tech industry and the thrill of making lots of money. Those of us who still perceive cycles in nature and society, including my ecologist friends, wonder when it will all come full circle, with technology again exposing its dark side, and the easy money fading away. I see a society that’s still rotten to the core, and more destructive than ever. Anger is an energy.
Furniture & Lighting: Father & Son
Saturday, January 18th, 2014: Arts, Design.
Family Legacy
My dad grew up making his own toys; as a young adult he experimented with art and music but settled into a career as a rocket scientist. Our first family home was furnished in midcentury modernist style: a sharp break from the antiques of my grandparents. While my dad’s lifelong need to work creatively with his hands found an outlet in a series of hobbies, the works that had the greatest impact on me were his furniture designs: two elegant modernist pieces that furnished my childhood bedroom and grad-school apartment.
But my dad himself was mostly absent, and my grandpa raised me to build practical things in a strictly functional vein, using the tools and materials at hand, “cutting corners” whenever possible to save money and effort. I went to college in Chicago, where I was surrounded and inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s functionalist architectural legacy, and in my third year, when I rented my first unfurnished apartment, I began designing and making my own furniture and lighting.
Dad’s Furniture
My dad’s “golden year” between college and marriage had been spent in the bohemian milieu of Chicago’s postwar jazz scene, hanging out in clubs and occasionally jamming with the cool cats, so it’s not surprising that both of his furniture designs had to do with music.
He didn’t have any experience with, or tools for, fine cabinetry, so he drew up the plans for these pieces and hired a local cabinet-maker to build them. Unfortunately, when we were younger, we took them for granted and didn’t realize how special they were. My brother eventually inherited the bookcase, and sold it decades ago. I unloaded the hifi cabinet on a roommate when I moved into a group house after grad school. And none of us, including Dad, ever thought to photograph these priceless works, so the only photos I have show them unintentionally in the background, obscured by less important stuff.
Music Bookcase
More a work of art than a piece of functional furniture, this irregularly stepped pyramid was sheathed in golden veneer, probably maple, and made to house a vintage phonograph in the compartment at lower right, with a door which swung downward, forming a shelf for your 78 rpm records. The records themselves could be stored in the specially-sized cavity below. Ironically, this piece of furniture was finished just as 78s became obsolete and the hifi revolution began, so my dad’s next furniture design had to address that new challenge.
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Hifi Cabinet
With the explosion of long-playing 33 1/3 LP records, Dad surrendered to his passion for music and transformed our living room into a listening environment, with two large pieces of furniture custom-designed to house a Heathkit high fidelity audio system and his growing collection of jazz and world music.
The massive speaker cabinet took up most of a wall by itself, but the tall, futuristic hifi cabinet served as a room divider, with its upper record compartment and cantilevered preamp shelf supported on columns of shimmering copper tubing. Whereas the earlier bookcase design was a modernist echo of ancient monumental architecture, the hifi cabinet looked like an apartment building of the future. The record storage and amplifier compartments were all enclosed behind sliding doors to protect them from dust, while the record-changer turntable sat in the open between the copper columns.
I was 5 years old when this was created, and I helped my dad assemble the audio components, which came as a kit. The resistors for the preamp looked like colorful jewelry; when the power amp was completed and turned on, vacuum tubes glowed with a mysterious blue light inside their metal cage with its elegant perforated patterns.
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Max’s Furniture & Lighting
I was poorer than most students at the University of Chicago, and I had been taught to make what I needed. So when I needed to furnish an apartment, I began scavenging the alleys and dumpsters of our Southside neighborhood for promising materials. I designed functional items partly on the basis of salvage, and partly using the cheapest building materials from hardware stores and lumber yards, including raw timbers I sourced from a country sawmill back home in Indiana. Neighbors tended to hate me because I ran my grandpa’s circular saw on the back stairs.
Like van der Rohe, I wanted to foreground the structure of each piece, minimizing the materials used, bolting the unit together for easy disassembly and transport, and completely omitting decoration. The shelving units were the purest example of this; my road sign tables were more whimsical.
