Tearing a Page from the Book of Ultra-Running History - The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats its Young

by Drew Martin

What do these books have in common?...The Valley of Death, Almost Home, The Body in the Woods, Fool, The End, A Week in the Woods, Damned, The Idiot, and Human Zoo.
Nothing stylistically but their titles are part of the quirky spirit of one of the most off-the-beaten-paths ultra-running races, the Barkley Marathons, which has no website, no publicly available information, requires an entrance exam, plus a $1.60 entrance fee (such events can exceed $500).

First-time runners are required to sacrifice a license plate of where they are from (the collection even includes one from Antarctica), and all runners must bring whatever the race-organizer, Lazarus Lake, needs that year. One year it was white-T-shirts, another year socks, and another year flannel shirts.

There is a race day chosen in the spring but there is no official start time; could be early morning or late at night, so the runners are delighted when they hear Lake blow a conch shell because it means they have one hour to start, which officially begins with his lighting a cigarette (he smokes a lot).

Barkley Marathons is named after an old farmer friend of Lake and it was dreamed up after the 1977 jailbreak of James Earl Ray (Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin) and other inmates from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee. It was said that one might be able to escape the prison but that you could never escape the woods.

Ray was captured within eight miles of the facility. At the time Lake and his other trail-running friends – some of the first of to inspire the current movement, found that distance laughable and said they could get at least 100 miles out. The course has grown to 130-ish miles with a time cap of 60 hours, which is covered with five loops that are one-third trail running, and two-thirds trail-blazing.

The loops are run twice clockwise, twice counterclockwise, and if there are more than one person who make it to the final fifth loop, they are split up to compete in opposite directions. “If” because in the 25 years prior to the documentary only 10 people had finished it. For this reason it is considered the hardest ultramarathons in the world.

Despite the hundreds of applicants who somehow hear about the race and actually apply, only 40 are accepted. Even though people would pay hundreds of dollars to have the chance to compete, the $1.60 entrance never changes to ensure a cast of characters, which seemed to include a number of male graduate students of the sciences – possibly because while long-distance running is a real thinking sport, ultra-running requires a certain level of analytics to endure the physical and mental challenges.

GPS devices are not allowed so the runners have to find their way with printed maps and compasses. In order to check that the runners are roughly sticking to the course, 11 books are distributed as checkpoints. The competitors are given race numbers for each lap and must tear the page from the book that corresponds to their number. At the end of each lap the pages are counted while the runners recharge with food and drink, and tend to their wounds: cracked feet, blistered heels, brier-thrashed calves, and other aches and pains. Returning to the camp is also where many runners give up, which is followed by the playing of taps, as if they died. It is better to give up at the camp because giving up halfway out might require a ten-hour walk just to get back.

While the odds of completing the entire race are against the majority of the runners (some years nobody finishes) many come for the “fun run” a term typically tagged to the kids’ mile run, often held at local 5K events, but here translates as three-loops, about three marathons through the various areas named for their grueling features including Pillars of Doom, Checkmate Hill, Son of a Bitch Ditch, and Testicle Spectacle.

The humor of these names (like the titles of the books that change each year to taunt the runner in some way) is introduced from the start of the documentary. In an early scene, the off-camera interviewer sees the fuel gauge on E and asks Lake, who is driving the old truck, about their fuel status. He explains:

"E" means excellent and "F" means you are fucked.

Truth Be Known

by Drew Martin
I just watched, in flight, Spotlight, which was recently awarded Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It recreates the journalistic efforts by Spotlight - the Boston Globe’s small but diligent investigative team, which uncovered a massive scandal of child molestation and the cover-up by the Catholic church despite a city-wide hesitation to tell/know the whole story, including the tight-lipped lawyers who defended the church, reluctant victims, and even the Boston Globe itself. What started with the knowledge of one sexually abusive priest grew to 13, then 87 during the investigation.

In 2002, the Spotlight team published nearly 600 stories about the scandal and set up a hotline to receive calls from other victims, who are estimated to be upward of 1,000 people. Eventually, 249 priests and brothers were publicly accused of sexual abuse within the Boston Archdiocese. These stats are listed in the credits, along with 102 archdioceses around the United States and 101 around the world where scandals of other major sexual abuse of minors were uncovered. The cast is an ensemble of decent actors who pulled together nicely to make an excellent film that harnesses the energy of the pursuit of a news story and the multitude of obstacles that must be overcome. More importantly, it reaffirms that the need for good journalism and truthful writing is crucial for a transparent and democratic society.

