Performing is always tough for writers. I mean, we’re not typically stage-trained theatre experts amped up on auditory performance steroids when reading our prose. The reality is, most writers are just average Joes like me. We stumble, stutter, are monotone, and really are quite boring when we get up in front of people and open our mouths. I don’t know why this is, and have been guilty of it for years. I’ve droned on like a pontificating robot. I’ve blathered, buzzed, and really was in need of a good oiling of my vocal joints.

Within the last year or so I started to transform my approach to readings. In fact, I’ve been watching two guys for several years now whom I consider reading performance mentors. One is TNB’s own Rich Ferguson (Watch Rich perform with my son Landen Belardes). I have carefully watched Rich’s often-aggressive delivery, his command of the stage, and the booming confidence in his voice. Doesn’t matter that it’s spoken word poetry. His work is often narrative anyway. Imagine him reading excerpts from a novel. I’d be in a trance.

That’s the spirit I want to capture.

Another reading performance mentor is author Tim (TZ) Hernandez of “Breathing In, Dust.” He’s from a little town in the Central Valley near where I live in Bakersfield, Calif. I’ve seen TZ wow an entire auditorium packed with teachers, musicians and vatos. He can memorize long poems, and read with the gusto of a gang thug, screaming to his homies. I so dig it. He can transform into any character, and read so passionately and so forcefully, and dare I say vivaciously, that you just might fall off your chair while listening. (Watch TZ tear it up from his forthcoming novel “Surge” while he’s just sitting around).

All writers can learn from Rich and TZ, whose poet hearts resonate something special from the core of their souls. They pull from an inner place that believes in characters, not just words. In fact, they transform into characters.

Yes. That’s what I want to accomplish as a performer of prose. I want my words to soar into hearts, not just minds. I want to transcend any venue, take listeners into the depth of a story, into the very believable world we writers have the talent, hearts and minds to create.

I want to become my characters.

Slowly I’m doing that. It takes confidence, lots of practice, and an eager heart to want to touch reader’s souls. I often use my kid Landen to accompany me. I’m lucky to have a guitarist in my family who can soothe the savage beast with just some licks on the strings. And he never gets stage fright, which is difficult for a guy like me who grew up shy to understand. Yes, I’m jealous of my own kid (and his brother too who can bust out his violin in front of any crowd and not break a sweat).

Now watch me perform chapter one from my novel Anhinga at a bar in downtown Bakersfield. You might love it. You might not. Either way, blame Rich and TZ for my slow transformation into a performer of prose, rather than just a reader.

You can also click on the below image to view the video.

“The fans, which move from time to time, touched by invisible currents, serve also as some form of communication known only to the Reptiles.”
-William Burroughs

One of the key purposes of art in my view is pure inquiry-to ask ourselves some new questions, or to be invited to consider familiar or obvious things in a new way. As mainstream commercial art in all its forms becomes ever more committed to the quick narcosis of superficial entertainment, I think this inquisitive and participatory aspect of more thoughtful art becomes all the more significant.

I’m also very interested in the question of how electronic publishing is affecting our vision, both in a literal sense and in a more psycho-cultural way. So, I’d like to conduct some research here.

My chief artistic focus is my writing, primarily fiction, but I am a painter whose work is sold internationally. I derive a great deal of satisfaction from work in an exclusively visual medium. I find that it’s a means of asking some questions in a different kind of way relative to life on the page.

I’d like you to consider these four paintings of mine and to provide some feedback on how you see them. You’re of course free to judge their artistic merits-to some extent that’s hard to avoid. But what I’m really interested in is how their textural and dimensional nature translates through the electronic screen medium.

How large do you imagine these physical works to be?

More importantly, what is your perceptual or emotional reaction to them? If you had to assign a single word to each of them, what would it be? (Again, I’d be grateful if we steered past the issue of whether or not you consider them good or bad and attended to the issue of them merely as things to be seen.)

I will tell you that one of the principles I work with is steganography, which is defined as “the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message.” It’s a form of security through obscurity and is now one of the most pervasive albeit subtle aspects of the world we live in. Hidden watermarks, digital signatures, embedded information-these forms of communication and control are all around us now.

As abstract as these images may appear (and however competently executed or not in your opinion) they all objectively contain information that can be considered encrypted. These messages aren’t encrypted digitally-none of the images have been enhanced via computer–they are straightforward photographs of paintings. The secondary level of communication is physically within the works themselves.

I’ve found that direct short range contact with these works invariably detects this secondary level of communication, even if only intuitively and inarticulately. Seen in the flesh, the viewer either connects pretty closely with the surface level meaning of the hidden element, or interprets it subconsciously in exactly the opposite way to its conventional meaning.

In other words, when experienced physically and immediately as paintings on a wall, the hidden elements are perceived either as reinforcements of the impression overall–or as direct contradictions. There seems to be no middle ground. I find that very interesting.

It would be very helpful to me as an artist, and even more so as an inquirer (which is how I classify myself), if you were to provide just a short and as automatic a response as you can on what you think you see here with each work.

The nature of the embedded communication isn’t the same in every instance. The philosophy behind it and the hands that were responsible are.

The composer John Cage once remarked, “When I wrote what I thought was uplifting music, people became sad. When I wrote serious music, people often laughed. I decided I needed to have another reason for composing music than communication.”