Small Room Divider Shelves
Talk about minimal materials! This lightweight unit made of cheap, common pine with long cantilevers on both ends became surprisingly stable when bolted together and weighted with books and knick-knacks, because the support columns were made from 1x2s glued together to form a rigid L-shaped cross section. I made it in 1972, but recently discovered a similar piece from 1981 by the celebrated Italian designer Andrea Branzi in the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
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Glass-Top Table and Pipe Lamp
On a scavenging trip to the famous Maxwell Street Market, I scored about a hundred pounds of heavy thermal glass intended for oven doors, and designed this table to accommodate one of the panes, framed in cheap pine painted black. And in our back alley I found a small but heavy piece of cylindrical steel stock, which I used as a base for this lamp. The problem with basing a design on salvage is that you sometimes have lots of trouble sourcing the right materials to finish it. I needed some sort of “sleeve” of the perfect inner and outer diameter to hold the pipe in the steel cylinder base, and that took me to an industrial rubber company on the far west side; the unique mirrored light bulb came from a boutique distributor on Michigan Avenue’s “Magnificent Mile.”
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Drawing Desk & Chair
I was scrambling for work in a depressed economy in the summer of 1972. One attempt was at graphic design; I answered a call for cover designs for a new magazine, and created this desk and three-legged chair to work on it. The desk was made of common pine and masonite, with a hinged drawing surface which could be raised to the proper angle.
The chair had a leather-covered foam seat cushion and a tiny back support, also foam-padded and leather-covered, that was hinged to conform to the angle of your back. Unlike today’s fancy ergonomic chairs, it was all made with the cheapest and most common materials from our neighborhood hardware store.
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Large Room Divider Shelves
When I transferred to engineering school and began to get paying jobs, we moved to a nicer apartment on the North Side, but it still had a combined living room and kitchen, so I created this massive shelving unit, based on my earlier design, to hide the kitchen, which we barely used, from our bright and airy living area. The cantilevered shelves were reinforced by longitudinal “joists” so they could support the weight of a TV or aquarium, and the vertical columns had a T cross section for extra rigidity. But like the smaller shelves, the whole thing could be quickly dismantled and stacked compactly for transport.
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Road Sign Tables
On a visit to Indiana I found these unused road signs and quickly turned them into personal tables which we used for dining in (mostly breakfast, since we usually went out for dinner). The eccentricity of the signs inspired me to make them asymmetrical in height.
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Rolled-Foam Sofa
I made this airy sofa by rolling sheets of foam around three longitudinal cores of pine and sheathing them in fabric. Note the Nelson-style midcentury coffee table I found at a garage sale.
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Terra Incognita Loft
By the time I moved into this vast raw industrial space, my aesthetic had become much more nuanced, my standards more demanding, and most of my construction efforts went into building out the space itself.
But once the space was fully built out (it had to be done twice), it seemed like I was driven to continue building something, no matter how small in scale, at least once a year, and it’s been like that ever since.
Cabinet Steps
These cubist cabinets formed steps to the sleeping loft of our guest room. I covered each step with industrial carpeting in a charcoal blend.
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Stairs to DJ Deck
This little gem was designed with small bevels between the stringers and the steps, which I painted in random pastel colors to liven up our otherwise stark black and white interior.
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Firewood Bed and Street Lamp
During my years in the loft I’d evolved from sleeping on a ledge above my art studio, to moving my girlfriend’s bed into the studio, to breaking up with her and taking another room as my studio in the last year, when I finally decided to build my own ultimate bed. My heart belonged to the desert at this point, and I wanted my bed to feel anchored in the earth, albeit I was two floors up above San Francisco in a building that was slowly disintegrating. I started with oak logs from our firewood stash for legs, built a rigid frame of 2×6 douglas fir with a platform of 5/8-inch clear plywood, and sheathed the sides with redwood. I joined everything together with wooden pegs and glue so there was no metal anywhere in the bed. On top of the firm plywood platform I placed heavy Japanese tatami mats, and the sleeping surface was a combination wool and cotton futon. It all weighed a ton, but could be dismantled into pieces, including the solid frame, each of which could be carried by one person. So I continued to take it with me to most of the 15 different places I’ve lived in since then, and like some other beds I’ve known, this dream bed has always been a rich source of memorable dreams, including the dreams I still have of my vanished San Francisco loft.
A few years later when I was living in Oakland, I found two roughly triangular pieces of heavy redwood burl, which I attached to the head of the bed as wing tables, again using wooden pegs, but removable.
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Hybrid Desk/Table
This piece began with a laminated drawing table top which I found lying around in Oakland. Shortly afterward I discovered these turned redwood pieces which had actually hung as decorations from a Victorian stairway, and added them as detachable legs. I liked the contrast between the synthetic, minimalist table top and the ornate, organic legs. After using it for years as a desk then as a kitchen table, I ultimately transformed it into my current music workstation here in New Mexico, with speaker stands above and a sliding keyboard shelf underneath.