A couple days ago I watched Je Suis Charlie, a documentary about the 2015 storming of the Charlie Hedbro headquarters in Paris by fundamentalists who massacred 11 staff in retaliation to the paper’s publishing of numerous cartoons that poked fun (often vulgarly) at the prophet Mohammed. After the attack I wrote a post that tried to balance freedom of speech with good editorial review, basically saying that the cartoons had crossed a line into hate speech. This documentary makes me think a little differently now, less prudent about that point. It is made up almost entirely of intimate interviews with the slain cartoonists’ coworkers, who were often, typically, their closest friends. 

The attack at Charlie Hedbo led to a world-wide rally Je Suis Charlie, to honor the lives of the cartoonists and confirm the need for freedom of speech. Despite the outpouring of support, and an unheard of spikes in publication sales, the newspaper is protected by armed guards. The question is then raised, how free is the freedom of speech now that it must be guarded by men with automatic rifles. The greatest concern expressed is that perhaps the young journalists will not take on more difficult topics because they do not want to stir the pot too much.

And finally, the third  production I want to mention in this same breath of journalism is the documentary about one of the greatest American street photographers, Vivian Maier, who took more than 150,000 photos, developed very few of them, showed hardly any to anyone, and died in obscurity after working as a nanny her whole life. Finding Vivian Maier is documentary by John Maloof about this intriguing person. Kudos to Maloof for his obsessive multi-media investigation into her photography and life, which discovered her talent, and pieced together a rich and complicated person from boxes of letters, receipts, personal belongings, and interviews with the families that employed her.

Cata Cata Cata Caterpillar You Glow Inside My Head

by Drew Martin

The shows at the Kate Werble Gallery are starting to feel like manifestations of my recent conversations. First, there was LIVESTRONG by Christopher Chiappa with 7,000 egg sculptures, which I stumbled upon less than an hour after a conversation with a coworker about bioengineering down the size of egg yolks. And now this: Sugar Computer/Electrocate, by Brock Enright with a motif of caterpillars, which I visited the day after another coworker had me look at hundreds of caterpillars on her screen (poem research).

The exquisite variety of caterpillars only make up a fraction of the Enright's work but they share the quirky assemblage of the free-box materials used throughout. There is nothing deep or insightful in this show but it is a nice detour from reality - not in a fantastical surreal way but rather more like a hipster Dada pause: dry wit, and a little snarky. The deliberate placement is short of categorical, which saves it from being too academic, but arranged in such a playful way that it raises it a notch above being scrappy. One artist that some of the work (hairy things in clear plastic balls) reminded me of is Montecito-based Joan Tanner, but with a little less maturity. None-the-less it is a delightfully peculiar entrapment with lots of little systems of imagination and creative juxtaposition.

There are two raked poppy seed Zen gardens, one in each room of the gallery, but their scale left me wanting more, as if I could feel that the artist envisioned them at a larger size but made a compromise. It is hard to compete with what has already been done for "bulk material" projects, such as Ai Wei Wei's one billion handmade porcelain sunfower seeds at the Tate Modern in London, Ann Hamilton's 750,000 honey-bound pennies at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco, Walter De Maria's 140 tons of dirt in Dia's Earth Room in Manhattan, or similar type wall-to-wall installations by a multitude of artists such as Brooklyn-based Tara Donovan. I could not scale the poppy seed plots up in my mind to match the famous rock gardens of Kyoto which I have seen in person (and Enright is referencing) because they actually make me think more about the miniature sand versions people have on their desks at work. It is another curious move by the gallery to relate to Japanese art that borders on cultural appropriation. The last show, Duplify, had a reinterpreted, multi-media tokonoma. That being said, the poppy seeds are a beautiful material to use. I have not seen them in art but they bring back good memories of my favorite pastries from my days in "Eastern Europe." They also have the feeling of volcanic cinder, and I guess I could even entertain their opiate effect and look at the work as the musings of a doped-up artist.