THINGS SEEN

Robert Henri Snow in Winter (1902)

Nicholas de Stael The Football Players (1952)

Atsuko Tanaka Drawing for Electric Dress (1956)

George Segal The Old Woman at the Window (1965)

Jim Rosenquist A Lot to Like (1962)

It’s been a strange month, mostly because I spent the bulk of it chasing the dangling carrot of artistic legitimacy.  Then my birthday came, and I woke to the realization that I was halfway to eighty-four. That’s a lot of trips around the sun, not enough to make me feel old, but definitely enough to have a strong sense of who I am.  I realized that the powers that be (the ones dangling the carrot) were asking me to become a cookie cutter version of myself.   When I finally balked at at their wishes – when I put my foot down and said I’m not writing that! – I was informed that my stance was “anti-establishment”.  Anti-establishment?  I rolled the word around in my mind for a moment.  Yes.  That seemed exactly right.

In this spirit of insurgence I found myself looking at Robert Henri’s Snow in New York (1902).  I love this painting because it feels like a street I have walked.  I love how the sky hangs low, and how you can feel the cold, damp air.  It may be warm inside those row houses, but it’s hard to tell.  The people inside work hard with very little guarantees.  The only thing we know for certain is that it is a grey day in a messy world.  This is the world that I live in, and I appreciate Henri because he didn’t choose to cover it up with a blue sky, or dress it up with a snazzier neighborhood.  Modern Art in America begins right here with Henri’s unfettered realism.  Raised in Nebraska, the son of an accused murderer, Henri (who had to change his name from Cozad due to his infamous father), rejected the French academic style that was in vogue.  He had no interest in painting figures that resembled Greek gods, nor did he care to idealize the world around him.  Fed up with the art establishment, Henri created urban paintings that depicted un-glamorized portraits of real life in gritty cities, filled with immigrants and struggling poor.  Conservative in style, his paintings were revolutionary in content.  He began to teach in New York, and developed a loyal following of students that included Edward Hopper and George Bellows.  The establishment hated the realism of his work, as well as that of his students, and critics came to call it “Ashcan”.  Instead of bowing to pressure to change the content, Henri organized a show featuring rejected Ashcan work.   Much to the shock of all the dealers, the show was a big success and people began buying.  Henri and his fellow Ashcan painters revived a much needed insurgent mood.

World Cup is upon us and my English better half is of course pulling for his home country, but my daughter is pulling for Portugal because she loves Ronaldo.  We were killing time down at MOCA, debating the importance of national pride over good looks, when we stumbled upon Nicholas De Stael’s The Football Players (1952). I learned that de Stael spent all of 1952 painting footballers.  He was like the Nick Hornby of his day, and this was his Fever Pitch.  The idea behind the footballer series was to break down the shapes of the players without loosing the emotion and passion.  De Stael wanted to suggest the essence of form and movement, without literally depicting it. I don’t love this work aesthetically but I appreciate what it represents.  De Stael spent most of his life seeking approval and legitimacy from the art establishment.  He finally got it in 1953, and promptly killed himself.  I’m not sure what to make of that really.

Atsuko Tanaka’s Drawing for Electric Dress (1956) was created during a period in Japan after WWII, when the country was consumed with modernization.  After the war, female students were allowed to attend art school.  Formally trained, Tanaka ultimately rejected traditional notions of art and went in search of the “unknown beauty” as she called it.  She found a home with the Gutai Art Association, the first experimental art movement in Japan.  Known for their conceptual performance pieces, their collective work always featured objects from everyday life like textiles, doorbells, and light bulbs.  In this sense, it’seasy to think of them as a pre-cursor to Pop Art.

At first glance, Tanaka’s crayon drawing seems nonsensical, and haphazardly drawn.  But Tanaka used the diagram to create an actual dress, which she wore to Gutai performances.  Risking electrocution, she would literally insert herself into the work of art.  A far cry from the Zen restraint that had typified Japanese art for centuries, and not what you might expect from a nice girl from Osaka.

My mother was a grad student at NYU in the early 70s, and George Segal’s work was something I grew up seeing in and around Greenwich Village.  Segal’s figures were considered revolutionary back then, but feel sort of old hat to me now.  When I spotted The Old Woman at the Window (1965), I brushed by her without much notice.  But as I passed in front of her window, I glanced over quickly, and caught a glimpse of my own reflection.  Suddenly, the piece took on new meaning.  I always thought the idea of the sculpture was that the viewer was supposed to look at the woman and make all sorts of assumptions; she is old, lonely, tired, frail.   On this day, I realized it’s also about the woman looking at me.  I wondered what assumptions I brought forth.  Maybe she was thinking, Look at that woman, halfway to eighty-four… What she doesn’t know, is a lot. This is the genius of George Segal.

In 1999, he won the National Medal of Arts but thirty years earlier, his sculptures were rejected by the rarefied world of the 57^th Street dealers.   They were only interested in art that was academic, conservative or elegant.  Segal grew up on a poultry farm, and decided early on that elegant topics weren’t for him.  He was part of the working people, and wanted to speak to that.   He continued to toil away at his art, teaching high school to make ends meet.  Finally, in the late 60s, he joined the Tenth Street Co-Op, which was comprised of ‘rejected’ artists looking for other outlets for their work.  They pooled their resources together and rented space in galleries on East 10^th Street.  Each month they would host shows, all on the same night, so that the artists and the public could mingle together on the sidewalk.  These ‘happenings’ became incredibly popular, and ultimately led to the legitimacy of many of the participating artists (including Segal).

