{"id":29348,"date":"2006-03-06T20:46:09","date_gmt":"2006-03-07T02:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=29348"},"modified":"2020-04-16T13:19:25","modified_gmt":"2020-04-16T19:19:25","slug":"random-thoughts-of-a-cross-disciplinarian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/random-thoughts-of-a-cross-disciplinarian\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thoughts of a Cross-Disciplinarian"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

\"semina\"<\/a>
\nI have a sense of being \u201ccitizen-victim\u201d of politiculture, recently enduring the politibabble of the Governor\u2019s \u201cState of the State\u201d address and the President\u2019s \u201cState of the Union\u201d address \u2013 both evocative of Orwell\u2019s \u201cdouble speak,\u201d the Cold War, the McCarthy witch-hunt for \u201cUnamericans,\u201d the Watergate break-in and break-down, and Clinton\u2019s struggle to define words like \u201cis\u201d and \u201csex\u201d. But perhaps life is even more complicated today by . Postmodern lacunae, shifters and technologies? I can\u2019t help but think some artists who feel disaffected might turn toward (neo-)dada\/(neo-)surrealist methods to explore \u2018the absurd\u2019 for its expressive potential, if not for consolation.<\/p>\n

And then, Shawn Rossiter reminded me of Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle<\/a><\/i>, on view through March 15th at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (Utah State University, Logan). This is a refreshing exhibition for its reintroduction of pivotal figures in American cultural production as counter-production. The Beat Generation of the 1950s, predominantly West Coast rebels in poetry and visual art, were precursors to the 1960s Hippies. Of the Beats, Wallace Berman held particular distinction (despite less publicity than poet Ginsberg or novelist Kerouac<\/i>) because of his freely distributed, free-form, privately published journal titled Semina<\/i>.\u00a0 Each issue, printed in small number, was consumed and passed around from friend to friend. Like zines of today, Semina appealed to a specific circle, a loosely defined aesthetic. It is hard to imagine that just nine issues of Semina<\/i>, published between 1955 and 1964, should be considered influential \u2013 but each issue included contributions from artists in the-then \u201canti-establishment\u201d who are now considered \u201cestablishment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fresh from celebrating my one-year anniversary working in Salt Lake City, the contrasts between Beatniks and Utah artists are striking. My linear (il)logic spun out of control. The discourse about \u201cestablishment versus anti-establishment\u201d has been a turbulent undercurrent in my exploring SLC\u2019s art (demi)monde. An anti-anything requires a pro-something. Naturally, the process of categorization is facile, but useless unless the categories are defined and agreed upon. In 1663, Charles Le Brun was appointed Director of the French Academy by King Louis XIV, with authority to devise and impose standards of representation, subject matter, style. This imposition of standards implies that artists scattered throughout the land were doing much as they pleased; yet Le Brun\u2019s duty was to impose compliance with the Academy\u2019s standards. So is \u201cestablishment\u201d a response to anarchy, renamed \u201canti-establishment\u201d after \u201cestablishment\u201d is, uhm, established?<\/p>\n

Truthfully, these were, remain, and will forever be co-existent (and complementary) phenomena. There were tensions between Leonardo\u2019s scientific naturalism and Michelangelo\u2019s superhero musculature of the early 16th century, William Adolphe Bouguerreau\u2019s Romanticism and Edouard Manet\u2019s jarring realism of the mid-18th century, Auguste Rodin\u2019s late 19th century realism and Marcel Duchamp\u2019s early 20th century conceptualism, Thomas Hart Benton\u2019s 1930s Regionalism and Jackson Pollock\u2019s late-1940s abstract expressionism. Today, can one identify tension between, say, Kenny Scharf\u2019s \u2018Pop sensibility\u2019 and Damien Hirst\u2019s graphic materiality? Closer to home, Salt Lake and Utah are home to numerous art venues, each with a \u201clook,\u201d responsive to each other, none more \u201cright.\u201d (Though some may hold strong opinions about what constitutes \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad\u201d art.<\/i>)<\/p>\n

Remember: The history of art is a product of Modern university scholarship emphasizing the cyclical process of the \u201cestablishment\u201d of the \u201canti-establishment.\u201d But these are not exclusive and pure endeavors. Those who are \u201cestablished\u201d integrate new ideas and technologies. Those who are \u201canti-establishment\u201d are collected, win awards and commissions, and become \u201cestablished.\u201d This evolution is not new, is not unexpected, and must be nourished.<\/p>\n