The only pieces that actually took me past their object status and sent me on a tangent were variations of coiled garden hoses, Green Sex, and Breathe in breathe out, which are accented with numerous colorfully beaded pins, like micro-banderillas (the barbed sticks used by banderilleros in bullfights to enrage and at the same time weaken the bull prior to the matador's entrance). They remind me of the cover for A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, the semi-fictional novel about a recovering junkie in rehab, which caused outrage with Oprah and many other people who felt duped because they had expressed great sympathy for Frey since he had the published the book as a memoir but it was later revealed as a sensationalized revision of what he actually experienced. My thought on this was that "Am I lying or telling the truth?" transgression doesn't really matter in the art world any more because we no longer look to artists with great expectations since what they produce is less and less about cultural enhancement and more and more about amusing themselves and visual entertainment.

Any kind of ready-made automatically calls to mind Marcel Duchamp (urinal, snow shovels, etc) but the multiple piercings of these objects render them functionless as water-carrying hoses and made me think about Chris Burden, the early-on struggling artist Chris Burden, who would make sure he could return his materials after the show. In one lecture he gave that I sat in on in the early 1990s he explained that he took all the money he got for an installation and bought a diamond, which he suspended by a thread and singularly lit in a dark room. After the show he sold it. Even though Home Depot has the best return policy in the world I don't think they would give Enright his money back for these hoses...maybe instore credit.

Kate mentioned that she likes how the hoses remind her of "infinity loops" but I would not go there; they are not that profound.

Numero Zero

by Drew Martin

I recently finished reading the last, thinnest, worst-reviewed book of the late, great Umberto Eco, Numero Zero (set in Milan, 1992), and yet it was my first time completing a work by him. My plan was to just absorb it all without a need for a blog post, so I did a normal read (without copious notes) and promptly returned it to the library. But then I started reading reviews of it and everyone, across the board, politely excused it as a lesser work or flat-out trashed it, especially the readers who had been enthralled by his previous works such as The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Prague Cemetery. I felt compelled to defend what I liked most about it even though I too wish it could have been something more, so I checked the book out again and captured here why it is still a worthwhile read.

Let me be clear, the second half of it was a bit numbing for me because it is all about Mussolini's final days and a conspiracy theory that his body-double was murdered/brutally beaten while he was snuck away to Argentina or (perhaps) the Vatican. The first half of the book is great and even gave me enough momentum to roll through the Mussolini stretches. 

I like the double meaning of the title, which refers to the 0/1 - 0/12 dummy issues of the experimental newspaper, the Domani (Tomorrow in Italian, and a dig at "evening" news) that the unseen publisher, Commendator Vimercate, wishes to use as a kind of blackmail in order to have access to "the inner sanctum" of the financial and political elite. Numero Zero is also not numero uno, which points out the below-average talent of the skeleton crew gathered together by the editor in chief, Simei, to create the 12 issues over the course of a year. They are second-rate journalists: a crossword puzzle creator, gossip columnist, other dirt diggers, and the main character, Dottor Colonna, a 50 year-old who has waddled in provincial papers. There is even a staff member who Simei is certain is a spy but does not let on because he values the man’s deeper resources from the secret services.

Vimercate is the benefactor of this journalistic experiment and owner of multiple properties including homes for pensioners and the infirm. His other shady dealings include TV channels strewn with home shopping infomercials and risqué shows, and more than 20 low-brow publications with titles such as Peeping Tom and Crime Illustrated.

Simei is so sure of Domani’s ultimate failure that he has hired Colonna to ghostwrite Domani: Yesterday: the memoirs of a journalist, which is "the story of a year’s work setting up a newspaper that will never be published.” Colonna is tasked to write how Simei labored away for a year to create a model of journalism and failed because it was impossible to have a free voice, and to show that Simei is a journalist of highest integrity. Simei believes his book will secure his financial future through royalties. He decides to not let the other staff know about the book so Colonna is positioned as the assistant editor.

When Colonna asks Simei why doesn’t he write the book himself since he has a journalistic bent (he ran a sports weeky, and a men’s monthly “for men alone, or lonely men, whichever you prefer”), Simei responds: 

Running a newspaper doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to write.

Despite the hack journalists, and doomed future of the paper, Simei has a mission and gives the staff a true purpose to report, in the words of the New York Times slogan: all the news that’s fit to print….and maybe a little more. He explains that newspapers are always telling you what you already know, which is why sales keep falling. “We’ll be talking about what might happen tomorrow.”

Most of the reviews I read about Numero Zero got it wrong about the paper’s slant. It is not that the staff are simply writing about the news that already happened but rather they are instructed to write in a style of inquiry, knowing what they know, that embraces the potential of the evolution of news, and to try to capture that in a predictive manner.