There’s a lot to like about James Rosenquist’s A Lot To Like.  It’s a stunning painting to behold.  You can literally stand in front of it for a good long while just observing all the every day objects.  I guess he reminds me of O’Keeffe in the sense that he paints things really big, so that you can really see them.  Before he achieved acclaim for his work, Rosenquist painted billboards and hung out with race car drivers.  In fact, my son used to play at the home of a race car driver who owned a Rosenquist, and my mantra to him prior to all playdates was always, “Don’t touch the Rosenquist!”

Rosenquist likes to think of himself as a billboard artist, but the rest of the world considers him a Pop artist.   He doesn’t like the label, which is fair enough.  But his reasoning is based on the fact that he never met Warhol.  I don’t see the logic.  You didn’t have to meet Monet to be an impressionist.  Rosenquist takes everyday objects and paints them BIG.  If that’s not Pop Art, I don’t know what is.  James should just calm down and enjoy the fact that he’s in so many major museums…

Ultimately, the thing I love about all of these artists is that they didn’t waste emotional energy trying to plug themselves into someone else’s diagram.  They trusted their own voices – they were inventive and daring. They disturbed, upset, enlightened and ultimately opened ways for better understanding.  Robert Henri always said a painter should only paint what is real to him.  I think this goes for all of us in the artistic world.  At the end of the day, you have to do what’s right for you.  You have to have the courage to be yourself, even if that means you can’t have the proverbial carrot.

If that’s ‘anti-establishment’ count me in.  Anybody else out there with me?

So, this is about the how, and when and why, and what of seeing. It’s about how the habit of seeing activates our minds and our imaginations, and how seeing opens doors that were otherwise closed; And how when those doors open, the world seems more manageable and meaningful.

But why seeing? Why not reading or listening?  Simply put, I had an artsy mother, who enjoyed hanging out in art galleries and museums. When I was especially small she was getting her Masters in Humanities. Every week she would plunk me in my stroller, and head off to some new exhibit. Since my mother had her own agenda, I was never told what to think, or how to feel. I was free to formulate my own opinions, likes and dislikes. In the process I learned how to look at art, but more than that, I learned, almost instinctively, how to make it relevant to my life.

So, for as long as I can remember each month, there have been things seen, and things unseen, and this is how I contextualize my little corner of the universe. A word of warning: I’m not very rarefied when it comes to the habit of seeing. I don’t pay much attention to theories, reviews, or critics. My only frame of reference is my perception of the piece, things the artist said, and what was going on in the world during the time of its creation. The rest I leave for others more qualified to ponder.

THINGS SEEN (click to view corresponding Flickr set)

Oskar Kokoschka Portrait of Frau Reuther c 1921

Robert Rauschenberg Dwan Gallery Self-portrait

Picasso etching of Rimbaud

Manuel Alvaraez Bravo Absent Portrait 1945

Paul Klee Trio something?

Kandinsky Unequal 1932

László Moholy-Nagy AL 3, 1926

Ellsworth Kelly Orange White Green Blue, 1968

Picasso Woman with a Book 1932

Brancusi Bird In Space (1931)

John Singer Sargent Street in Venice (1882)

THINGS UNSEEN

Luisa Lambri: Being There

Renoir (in the 20th Century)

Jack Pierson

Jim Hodges: A Diary of Flowers – Above the Clouds

Jan Savery Elephant and Monkey 1645

Rembrandt van Rijn Death of the Virgin 1639

According to my family, I was incredibly moody last month. In my defense, I had a rather rushed rewrite due mid-month. In the screenwriting world, my main role is to get actresses attached to projects. Working from an existing script, I flesh out the characters and beef-up their involvement within the story, so that the actress will agree to make the movie. After that, the director comes on and usually brings on his own minion, meaning I get the boot. For this I am well paid, but the trouble is I get attached to the characters. They become my little creations, and as I near the end of the project, I begin to feel a loss of control, as if my babies are going to be taken from me. This of course leads to moodiness – because no one wants to have their babies taken from them. Then there’s also the compounding issue that I’m on the verge unemployment, which means I have to start the entire tap dance all over again. Add to that the fact that the dogs are constantly barking, and my daughter is nearly eleven and her head is in the clouds (I suspect Robert Pattenson is to blame, but she denies this). Then there’s my son who takes baths and still comes out dirty, and every time I turn around there’s another pile of dirty clothes on the floor, oh and let’s not forget about breakfast, lunches, and dinner and the corresponding trips to the supermarket that they require.  Does Nick Hornby have these problems? Or Don DeLillo? I think not. So, yes, I was moody. What else is new?

Oskar Kokoschka’s portrait of Frau Reuther was a good reminder that I need to keep things in perspective. Not because she’s old and half blind, but more because she’s got this slight smile on her face that seems to imply there’s no sense fretting over this type of stuff. I love the way she sort of hides her gnarled hand as if it’s really of no consequence anymore; she’s alive and kicking on the inside. Kokoschka, was an Austrian painter who had a very long, very torrid affair with Alma Mahler (wife of Gustave). He was also kicked out of Austria in 1934 after being labeled a ‘degenerate artist’ by the Nazis. The notion of ‘degenerate’ art came from a Jewish critic named Nordau, who loathed modern art, and felt it was the work of people who were so screwed up they had lost the self control to produce anything coherent. Ironically, the Nazis seized upon his ideas in their quest for Aryan purity in art – though I’m not certain how Nordau fared in the process. The Nazis even had a big Degenerate Art Exhibit, which featured masters of Fauvism, Impressionism, Bauhaus, and Cubism, all re-organized into fantastically named categories like: Insolent Mockery of the Divine Under Centrist Rule, Nature as Seen by Sick Minds, and Madness Becomes Method. You couldn’t even make this up. The big irony was that after the show the Nazis also held a big auction and bought up all the pieces at top dollar.