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What I’ve Learned About Furniture & Lighting
I feel so lucky to have been born into midcentury design and organic abstraction! The abstract organic patterns of my parents’ living room curtains were an inspiration for the forms in my later art. And my parents’ living room furniture set the standard for the furniture I love today.
I’m allergic to house dust, molds and pollens, and all surfaces in my home need to be easy to clean and free of clutter. Carpet, which both collects and produces dust, has always been taboo. But even more importantly, experience has taught me that no home is permanent and all my possessions need to be portable.
Hence I love midcentury furniture with its lightweight frames and spindly legs that make it easy to move and clean around and under. I like my interiors to resemble comfortable campsites.
The camping aesthetic extends to lighting, which I’m even more passionate about, since it sets the mood of an interior.
Ceiling light fixtures and chandeliers are an abomination because they impersonate the sun and turn night into a false day. Our bodies evolved with natural overhead lighting that rose, waxed, waned and set with the sun, to be followed by the ground-level light of a campfire, so I make sure that my ambient lighting is positioned low in the room (see photo below).
Whereas lighting designers tend to make lamps into fetish objects, I prefer to downplay the design of the lamp and focus on the light itself and the way it affects the environment. Indirect lighting bounces the light off a wall, so it takes on the warmth of the wall color and more closely simulates campfire light. Task lighting at a desk or table is the only kind of downward-pointing light I use.
Because I’m no longer interested in designing lamps as objects, I mostly use cheap industrial clip lights for indirect ambient lighting. But when I opened my office in San Francisco’s North Beach during the dot com boom, I acquired a set of reproduction 19th-century pharmacy lamps which are adjustable and very versatile for producing the kind of reflected, campfire-style lighting I love to live with.
Listening Outside Your Comfort Zone
Wednesday, April 16th, 2014: Arts, Music & Dance.
I was brought up on eclectic music, but I have had my obsessions, like the early 70s when I only listened to classical, or the 80s when I only chose to listen to African music. Yet even during those times, my girlfriends and roommates played other kinds of music constantly all around me; music listening had not yet been privatized via iPods and earbuds.
Obsessions were part of my youth, when I was more worried about rebelling or establishing my identity. Later I gave that up. I’d much rather learn and evolve than get stuck with an “identity.”
Now that private listening has become the norm, my younger friends are migrating to streaming services. As others have noted, even when it’s “curated,” streaming music delivers primarily that which is already familiar to you. Pandora creates “radio” based on your favorite artists. I’m sorry, but that’s no way to discover new music.
As an artist committed to, or rather, dependent on, lifelong learning and unlimited exploration, I have only limited interest in listening to the kind of music I already know and like. That’s one reason why I still listen to terrestrial radio with live DJs. While I’m working at home, I stream a handful of stations that play eclectic music that often surprises me and turns me onto something I didn’t know and like before, including one internet-only station that happens to play my music. I’ve discovered these terrestrial stations during my travels, by actually being in the places where they’re located, places I developed a connection with, and having them available online is the icing on the cake.
In this context, I regularly listen to shows featuring styles of music I don’t like, because sometimes a single track will stand out and teach me something.
Still, I know a lot of older musicians who should know better, who only listen to the one or two kinds of music they’ve identified with: folk, country, rock, jazz, world, etc. Musicians who revere jazz or traditional music and make sweeping judgements against rock, electronic or punk. And of course the nostalgic baby boomers with their classic rock addiction. That’s a great way to stagnate, dudes.
Or you could try listening outside your comfort zone – you might learn something and have some unexpected fun!
Miracle in Indy: When Art Transcends Intention
Sunday, January 24th, 2016: Arts, Visual Art.
For many years, when visiting family in Indianapolis, I’ve escaped the confines of the cramped family home to spend a few hours at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), which, unlike many urban museums, occupies a bucolic site in the midst of park land on a bluff above the forested floodplain of the White River. The museum grounds are surrounded by an even larger forested cemetery, so there’s literally nothing in sight to remind one of the city, and the architect took advantage of this by providing large windows in all the outer galleries, for an indoor/outdoor feel and expansiveness that’s missing from most urban museums.
As I identified favorite works in the collection, my sporadic visits became more like pilgrimages, and as I fell in love with the Japanese gallery, which most often features scroll paintings, I came to think of my visits as a form of meditation, ritually beginning with the Japanese gallery.
But at some point, every visit continued to the back of the 4th floor, the contemporary floor, where a sound installation by Julianne Swartz had been more or less permanently relocated.