Because of limited staff each dummy issue can carry whatever date we fancy, and it can perfectly well demonstrate how the newspaper would have treated it months earlier when, let’s say, the bomb had gone off. In that case, we already know what will fall, but we’ll be talking as though the reader doesn’t know yet know. So all of our news leaks will take on the flavor of something fresh, surprising, dare I say oracular. In other words, we have to say to our owner: this is how Domani would have been had it appeared yesterday.

…let it be understood that the newspaper is collecting other evidence, and say it in such a way as to put the fear of God into those who will be reading our issue number 0/1 knowing full well what has transpired since [February].

Numero Zero, would serve well as a humorous Journalism 101 read, and it captures the creative interactivity of a newsroom, such as this prompt by Simei.

So, Colonna, please demonstrate to our friends how it is possible to respect, or appear to respect, one fundamental principle of democratic journalism, which is separating fact from opinion.

Take the major British or American newspapers. If they report, say, a fire or a car accident, then obviously they can’t indulge in saying what they think. And so they introduce into the piece, in quotation marks, the statements of a witness, a man in the street, someone who represents public opinion. Those statements, once put in quotes, become facts – in other words, it’s a fact that that person expressed that opinion. But it might be assumed that the journalist has only quoted someone who thinks like him. So there will be two conflicting statements to show, as a fact, that there are varying opinions on a particular issue, and the newspaper is taking account of this irrefutable fact. The trick lies in quoting first a trivial opinion and then another opinion that is more respectable, and more closely reflects the journalist’s view. In this way, readers are under the impression that they are being informed about two facts, but they’re persuaded to accept just one view as being more convincing. Let’s give an example: a bridge has collapsed, a truck has fallen over the edge, and the driver has been killed. The article, after carefully reporting the facts, will say: We interviewed Signor Rossi, age forty-two, proprietor of a newsstand on the street corner. ‘What do you expect? That’s fate,‘ he says. ‘I’m sorry for the poor driver, but it’s the way things go.’ Immediately after, there’s Signor Bianchi, age thirty-four, a builder working on a nearby construction site, who’ll say. ‘The local authority’s to blame, this bridge has had problems, they’ve know about it for some time.’ Who is the reader going to identify with? With the one who’s being critical, who’s pointing the finger of blame.

Later in the book Colonna reports, “I read the first drafts of the articles, tried to give them a uniformity of style and to discourage overly elaborate expressions. Simei approved: “We’re doing journalism here, not literature.”

For other page fillers, they are inspired to create horoscopes with optimistic predictions "lasting happiness will suit everybody" and crosswords with hints such as “husband of Eve” or “the ruler of Germany during WWII”. And the staff is egged on along the way with tidbits of journalistic comments and advice:

Readers thinks that people generally are lousy workers, which is why we need examples of professionalism – it’s a more technical way of saying that everything’s gone well.

And above all, apologize….You musn’t say the Church has revised its original position on the rotation of the Earth but rather that the pope apologizes to Galileo.

And ultimately,

Newspapers teach people how to think.