Dwan Gallery Self-portrait by Robert Rauschenberg brims with imaginative energy. I love how he deconstructed himself in this; his hand, his ear, his pencil, his glass, the backward R, and the black and white holes from the piece of torn paper. It’s messy and direct, so full of ideas it practically sings. Rauschenberg was always fearless when it came to executing different ideas in different dimensions and media. Whatever activated the work – wax, textiles, photographs, torn newspaper clippings, light bulbs, coke bottles – the stuff of life really, was fair game.  Rauchenberg said that we are all works of art, or that we have to at least embrace that possibility.  I consider my own self-portrait at present – piles of laundry, endless cycles of dirty dishes, dog hair tumbleweeds – maybe he’s onto something.

The thing that I really like best about Manuel Alvaraez Bravo’s Absent Portrait is not so much the photo itself, but that it reminds me of Martha Posner’s Memory and Desire series. Posner does incredible things with clothing as sculpture.  I’m not someone who ever had the wish to feel invisible, I think it’s more that I feel invisible far too often, so Bravo’s photo, and the idea of the absent human figure, with just the dress sitting on the chair, appeals to me on a dreary sort of level; or maybe I’m so used to seeing clothes piled up on chairs, that this somehow seemed to be a poetic rendition of the mundane.

 

I’m completely irritated with myself for not noting the title of this Paul Klee painting. I think it’s something with trio, or triad but suffice to say it’s typical utopian machine world Klee. Three little stick figures, are heading out against an atmospheric wash backdrop. Klee painted so many of these, and each one feels like a different window into a vast imaginary world, where hand drawn creatures twitter, sing, and walk tightropes. I always compare it to the characters that Calvino created in Cosmicomics. Weird dreamy landscapes full of inanimate creatures whose pathos and emotion seems to mirror ours. I know Ruskin ragged about the use of pathetic fallacy but I can’t get enough of it. I want my imagination stretched, I want to think about things that don’t make sense. Then again, Ruskin didn’t like Whistler, so what did he know?  Anyway, sorry to digress.  Klee taught at the famed German Bauhaus school of Art where the school motto was ‘Art and Technology – A New Unity’ (this being the second choice over ‘Small but Excellent’ which had been scooped up by the nearby University of Potsdam). The curriculum at Bauhaus was incredibly well-rounded and interdisciplinary. They studied everything from architecture to religion, and believed that technology and spiritual growth were co-dependent.  Students and teachers worked side by side, and in order to keep the school self-sustaining, they would take on real-world commissions in design problems. It was (at least in theory) an incredibly positive communal approach to teaching and because of it instructors and teachers formed tight bonds. Of course the Nazis wouldn’t tolerate this type of transcendent visionary thing and shut the school down under their ‘degenerate’ clause, but Bauhaus aesthetic and influence are still felt today in design and architecture.

Unequal by Wassily Kandinsky was a new painting to me. I have always felt a kinship with Kandinsky mostly because we both suffer from synesthesia, and Kandinsky felt a kinship with Klee, since the two both taught together at Bauhaus. The only trouble with Kandinsky is that he that sometimes can begin to feel predictable, but Unequal seemed fresh.  I don’t know if this is because I had never seen it before, or because it had more blue than I’d ever seen from him, or because the brush work was more evident than usual.  Either way, I paused on that window-like object on the bottom right corner and decided that it was the portal to Klee’s mechanical utopian dreamscape. Then I was struck by the idea that Klee and Kandinsky were the Tex Avery and Chuck Jones of Bauhuas.  I wonder if anyone else has ever made this analogy. I’m guessing not.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s AL3 is yet another Bauhaus creation. Moholy-Nagy was Hungarian. His cousin was George Solti, a huge conductor with the Chicago (symphony) for years. I saw him conduct Bartok’s Music for Strings, and it was nothing short of amazing. Solti studied with Bartok, and I’m certain Moholy-Nagy must have known him as well. What an amazing time to be alive. I think of them all hanging out in some fantastic cafe in Budapest.  Where have all the fantastic creative cafes gone? Maybe they only exist online, or perhaps they’re somewhere inside AL3’s velvety alien world. Yes! And Klee’s twittering figures vacation there when they need a break from Kandinsky-land. They hang out in clubs that feature Bjork tribute bands and tight rope walkers, and the only form of sustenance are Fudrucker’s hamburgers (have you ever noticed that there are always tons of Kandinsky posters at Fudruckers?). Oh, I suppose I’ve let my imagination run away with me. Ruskin would not approve, so I suppose I should get back to reality, and gritty truths, and anus ulcers and ugly tits…

Clearly, you didn’t see where this was going, but I’m laughing to myself because of course I’m talking about Picasso’s etching of Rimbaud. Sure Rimbaud was a serious cutie, but he was such a shit. His controlling, but brilliant mother (who was also severely Catholic) insisted on home schooling him, which I think led to all his later troubles in life. Rimbaud was a selfish, enfant terrible, of the highest order. His bad behavior caused unspeakable emotional harm to pretty much everyone he touched, and yet he’s rewarded with a Leo DiCaprio film and t-shirt licensing deals. Screw Rimbaud, and screw this etching. It’s stupid.