A fine example of this evolution from anti- to anti-anti (as a double negative ought to be positive?<\/i>) is Dada. The artists who, in 1915, founded Dada \u2013 first in Zurich, then in Berlin, Paris, New York \u2013 were of varied artistic disciplines, mostly visual artists and writers. They reacted to World War I with irony, cynicism, and anarchical nihilism. The human civilization experiment ran out of control. The illogical and the absurd, combined with the role of chance in artistic creation, were exaggerated.<\/p>\n

Their \u201cperformances\u201d at the Caf\u00e9 Voltaire would have poetic recitations obscured by loud music, dancing obscured behind painted curtains, music played without musical instruments, and other farcical acts. This was a mirror of (self-)judgment, intended to inspire an analytical examination of one\u2019s self, one\u2019s actions, one\u2019s production. But imagine their dismay when some \u2013 the longer-lived of the Dada collaborators \u2013 realized they had evolved from [1] artists revolted by and revolting against the disjunction between the artifice of civility and the underlying human instinct for irrationality (esp. the chaos of the First World War<\/i>) to become [2] celebrated cultural icons who had, unwittingly, produced much sought after collectible commodities!<\/p>\n

With hindsight, we understand the revolutionary becomes mundane once a new revolutionary banner is raised high. [This is yet another way to say the \u201canti-establishment\u201d wolf often becomes the \u201cestablishment\u201d sheep.<\/i>]<\/p>\n

The current banner is the Postmodern (or Post-Pop?<\/i>). I won\u2019t bother trying to define it; as I wrote above: \u201cthe process of categorization is facile, but useless unless the categories are defined and agreed upon.\u201d But I can point to three contributing factors that have shaped our Postmodern sensibility , whether we are conscious participants, subconscious victims, or flat-out unconscious. The three factors: lacunae, shifters and technologies. These are, in order, the gaps existing in our discourse, the words that have no fixed meaning that are (ab)used in our discourse, and the skills (and tools) with which we engage in discourse.<\/p>\n

With that, I return to Semina Culture<\/i>, a thought-provoking and timely exhibition at the NEH Museum of Art at Utah State University. Wallace Berman and his circle seized opportunity before the establishment invited them. They were honest and open, leaving little to the imagination \u2013 as you\u2019ll see in the explicit commentary, nakedness (or nudity?), and sexual reference. No lacunae (gaps) in their discourse. Their words were definite and precise, igniting passion, gouging into raw flesh. No shifters in their discourse. Their technologies were critical eyes, drawing, writing\/typing, photographs, and Berman\u2019s small hand press. No fanciful technologies, as this predated the refinement of binary mathematics into the multiplicity of the Internet Age.<\/p>\n

The Beat Generation did what they did, made what they made, with and without complaint. But they knew to whom and about what to complain, all the while cognizant of the value of rejection. At least s\/he of the \u201canti-establishment\u201d who is rejected has attracted the attention of and received (or obligated) response from the \u201cestablishment.\u201d (Better bad press than no press?<\/i>) Is it better to be shooed away like a fly buzzing around a reader\u2019s head than squashed under the weight of the reader\u2019s tome? A rite of passage? A necessary step of the anti-establishment toward becoming establishment? Perhaps the pains of evolutionary \u201cbecoming\u201d are more symptomatic of real life than the comfortable ideal of static \u201cbeing\u201d?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve read this far, you\u2019re likely wondering what\u2019s the point of this stream of commentary in constant flux? This is an invitation for contact by like-minded individuals prepared for action in an open forum for [1] discussion (practical, theoretical, socio-political, etc.) and [2] artful activities (spoken word, performance, musical improvisation, automatist drawing, group collage, etc.<\/i>) to engender a collaborative spirit in Salt Lake and Utah. Emailing jayh@slartcenter.org<\/a> is the best technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a sense of being \u201ccitizen-victim\u201d of politiculture, recently enduring the politibabble of the Governor\u2019s \u201cState of the State\u201d address and the President\u2019s \u201cState of the Union\u201d address \u2013 both evocative of Orwell\u2019s \u201cdouble speak,\u201d the Cold War, the McCarthy witch-hunt for \u201cUnamericans,\u201d the Watergate break-in and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1551,"featured_media":29344,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[1001],"class_list":["post-29348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual_arts","tag-by-jay-heuman"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/semina.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 17:08:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1551"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29348"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53761,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29348\/revisions\/53761"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}