Triptych

by Drew Martin

The other night I had an adventure. It was an evening of trying to get home from an event in Manhattan that ended in a swanky bar, and it involved a cast of characters: a group of Weill Cornell medical students on the panoramic 65th floor of 30 Rock questioning me about my prostate, a young Palestinian man who I met in the bowels of Port Authority after midnight and was studying something like liberation theology, Nora - a young waitress with whom I rode the last bus out of New York (1:30 AM) who told me about her Mayan ancestry and the Mayan words mixed with the Spanish they speak in the Yucatán, and Darren - a super nice bus driver, who told me that I looked like I lost my best friend when Nora got off the bus. Darren said he used to have a pest control business and would fumigate apartments in Brooklyn including the actor John Turturro's place. I thought about those famous people who avoid paparazzi but do not think much about people like Darren snooping around because they do not actually think of them as people. Darren drove me to my town, where we finally arrived at 2:30 in the morning. The last twenty minutes we were the only ones on the bus - driving through dark, wooded suburbia. We could not place the accent of the middle-aged cleaning lady passengers on their way home from their night shifts. One of them, a strong-bodied bleach-blonde, was the last of them to get off. When I offered that perhaps she was from from Albania, or somewhere in that region, Daren coolly replied, "I do not know where she is from, but I do know this: she has got a nice body." Typically I do not like when other men "go there" about women, but Darren said it with a special kind of admiration, and most men would not have looked twice at this woman. He told me a story about the night prior - a young man fell asleep and missed his stop, one of the first on the route, and did not wake up until the last stop, my stop. Darren did not want to let him off because it is a conservative town and the young man was "goth" so Darren took him on the bus to another town where he would have less of a problem and let him off at an all-night diner so that he would have a place to stay until the buses started running again. When I was getting off Darren reached to shake my hand and said, "Andrew, I hope to see you again." I warmly shook his hand and said, "Yes, but not on this bus." The evening had undertones of failure, starting with my not being able to get home to my family at a respectable hour (which I felt led to a chain of other events) - Nora and two of the medical students had been ballet dancers, and fell short of their dreams. Nora was divorced and one of the medical students told me in shock of how her hedge-fund boyfriend of three years had just kicked her out once she started talking to him about having kids. And that led to my remembering a line from a recent show I had seen in which the character says, "Your kids will always disappoint you." I thought about this long and hard as a father of three and as a son myself, and the affects of the successes of one on the other. I carried the idea over to the art world and the first work that came to mind was Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters from 1885. Though it has glimmers of hope, it is a painting about disappointment. And then, for some reason, perhaps because I looked at Giorgio de Chirico's The Melancholy of Departure from 1914 the other day, I had a dream about explosives being transported in bananas.

Vigée Le Brun: Courtesans and Countesses and Princesses! Oh My!

by Drew Martin
I often think about how the gender and personality of the photographer affects the expression of the person being photographed. I see it in the portraits I have taken over the years: the people in those pictures are looking at me with a certain look, which is usually a disarmed friendliness. But until today I never thought too much about the subject of paintings partly because I figured it was just a generalized expression since the process of sitting for a portrait could take a long time. I also assumed that most of the beauties in those portraits were glowing with fantasized returns of a male gaze. I do not recall coming across many female painters prior to the 20th century. So when I walked through the Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun show with my parents and daughter today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I was rather surprised by the sweetly intimate expressions of the ladies in the portraits from the turn of the 19th century.

Pictured here, clockwise from top left, details of the portraits of Princess Antoní Henryk Radziwiłł 1802, Countess Ekaterina Vasilievna Skavronskaya 1796, actress/courtesan Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland 1791, and mistress Isabella Teotochi Marini 1792.

The revealing portrait of Isabella (lower left) was painted by Vigée Le Brun as a gift to her friend, a diplomat and member of the Académie royale where she had studied.

"She painted the work in service of a relationship she knew to be a secret, creating a portrait that would fan the ardor of its owner."

Putting Art into Perspective

by Drew Martin
Since the Museum of Peripheral Art is kind of a free-for-all arts and media web-log in the greatest sense, and I have decided to spend more of my time focusing on a specific project, I have launched a new entity to handle this thesis: the Institute of Theoretical Art (http://instituteoftheoreticalart.blogspot.com) Here is a repost of its first article: Putting Art into Perspective. 

by Andrew Martin

Mathematics is an abstract language created by humans, which interprets universal patterns. It started in the physical/visual world as a way to quantify things: land, livestock, building materials, etc. Through its abstraction and withdrawal from specific computations it evolved to stand on its own as mathematics for mathematics' sake.

I recently watched the four-part BBC documentary, The Story of Maths, presented by Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy, who does a great job of crunching the history of math into four hours, while taking the viewer around the world.

I tuned into the series more as visual thinker than as a mathematician. It is easy enough to see how a quantity (of whatever) can be represented with symbols. Sautoy offers that even 0 as a symbol for nothing, a concept that eluded the early mathematicians including the Greeks and Chinese, may have come from the circular divet that was left in the earth when a counting stone was removed from its place.

What I found most interesting is that while some mathematics can be visualized, most situations are formalized through a formula. That is, except for perspective, whose solution was in the command of vanishing points. Of course there are numbers behind that system but it was a case of mathematics whose problem arose through two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world, but was solved through a purely mechanical act by artists.

Basic geometry is a very visual kind of math but the question is, which came first the shape or the possibility of the shape? With a set of numbers/coordinates I can generate a shape but I can also create a shape that calls into play a set of numbers. Are the geometric forms we observe and (re)create merely byproducts of these "numbers" or do the shapes create a case for the numbers? Or is it that they are one in the same - the same information that can be represented visually or numerically?