If Picasso annoys me, and Rauchenberg fills me with optimism and hope, then Ellsworth Kelly grounds me.  His work, like Red Orange White Green Blue, makes me feel the underlying order to everything. This is important because often times it feels like the ground under my feet is breaking.  I should point out that it really drives me crazy when people complain that they don’t get Color Field painters.  It’s a bit like looking at a person’s life and saying, I don’t get it. You’re not supposed to get it! It’s about perception. In the case of Kelly, that perception is color. Don’t think, What does it mean? Or, What is it? It doesn’t mean anything.  It’s about the color and how you feel about the color. It’s a fragment, a moment, a ‘stunning emptiness’ as some critic once said of his work (I know I don’t read critics but Kelly mentioned it once in an interview). I remember the first time I saw Kelly’s work. It was just a long line of color field paintings at MOMA and I was mesmerized. Now granted, I do have synesthesia, so color really sings for me (literally) but still, give the color field painters a chance if you haven’t already. Just relax your mind and just enjoy the feeling of the color . So what can I say about Red Orange White Green Blue? Nothing. I will say nothing.

Now excuse my earlier Picasso irritation for just a moment as I explain why Woman with a Book (1932) doesn’t annoy me. Sometimes Picasso’s work, can feel like an exercise in self-congratulation. Thankfully, this is not the case with this painting, which features his then mistress Marie-Therese. I love the way he organizes the space, the way the colors play off one another, the elements of fantasy and imagination. The painting is just one big push and pull.  It’s modern, but it’s old; it’s realistic but it’s abstract, and all those thick black lines ground it, while the look on Marie’s face is so dreamy.

Bird in Space is not my favorite Brancusi, mostly because I’m scared of birds and it seems a little impersonal compared to his faces. What was interesting to me about this particular Brancusi wasn’t so much the work itself, but the fact that it is stuck in the middle of this huge room at the Norton Simon with this sulky Giacometti statue. Ever since I visited Brancusi’s atelier in Paris, I’ve been struck by the anthropomorphic quality of his work. Seeing all those half completed sculptures stacked on the shelves, I couldn’t help but feel they were all wondering where Brancusi went. They were like orphans, safe in their own company, but lonely all the same. I think Bird in Space looks lonely too, and tired of the sulky Giacometti lady, who for the record needs a bra and a better attitude, which may just become my new motto. For me, Brancusi is the Picasso of sculpture, minus the endless womanizing, the celeb status, and the lavish lifestyle. He was one of the first sculptures to challenge the dominance of Rodin (and given my love of Camille Claudel, this alone makes him a hero of mine). Brancusi was all about the essence of things, and simplicity of form, which makes sense given the times he lived in. The Ottoman Empire was being pushed back to the Turkish borders, and there was even bigger trouble in the Balkans, which meant Brancusi, who was from Romania, was smack in the middle of all that upheaval. The world was a confusing place and Brancusi reductionism helped to simplify it – even if only for himself.

The other day my daughter finished a John Singer Sargent reproduction that she had been working on.  It’s a lovely little painting called Woman with Furs, and features a fur clad woman wandering along a cold landscape.  It’s so small and perfect, and I’ve hung it by my desk so she can keep my company while I write. Now, the thing about Sargent is that he gets a bad rap because he wasn’t a trendsetter or a radical. Worse yet, he was always employed (God forbid), but I believe Sargent’s importance lies in his portrayal of women. They all share a self-assured quality, or maybe it’s an air of modernity; They are always very much in charge, within their femininity.  I’m guessing his mother had something to do with this. She was an interesting woman who decided she wanted to leave the States and move to Europe. She was sort of like Kate Winslet’s character in Revolution Road (a hundred years earlier) minus the loser husband and the suicide. As a result, Sargent was born in Florence and raised as an ex-pat in Europe.

Street in Venice features a typical self-assured, confident Sargent woman. Wrapped in a big, dark coat with her white dress spilling out from underneath.  She heads down that silent alley while the rest of the city naps. There are a few people lingering in doorways; she’s noticed by a few of the men but doesn’t really seem to care. Her thoughts seem elsewhere, and there’s an aimless quality to her walk… Still, I think I see the hint of a smile coming across her face, and even though I don’t know where she’s coming from, or where she’s going – I can’t help but feel she’s heading in the right direction.  Hopefully, the same can be said about me.

MADRID, SPAIN-

Two months ago over a hundred cows were set up one night in Spain capital. Just like that. One day the corners are simple, everyday Spanish-capital corners and the next, every other one is adorned with a myriad  of fiberglass cows painted every sort of design and color imaginable.

This naturally makes the tourists smile and sparkle and snap their photos standing next to these fake plastic  cows.

They clearly don’t read or care about the sign at the bottom of each cow that lists the artists’ name, the title of the piece and the little label that reads in capital letters: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE COW.

Most of them touch the cow.

Some of them ride the cow.

Some of them oblige their children to sit on the cow and frown.

According to the Cow Parade website, it is the largest and most public art event in the world.

An estimated count puts about 100 million people seeing this public “art” throughout the world.

Dublin, Sao Paolo, Chicago, New York, London, Buenos Aires, Tokyo and Milan are just a few of the more than 50 cities that have hosted the fiberglass bovines, each herd of them painted distinctly by the country’s own artists and later are auctioned off for charity. Apparently they’ved rasied over $20 million dollars since 1999.

Over 2500 cows have been made since it started a decade ago and no two are identical.