The Swartz installation, “Terrain”, had originally opened in the museum foyer, the highest-traffic site in the museum. It consists of a broad network of audio speakers suspended overhead, playing continuous, spatially distributed loops of people breathing, whispering and humming, a soundscape which comes and goes in gentle waves. Swartz asked her recording volunteers to think of someone that he or she felt tenderness for, and to say what he or she would whisper in that person’s ear. According to Swartz, “the piece is negotiated by the movement of your body – it’s all happening overhead and you negotiate it by the path you walk.” What the listener hears, if they hear anything, is unintelligible, seemingly random, and can often be interpreted as nature sounds. All good so far, except that the unfortunate “negotiate” should be replaced by navigate.
I had sampled this installation since its opening in the foyer, and had always found it underwhelming, visually distracting, and somewhat pretentious. The foyer installation just couldn’t work, with the high ambient noise level and high traffic. I can’t imagine what the museum and the artist were thinking, opening it there. And even in the upstairs location, the artist and museum provided no effective guidance on how to experience the work; the strong overhead visual network of cables and speakers overwhelmed the gentle audio component, and visitors tended to enter talking with each other, walk around talking inside, and leave without ever really experiencing the work.
But after my recent hip surgery, I arrived at the IMA to find the Japanese paintings replaced by ceramics, and when I reached the Swartz installation, my hip was aching, the room was empty for a change, and I laid down on one of the two padded benches and closed my eyes. Finally, in its aerie high above the river and the winter landscape, “Terrain” began to work on and for me, teasing my ears and freeing my mind. My thoughts slowed to a standstill and my hearing expanded, at least until a group of talkers came in, circled cluelessly, and left. Contrary to Swartz’s stated intention, the audience needs to be still, not in motion, in order to apprehend how the sound is changing across the space of the installation.
Hence, in yesterday’s return visit, I took the elevator straight up to 4. “Terrain” was occupied, but this time, amazingly, by other silent, motionless kindred spirits: 3 on the benches and one on the floor in lotus position. I tried standing at the wall of windows for a while, gazing out over the stark winter forest and river to the dull western plains, but full attention required full relaxation. So I went elsewhere and returned later, when I found a young man sprawling on one bench and the other bench empty.
I laid down again, and we two strangers shared the ever-changing soundscape for a blissful 20 minutes or so. Whispers from one direction, tickling my ears, fading away. Tuneful humming from another direction, building, fading. A sustained silence, emptiness outside and in. Eventually, my body felt like moving again.
The least distracting way out is thru a narrow lightless corridor, past a James Turrell installation, and through a small video projection room. As I emerged into the bright central atrium of the museum, I heard someone behind me saying “Excuse me, sir.” It was the young guy from “Terrain.”
“Do you visit often?” he asked.
“Yes – I don’t live here, but I visit every chance I get, just to meditate,” I replied.
“Have you tried the Turrell?”
“No, not really. What’s up with that?”
He led me back into the darkness. From the narrow corridor, the Turrell room is so dark the room itself is indistinct. “Hold your hands out in front of you and walk to the wall,” he said. Together, we slowly advanced into the darkness. As your eyes adjust, you begin to recognize an even darker rectangle centered in the opposite wall, like a large black painting. Then when you reach the wall, your hands go right through – it’s actually an opening, but the inside is not just black, it’s a colorless void – you can’t see an end to it. It could be infinite.
“Amazing!” I said quietly. “Thank you!”
We stood side by side staring into the void, alone in the silent room, for 10 minutes or so. It was another form of meditation, that would’ve been spoiled by others passing in the corridor or entering the room.
Then I turned and thanked him again, slowly returning to the outer world.
I don’t know of any other museum where an experience like this is possible – and at the IMA, it seems to be an unintended and well-kept secret. We artists are painfully aware of the gulf between our intentions and our achievements, but we are much less aware of the broader potential of our work to come alive and transcend our intentions in different environments and with different audiences. Swartz’s original idea that “it’s all happening overhead and you negotiate it by the path you walk” turns out to be a very limited way of experiencing her piece. You really need relaxation, stillness and silence for something like this. But going beyond the artist’s intention is a success, not a failure.
Even now, years after their openings, I think the Swartz and Turrell installations have the potential to be the most powerful works at the IMA, but largely accidentally. I’m dreading the day when the museum will retire them.
Friday, August 9th, 2019: Arts, Design.
We all collect business cards. A few of them are creative. Most of them are boring.
Here’s a random sample of cards from the 1970s through the 2000s – including a few of my own – that suggest some of the eclectic worlds my life path has intersected with, and the differing ways in which people from those worlds introduce themselves to strangers.