[image source: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Perspective.html]

That being said, the geometry of a cube is very different than the geometry behind the workings of perspective because in a cube the lines of opposing sides are parallel but through perspective they are angled to one, two, or three vanishing points. What this means though is that I can never observe a true cube because I will always be influenced by a perceived perspective.

A working perspective was not developed until the early Renaissance and was hailed as a truth. Ironically, within a few hundred years it became reputed as a lie. It seems, however, that the trickery is in our skewed observation: our stereoscopic eyes and visually comprehensive minds create an illusion that is as false in reality as it is on a wall or a canvas.

In terms of art history it is interesting to note that the use of perspective was often not used merely to recreate an environment so much as it was a way to create a more believable world to tell a story, especially one that no one was still around to refute. Pictured above is Raphael's School of Athens, completed in 1511 to depict a hypothetical mashup of ancient philosophers.

I find that the most interesting use of perspective was by the surrealists, who did not abandon it during Cubism, Abstract and other movements, because it gave them the power to create a space for their strange worlds, as we see 420 years later with Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory.

 

The Tortoise and the Stare

by Drew Martin

Our experience of art is based on what the work shows us combined with the personal experience we bring to it. So when I entered the back room of the Kate Werble Gallery group show Duplify yesterday and saw a couple turtle shells split down their center with a piece of stainless steel, the formal presentation and comment on symmetry (and an “old” organic form/nature ready-made vs. the “new” shiny prefabricated material) was dominated by my remembrance of a recent article someone had sent me. It was about super-realistic 3D-printed decoy tortoise shells that are being sprayed with an off-putting substance, and scattered around the southwestern deserts in order to condition ravens (the main desert tortoise predator) to not eat them into extinction. 

I also thought about  the oversized tortoise shell I saw on a recent visit to Thomas Edison’s laboratories in New Jersey, which he had (along with elephant hides and animal hooves) to sample these materials for his (then state-of-the-art) experiments and products. Both of these thoughts altered the intended contrast set up by the artist (Andy Meerow) but enriched my own experience, which would have been less interesting without them.

This is also true of the work at the gallery by Émilie Pitoiset: two leather gloves – one posed holding the cigarette and the other fingering a coin. Seeing these, it is hardly possible for me to not recall Wisława Szymborska’s Muzeum poem, particularly the line The hand has lost out to the glove. Unintended by Pitoiset and Werble, the placement of these objects in a temporary show in a hip, modern gallery, with Szymborska’s words in mind is a brilliant stab at her nemesis – time and the victory of object over the owner  – and joins her in the concluding lines:

As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I’m gone!

Across from the gloves is a dress, of sorts: a multi-material conglomeration portrait on canvas titled Perched. It is a colorful and lively piece that satisfies painting and sculptural urges. Its hands, and other features, are a wonderful struggle of representation – a neurotic triumph over possible failure, and hyper-representation over realism. These hands do not fool use as hands but are an amazing representation of hands: restless, veiny, clawing.

I also enjoyed the untitled diptych by Ryan Mrozowski, which is a nice play of botanic shapes, where a silhouetting of half the leaves creates a masking of itself and has an op-art tension of what is camouflaging what. I too quickly walked past a “black on black” work and should go back so as to not dismiss it. And, I almost paid too little attention to a multi-channel video installation in the front room of the gallery until I noticed Watts Towers in the montage and engaged in a conversation about the piece with Margot, the associate director of the gallery. She explained the tokonoma reference of the work, which was not what came to mind for me but definitely made me think differently about the work and the show.

Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me - A Movie That Strikes A Chord

by Drew Martin
Glen Campbell sang Rhinestone Cowboy back in 1975 when I was six years old. I feel like that song is in my DNA because I heard it when music just seemed like it was part of the atmosphere. Campbell was the first signer to win a Grammy award in both Country and Contemporary in the same year.

I just watched Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me, wow, what an amazing documentary. For one thing I got to rediscover how talented he is as a musician. The film really does a good job of expressing his gifts, such as his perfect-pitch tone (he was even in the Beach Boys to fill in after Brian Wilson had his nervous breakdown), and his great guitar playing (which I had not known about).

The focus on the film, however, is about his decline from Alzheimer's and how he and his family (who perform with him) struggle with the disease.