Celebrity painters of cows include David Lynch, Ron Wood (from The Rolling Stones) and Radiohead. Oprah Winfrey, Elton John and Ringo Starr all own one.

This is all hunky dory, but I keep asking myself:

Why cows?

Why now?

The website answers the first one:

This is a popular question. Simply, the cow is a universally beloved animal. The cow represents different things to different people around the world-she’s sacred, she’s historical, she connects us to our past-but the common feeling is one of affection. There is something magical about the cow that transcends throughout the world. She simply makes everyone smile.

Does “she” make you smile? When I think of which animals make me smile I tend toward little bitty kitty cats and puppy dogs, maybe bunny rabbits. Hell, even pigs spark a grin across this face. But cows? Not even in the top five. Not unless I’m really hungry and she comes out juicy and a little pink on the inside.

The website also explains that the cow is the perfect animal on which to paint because of “the form, flexibility, and contiguous breadth” of it.

While I don’t doubt that the contiguous breadth of a life-size fiberglass cow can make it a good candidate for painting on, I don’t see how fiberglass models of cow bodies can be seen as flexible, especially when compared to, say, a canvas, which is unarguably more pliable.

In an effort to get a gain an accurate overview of what this annoying art movement provides Madrid, I went cow hunting one day. In total, I shot about 25 cows, not all of which made this post.

At least here in Madrid, three different forms of the cow are possible.

The standard and most frequent cow, standing on all fours:

The cow standing on two legs:

bathing in a tea cup?

Suffice it to say the verisimilitude of these cows is not to be taken seriously.

Nor, as I said before, are they to be touched, which tourists did time and time again in my cow hunt.

The effects of the multitudes touching these cows only leads to the the inevitable rubbing-off of the cow’s painted outer layer, otherwise referred to–by some–as art.

While the vast majority of the cows were average at best or underwhelming…

A handful of them stood out as exceptionally rendered:

Across the street from the Prado, the curators at La Caixa Forum, a relatively small and trendy museum, decided to put out some Rodin sculptures in front. They’ve called it: Arte en la calle (Art in the street).

Half a dozen sculptures adorn the entrance area of the Forum.

I kept wondering why no one seemed to be looking at these true works of art. Because they don’t have any color? Because they were made in the image of man, instead of the other, the animal?

They were muted bronzes, intimating elusive notions just waiting to be discovered by whoever stood and pondered. They were trapped in space and time while people walked freely by, ignoring them, secretly salivating for the next grouping of colorful cows which they could touch and take a soon-to-be-forgotten photo in front of and maybe show to a few friends when they returned home, maybe not.

 

It’s been just over two years since I posed naked with 2,753 other people on the edge of Cleveland, Ohio.

It’s been just over two years since I stood shivering in the middle of a park behind the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame where I pulled my T-shirt over my head and dropped my pants and boxer briefs for a couple of hours.

All very legal.

All very much for art.

All said and done and plastered all over the news at the time.

I haven’t really thought about that June day much since, but this past week public nudity found its way back into the headlines because the small, and famously nude-friendly town of Brattleboro, Vermont, has finally put an ordinance on its display of flesh.

Brattleboro, they say, has long been a live-and-let-live town where skinny dipping was never a big deal. But ever since a group of teens started hanging out in a public parking lot in their pubic-haired suits, along with this summer’s well-documented account of some old guy, a tourist from out of state, walking around downtown in nothing more than a fanny pack, the town has erected a hard stance on public nudity.

A few teens and an old dude seemed to ruin it for everybody.

Isn’t that always the case?

I started thinking about that time when I did that Spencer Tunick photograph, and so I dug out the notebook where I wrote about the whole thing while eating a free Chipotle burrito.

It would be nice to put this story to rest.

It’s been edited and TNB’ed, and here’s the account:

June 26, 2004

It was on New Year’s Eve when I heard some friends discuss the Spencer Tunick project.

The famous photographer was looking for volunteers to pose naked in a Cleveland public space and the buzz was loud.

Everyone asked each other if they would, or could do it, and I simply said that it sounded like an opportunity to do something crazy in a controlled environment.

I said it simply, with beer and Champagne fighting and calling each other derogatory names in my stomach.

The next day – the first day of the year – after renewing my gym membership and pushing away a bag of those fiery Cheetos I love so much, I signed up for the event.

Cleveland was to be Tunick’s first legal shoot in the United States; he had been arrested five times in New York City for doing his thing. At the time, the artist had gotten naked masses to not smile for the camera in Spain and Australia and in a half-dozen other countries around the world. His picture in Montreal, where over 2,500 people staved off fiery Cheetos or the dill pickled-flavored version of them that I hope are available up there, set a record for the most nude persons together in North America.

When I signed up in January I expected to be mortified and photographed in less than a month.

Do it.

Go home.

Be quiet.

But over 4,000 people signed up and the shoot had to be moved from an indoor location to somewhere outside – causing the shoot to be delayed indefinitely as a date was being selected.

Over the next six months I received emailed updates.

The location was to be kept secret until the week before to lessen the amount of voyeurs and news crews.

I read about the June 26 confirmation date, and I clicked on the link to see the T-shirt I could buy after the shooting ended.

I read about the amount of people that were filling out applications and I read about the importance of its secrecy.

My close friends were in disbelief when I told them and my sister, who I thought of as a liberal, became angry when I described exactly what I would be doing. My oldest brother, who I had been squatting with at the time, considered me crazy but laughed and read all the emails I pulled up for him.

