America is hopelessly divided.
Rendered in half.
Torn asunder.
So they say.
It’s certainly the conventional wisdom, and something I’ve mused about at length here in the blog as well.
Given that old cliché, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” it would lead one to assume the notion is true.
The US is split in two quasi-equal factions, and given they hate each other, as a nation, we’re essentially screwed.
Game over.
Let’s all go home.
That argument, that we’re broken into liberal and conservative camps, or Red and Blue states, or urban and rural enclaves, and it’s a bad thing, is so universal as to be unquestioned.
It’s so universal, in fact, that it was espoused by the very person typing these words.
(Do you sense a BUT coming?)
But…what if everyone is wrong? Even earlier versions of me?
I’ve been wondering lately, as for some reason, I’ve pushed words like split and divided from my brain, (not consciously,) and they’ve been replaced by another, very different word, that means more-or-less the same thing:
Balanced.
What if America is balanced between roughly-equally-sized blocks of people with naturally conservative and naturally liberal tendencies; citizens providing the warp and weft that has woven the nation together for the last 243 years?
What if?
What if it’s not so bad that some people don’t see eye-to-eye, or choose to live separate from one another?
What if we need each other, and that innate tension has kept us tougher these centuries, including after a Civil War that nearly created two separate countries?
Maybe, given our history, (of one half conquering the other,) and the fact that we (more-or-less) sewed it back together, plus the natural differences of country and city life, just maybe, this is our secret sauce as a nation?
Isn’t it a crazy thought?
The fact that Republicans and Democrats, (or Liberals and Conservatives,) continue to hand off the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court to one another, over phases of time, could make us better, as one side checks the other’s wildest instincts over time?
It’s a lot to swallow, given I’ve been such a vocal critic of President Trump. (And was no fan of George W. either, as you well know.)
I feel like most of us assume our side is right, and if we could only grab control of all three levers of power, at once, and have them for a decade or so, we’d fix America for good.
Red AND Blue think that.
But what if we need each other, and have essentially found ourselves endlessly distracted by infighting these last ten years?
What if the internet and social media have allowed powerful entities to chop us up into individual “profiles,” and rig the game to the point that we don’t even know we’re being played anymore?
No, the blogger is not turning Luddite on you, and I’m not saying it’s the robots fault either. (If anyone’s got a raw deal, it’s slave-robots.)
I benefit from the internet more than most.
However, “30 Rock” just came to Amazon, and I’ve been re-watching it, along with my 12 year old, who wasn’t born yet when it first debuted.
The take on race, class, the media, America, sexism, all of it, even the fashion, seemed current.
It was weird, as I’ve seen other TV from NYC, not much earlier, that is very dated. (Hint: “Sex and the City.”)
As much as I admire Tina Fey and her staff, as they barely put a foot wrong, it made me wonder if we’ve been spinning our wheels for most of the time I’ve been doing this job?
(I began here in 2010, for goodness sake.)
And I know that my work has value, commenting regularly on our culture, but what if the culture has been stuck?
What if I’m commenting on a repetitive loop?
What if Trump is the natural evolution, the natural conclusion of a process of getting ALL our attention, of monetizing that attention, as well as our identities.
We’ve given companies like Facebook every piece of information about ourselves that we possibly can.
Whether Facebook gave us Trump, or Trump gave us Facebook, maybe we got suckered into a 10 year void, where we kept pushing the button, and they kept giving us the snack?
(Whatever type of content you want, whenever you want, 24-7, and very likely free.)
If we were lab rats, and they wanted to devise as system to keep us endlessly distracted and squabbling, maybe it would look a lot like the world we’re living in?
To be clear, I’m not suggesting upending the system, nor have I been binge-watching Bernie Sanders campaign videos.
Rather, after a nice walk, and a short meditation, I took a long look at my book shelves, and noticed “Pure Beauty,” by John Baldessari, published in conjunction with a show at the Met in 2010.
Not that any of you would likely remember, (even my wife, or my Dad,) but I wrote about that show here, back then, very early in my APE career.
I’d seen the exhibit, the first time Rob asked me to go to NYC to cover the PDN Expo, and it had floored me.
Rocked my head.
Shook me sideways.
Punched me silly.
(You get the point.)
I liked it so much that I bought the monograph, which I don’t believe I’ve done before or since. (While working.)
I liked it so much that I left my notebook at the cash register, and only by the grace of the writing gods did I remember while I was only a few galleries away, in time to get it back with no hassles.
The exhibition was so good that it reframed the way I understood art, and my own art in particular.
Coming from UNM, which was a conceptual program, I learned from Tom Barrow and Patrick Nagatani. (Who got his MFA at UCLA.)
I was encouraged to think about working with ideas, and using processes which could themselves be symbols. It stuck with me, that way of thinking, and led me to study conceptual art in grad school, along with photography.
I could talk about Warhol, sure, and Marcel Duchamp, but mostly I think I made work that way because it had been implanted in my early-artist-operating-system.
All of a sudden, in that John Baldessari show, it was as if I were seeing every good idea that I had ever had, or was likely to have, on display on the walls before me.
Already done!
It was all there, the playfulness, the experimentation, the use of processes to engender artistic outcomes. The humor, the use of color, and the radical lengths to which the artist would challenge convention.
Like I once wrote about the Mike Kelley show at the Stedelijk Museum, (the time I owned my lack of genius, and was liberated,) the Baldessari show opened my mind the fact that if it came into my head, if I wanted to do it, if it was where my art took me, I should go.
And if, in the end, even with all the love and joy I had, I still felt like life was a bit absurd, well, that was OK too.
He threw red balls in the air to make a straight line, set against the blue sky, and documented it.
He made up games where you point to a carrot or a green bean?
Took selfies waving goodbye to strangers on boats.
Or wearing hats to block his face.
He made photographs out of secret handshakes!
He sang songs of Sol LeWitt art instructions.
Or took pictures of letters he built in the natural environment that spelled out the word “California.”
Everywhere we see games and systems.
Lots of play.
There were mini-movies, told in stills, and color blocks made from car doors.
This guy, John Baldessari, was a machine, just rapid-fire making amazing things, turning humor into pathos, and both balanced life experiences into something deeper.
Something that felt like the whole of life itself.
Looking back, nearly 10 years later, wondering if the last decade was a glitch in the system, I realize how much I learned that day, and how much his work had influenced me until that point. (And since.)
There are paintings, (for which he is rightfully renowned,) in which the artist painted instructions, in words, for how to sell lots of paintings. Or critiqued the process of painting, in words, inside his own paintings.
Everyday citizens have all heard of Warhol, and Picasso, but JB might have been just as influential.
Sadly, John Baldessari passed away in late #2019. (Another data point that year was a bitch and a half.) While we’re all less-well-off without him, and I’m sad I never got to shake his hand, (pre-coronavirus days, obv,) books like this one carry on his legacy.
Highly, highly recommended.
Bottom Line: Monograph from a 20th/21st Century master, #RIP
To purchase “Pure Beauty” click here
If you’d like to submit a book for potential review, please email me directly at jonathanblaustein@gmail.com. We are interested in presenting books from as wide a range of perspectives as possible.