A little more than a year ago I wrote a blog post about Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory, a film about social worker Dan Cohen who visited America’s nursing homes in a quest to unlock the minds of people with dementia having them listen to music they liked in their youth. It is remarkable how unresponsive people all of a sudden come alive when they tune in.

This documentary about Campbell should be watched in tandem with Alive Inside, because it shows how this famous musician, who cannot recall the names of his closest family members or answer simple facts, can turn around, go onstage, and perform his songs in front of thousands of people.

Pictured above, Campbell and his talented daughter, Ashley, dueling it out onstage during his farewell tour.

The Body Paint King

by Drew Martin
Body painting is older than clothing, and while several modern artists have incorporated it into their work - most famously Yves Klein’s Anthropométries, and Keith Haring's paintings on dancer Bill T. Jones, and singer Grace Jones, it is still often looked at as a free pass to stare at a naked (more-often-than-not young female) body. I have recently started following "Ed the Artist" on Instagram @edtheartist1 who has claimed the title as Body Paint King. Raised in DMV (DC, MD, VA) and based in Atlanta, Ed regularly posts pictures of his models at photo shoots, and sometimes of him painting them. While many images are more titillating than others (because the model's body dominates the design), he often finds the right balance where everything comes together nicely and his talent shines through. In those moments Ed takes the art of body painting to another level and redefines what it can be. Here are a few of my favorites:

Addendum: I am adding here other great body paint jobs Ed has done since this post.

Seymour Hear More

by Drew Martin
I saw an interesting documentary today by Ethan Hawke about Seymour Bernstein, the American pianist, composer, and music teacher who turned away from public performances at the age of 50 in order to enjoy a calmer life.

Most of the film is a direct conversation between him and one of several friends and students.

At the age of 15 Bernstein said he was aware that when his practicing went well, everything in his life seemed to be harmonized by that. And when it did not go well, he was out of sorts with people. From this he concluded that...

"The real essence of who we are resides in our talent."

Many times his close-up, placid face dominates the frame and he speaks so directly to the camera that you lock eyes with him. His musings border a line between artistic philosophy and guru self-help advice.

"Motivated by a love of music and possessed by a clear understanding of the reasons for practicing you can establish so deep an accord between your musical self and your personal self that eventually music and life will interact in a never-ending cycle of fulfillment."

When asked by an off-camera Hawke about extremely talented yet extremely horrible people and whether there is a connection between the monsters and the gift, he responds:

"The contrast between the unbelievable attainment of art, and the unpredictability of the social world is so great that it makes them neurotic."

Bernstein relishes and thrives in his solitude. He has lived by himself in a one-bedroom apartment for nearly 60 years. He expresses trepidation of social interaction outside his music world and explains that even when someone is really close to you, one comment may dissolve a friendship. He takes comfort in the "predictability" of music.

"When Beethoven put a B-flat down, that's there forever. Because of the predictability of music, when we work at it, we have a sense of order, harmony, predictability and something we can control."

He says that and then switches gears...

"Your initial response to music occurs without intellectual analysis. Gifted children, for example, often project deep musical feeling without being aware of musical structure or historical facts. It is this kind of innocence from which adults can learn. Therefore in practicing avoid excess of analysis and allow the music to reveal its own beauty. A beauty that is answered by something deep within you."

Hawke asks Bernstein how he felt when his father used to say he had three daughters and a pianist. Not only does he respond negatively but then he explains about a "transparent dome" he protects himself with that ravens whirl around, and says that his father was one of the ravens pecking at the glass. This patriarch is one of many people he explains that hope for your failure. But Bernstein was world-class and got rave reviews. He even performed on a grand piano for his fellow soldiers during the Korean War. These personal stories play nicely into his comment that "the struggle is what makes the art form" and his expressing that the dissonance, harmony and resolution of life is captured in music and that it is the dissonance that gives meaning to the resolution.

The ideal of music as a universal language because it is a language of feeling, also becomes his religion. He talks about the ecstasy and transcendence of music and that while religion requires faith, music is present in its language. His theology is of a god within us, which he calls a "spiritual reservoir." 

The film is full of his great musings and conversations of craft versus talent, the effect of nervousness (that more people should be a lot more nervous and that many artists are not nervous enough), the importance of composing to be closer to the creative process, and how learning to listen to yourself play will allow your to better listen to other people, which he complements with a comment...

"The greatest compliment your can give people is to tell them the truth."