Classic Rock woke me up at 3:30 that morning and I pushed snooze twice. I had to be at the 9th Street Pier by 4:30.

I half-heartedly combed my hair while I stood in front of the mirror with rings growing under my eyes. I wore gray rip-away Adidas pants and a black T-shirt that read “Defend Cleveland” across its chest.

I listened to the latest Beastie Boys album as I negotiated the dark streets.

I worried about the chilly weather and what my dick would look like when I introduced it to thousands of people at once.

I told it to make me proud.

Or to at least behave.

Traffic at the pier was heavy and I worried about arriving late. Young people walked past my idling car and I took a sharp right, parking in a lot where I once tailgated before a Browns game.

I sat for a moment of silence in my car, taking in the moment, watching hoards of people stream past.

I recognized a guy who worked at my local coffee shop. He and his girlfriend wore matching white robes.

My Nike sandals were loud as I speed-walked toward Lake Erie.

“Hello all you people I will see naked,” I said in my head to the thousands waiting in line with their white pieces of paper.

The tension certainly was weird – sudden bursts of laughter came from previously mute people, screams came from obviously drunk participants, hands covered faces, sets of eyes looked for vindication in those around them and when they couldn’t find it they locked onto the pavement.

Most people came in couples and small groups. They were young and old, male and female, big and small. All colors.

I was young and by myself.

I was growing more pale by the cold minute.

I looked at girls who I looked forward to seeing naked and looked away from all those people who I would rather not.

“This is art and not perverted and this guy is a famous artist and this is for art and it’s not that weird if you think about because we were all born naked and it’s natural to be naked and hey, look at her,”I said in my head to the thousands waiting in line with their white pieces of paper.

A guy I knew from work, Mike SomethingIcantremember, walked by and I tapped his arm.

“I hope I don’t see you in there,” I said and we both laughed a nervous string of laughs.

I paced nervously behind the Rock Hall, hands deep in my pockets. Some fat guy stripped and walked around aimlessly, naked and smug.

Whispers and eye-rolling.

Laughs and scoffs.

And that was just from me.

At 5:30 helicopters hovered overhead and a bullhorn demanded attention from the southwestern corner.

I walked toward the front and Spencer Tunick’s assistant began with thank-yous to Cleveland, its port authority, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and to the people (me!) who had woken up so early to become pieces of art.

Hecklers called out and instantly became obnoxious, but directions were given from a short-haired Tunick who stood tall on a ladder.

Sunrise would be the start of it all.

A beautiful girl my age paced back in forth in front of me and spoke into a recorder.

Punks, hippies, and college students surrounded me and bounced in anticipation.

I handled my balls through my pockets – stretching my scrotum and trying to keep everything warm.

Oh reader, you’ll be fine.

I need to get this off my chest.

You know what I mean.

Sunrise.

We were told to disrobe and we did.

Naked.

We were all naked.

I was naked.

That beautiful girl with the recorder was naked.

That dude right there had nothing on.

Just like that woman. And him and her and her and I-can’t-tell-from-the-back.

And me.

Penises.

Vaginas.

Hair.

Breasts.

White butts.

Everywhere.

Leaving a couple of thousand piles of clothes behind like there had been an alien abduction with very strict rules, the entirely pink and brown crowd padded toward the pier.

The first photograph called for us to cover the pier all the way up to East 9th Street and to lie on our left sides, facing the city.

I passed people who must have gone through emergency surgeries.

I passed by men and women who held gallons of cottage cheese in their buttocks.

I never knew so many people had tattoos.

With the morning wind of the city chilling my butt crack, things officially got strange.

I realized that I wasn’t really naked anymore.

If we were all naked, then I wasn’t naked.

I felt like just another wild animal in a wild-animal pack.

Like I lived in the future where clothes were so 21st Century.

Like what it might have been like if George Orwell had added a few more chapters to “Animal Farm.”

Like if in this reality, the humans never broke that one fun fact that we’re the only species on the globe to wear clothes.

Did you know there are 1.5 million species on Earth?

This would surely take some time to get used to the idea, if we decide to just suddenly live like the rest of them. I bet after 16 to 20 months the nakedness would cease being the first topic of conversation.

“Yeah. Nice to meet you. So, uh, can you believe we’re all still doing this? Pretty crazy, right? Oooh. Bummer back hair. How’s your feet?”

My feet slapped the pavement.

Middle-aged women held hands.

So did young couples.

I walked alone.

But I was pretty fine with it.

I kept walking toward the city of Cleveland, all but certain that others were observing and making mental notes of my body for whatever story they would be writing two years later.

Finally I was told that I had gone far enough.

An early morning garbage truck driver stuck at a light noticed us all and he waved.

We waved back and shouted.

He honked.

The general public was nowhere to be seen as security had been tighter than that dude’s abs. I did see some lonely man take a few pictures from the sidewalk and he was immediately ushered away.

I turned around quickly, facing the lake and a sea of human chests and pubic hair, and then I turned around again to look up at the skyscrapers.

Surreal.

A young black man on my left cracked witty jokes that kept everyone around him laughing.

We were instructed to get on the ground and we did.

(The above is the free photo all volunteers received months later in the mail… I’m somewhere around that arrow tip.)

Five minutes later, thousands of naked men and women swarmed the park in search of their Adidas pants and shirts.

Walking as far as I did up that pier, I was one of the last of the pink bodies searching for the right pile of clothes.

Suddenly I was more naked than Jennifer Connelly on a movie set.

I felt my entire body blush.

Tunick congratulated the clothed us.

Then he instructed us to walk back to the pier where we would take single-sex photographs, and the women would go first.

And there I soon sat – cross-legged in my damp Adidas pants – watching a thousand or so women stand up and strip.

They paraded toward the dock, trying to maneuver through all those sitting men who had their necks pulled up.

Eyelids disappeared.

At first it was like a dream come true, but it soon felt terribly creepy as the women found themselves in an unmoving, naked conga line.

After the bottleneck of blonds and brunettes and grays finally disappeared, the women were positioned in the shadow of a steamship – facing the camera and lying on their right side.

This Lake Erie-like harem took ten minutes to photograph, and the men clapped when it was over and the ladies skittered back to their clothes.

As I waited for the women to get dressed and for the next set of directions, I set up a small base next to a light post and behind a pack of punks where one guy had tattoos all over his face, a ring connecting his nostrils, and implanted horns under the skin of his skull.

From where I stood over him, I studied the scars from such an idiotic decision.

How did this guy buy milk with those horns?

How did this guy ask for directions?

Before I could muse on what his mother thought the first time she saw the horns, I was told to get naked and to get in the grass.

We were herded like animals into a fresh pasture.

With Browns Stadium in the background, the men were told to roll up into a ball with our rears toward the camera.

Many, many jokes.

(Photo by Herb Ascherman/Thomas Mulready)

The women, clothed and laughing, stood rambunctiously behind the photographer. One flashed her tits, I remember. And I also remember being a little ho-hum about it given the circumstances.

We were then instructed to shift to the left and lie on our right sides where the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would be seen in the picture.

To our collective surprise, we were asked to lean our shoulders on the nearest man’s legs. Without much pause we complied. I rested my head on a hairy man’s legs and we laughed until Tunick said he wouldn’t take the picture until there were no smiles to be seen.

The last pose had every man lying flat on his back and closing his eyes.

The sun was totally out now, warming our bodies.

And it felt great.

I felt peaceful.

Minutes later I bee-lined for my lamp post.

And then that was that.

I grabbed a few Chipotle coupons for free burritos and checked out the $15 T-shirts for sale. I considered buying one, but my pockets only carried my car keys and underwear.

I drove home, stripped again, and snuck back into bed.

Hopefully the town of Brattleboro doesn’t give up entirely on its downtown nude thing.

Someplace has to have that.

If there’s one thing I learned from that day in June over two years ago, it’s that you can get horns implanted in your skull.

Wait.

No.

If there’s one thing I learned from that day in June over two years ago, it’s that you’re not really naked when everyone else is naked too. And there’s something to all of that, right? When there’s the consensus that it’s okay for everyone to do something out of the ordinary, then it becomes as ordinary and as ho-hum as a woman flashing her tits at a nudist shoot. Someplace definitely has to have that.*

*I don’t think this paragraph makes a point.

Yesterday I went to the opening of an exhibition at a small art gallery.

I love exhibitions. Especially when they’re small and quirky.

The invitation to the opening was nondescript and black, and gave no indication of what the art was going to be like, or even what medium it was going to presented in. All we could discern from such an oblique invite were the artists’ names, ksubi and Kane, and the title of the new collection.

The title of the show?

“Sunglasses For Dickheads.”

We thought we were prepared.

We weren’t.

Being unprepared leaves room for surprises.

I love surprises.

This is what we were confronted with when we walked in the door.

Rocking cocks.

And I don’t mean the rooster variety.

There were no chickens there last night.

Nup. No chickens at all.

This piece is entitled “Gary Nudeman.”

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call art.

I love art.

Did you know that in ancient Egyptian the word for ‘art’ was the same as the word for ‘penis’?

No? That’s because I made it up. But let’s just suspend all that rotten truth and belief stuff and pretend for a second that it’s a fact.

It’s more fun that way.

Would you like to meet Ziggy Hardthrust?

I thought so.

My friend Jostie suspects there might be a secondary penis hiding inside that rather elongated scrotum of Ziggy’s. None of us were in much of a hurry to find out.

I love scrotum’s.

I love art.

I thought the following photograph bore more than a passing resemblance to my friend Dean.

Dean disagreed. He thought this next one was a better likeness.

I love Dean.

HANG ON!!

Is that….? IT IS! It’s Lyall Shovett!!!

At this point I began to wonder if I was hanging out with The Muppet Show Band.

Or perhaps The Village People….

But instead it was Pu Tang.

I love the Pu Tang Clan.

After much ponderous discussion and close-up examination I decided my favorite photograph was the one styled for and named after Ms Siouxsie Bangshee.

Here it is.

Now THAT is a great big piece of ART.

Did I mention I love art?

How did that earring stay on? Or should I say “nutring”? Or “cockring”? Or what???

I love earrings and nutrings and cockrings and what.

After a beer and a glass of wine the obvious kind of boy shenanigans ensued.

I love boys.

Boys will be boys.

Apparently they can’t help it.

The little rockstars between their legs have something to do with it.

Sometimes the rockstars between their legs are bigger than others.

Then they’re called cockstars.

I love rockstars.

I love cockstars too.

Rockstars, cockstars and all things naughty and deranged make me happy.

Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make me happy.

Sometimes it takes a bit more.

Maybe it’s a technique thing.

Brush strokes, lighting… talent. You know.

Like I said…

I love art.

If you exhibit, I will come.