The film ends with a wondrous Bernstein saying...

"I never dreamt that with my own two hands I could touch the sky."

Lily Yeh Yeah Yeahs

by Drew Martin
When I see a movie (in this case on Netflix) with a lowly one-star rating, I usually check to see if it is really bad or really good. Most of the time it is the former but I recently lucked out. The other day the lone star The Barefoot Artist caught my eye and it was something I am really glad I watched. It is a documentary about Lily Yeh; her work as an artist, and an emotional detour to her ancestral home on the southern island Hainan, and other parts of China to reconnect with her step-siblings who her father left behind for a harsh fate while he went off to have a good life with her mother in Taiwan.

A visual metaphor for this part of the film is when she and the various relatives and friends in China piece together an extensive and beautifully drawn map her father made of the island.

When Yeh came to America in the 60s as a young lady to study painting her dedication to traditional Chinese landscape painting was challenged by the New York artworld's emphasis on Pop Art and happenings. And while she had professional representation and envisioned a full career as a gallery artist, she ended up taking a very different and quite remarkable path, which led her to do community art projects in troubled parts of the world.

The top image here is a site she created in response to seeing a depressing animal-shed-like place for the remains of the 1994 Rwanda genocide victims. She understood that the survivors of the massacre were distraught by this situation because they felt that their loved ones could not rest in peace until they had a respectable burial site.

The picture underneath that is one of her more extensive projects - the multiple-block arts garden in Philadelphia called the Village of Arts and Humanities, which is where she really cut her teeth and assumed the role as a public artist, director, community organizer and fundraiser.

Her work transforms rough abandoned lots and other unattractive neglected spaces into colorful and peaceful oases with bright painted and tiled murals, organic sculptures, and quirky masonry walls. There is no need for validating art-world reviews of these projects, because the reward is in the faces of the communities who get to share these installed gifts.

Yeh talks about wanting to create dustless places, a term used to describe the serene environments of Chinese landscape paintings. There is a motivation in her to better sad locations through colorful art and community collaboration, and there is also a side she expresses to find peace in a world where her beloved father never felt complete after leaving his first family, and one that was also troubled through her own failed marriage. She expresses that her idea of home is not a location but that place where she feels connected in art.

A Fresh Start in 2016

by Drew Martin
The African-American community is arguably the most creative and inventive culture in the world, especially when trends bubble up from small, close-knit neighborhoods as a way to get local attention and respect, and anything mainstream or out of reach gets customized for that community.

Yesterday I watched Fresh Dressed, a 2015 documentary about the history of fashion behind hip-hop. It's a wonderful sartorial time capsule that begins with the territorial gang outfits of the boroughs of New York City, builds up to the big-name performers with their own clothing lines, and then returns to high-end brands with staying power that were once sought after, when the popularity of musician-backed lines waned; an issue of style being too closely associated with a personality.

One thing emphasized was how hip-hop music put the spotlight on street styles that were already there, and how as hip-hop spread around the world and people liked the music but could not always relate to the English lyrics, the fashion became an even more important way for kids in other countries to identify with the music.

Ralph McDaniels, the creator and host of Video Music Box says that the colors of hip hop came from the spray paint can selections that were favored in graffiti and that the first canvases for hip hop individuality were on the backs of jean jackets.

Dapper Dan's Boutique in Harlem was the first store that was tailored to the hip-hop scene. Dan did with fashion what hip-hop did with music: he sampled and mixed fashion, and brought the music scene's imagination into reality. He also introduced urban luxury brands when luxury brands were unattainable for people living in the projects. Dan did big, bold outfits as well as simple things, like put Louis Vuitton's LV mark on caps, when they would not think about doing something like that. Dan says he blackenized those famous designers for his people.

A "fresh starts with the feet first" comment leads into a funny anecdote by rapper Jim Jones about the importance of sneakers. His school required a uniform so sometimes kids would fake a sprained ankle in order to be able to wear at least one of their new sneakers, albeit while fake-limping with a cane.

Now people buy fat laces but before they were available for purchase they had to be customized. Kids would take the standard laces that came with the sneakers, then stretch, starch, and iron them before lacing them the opposite way - looped over the eyelets.

Personally, I was less interested in seeing the late-comers such as Kanye, and was more interested in the beginning of the movement. I especially liked the breakdown of the "flavors" from the different parts of NYC that were unique to each borough:

A guy from Brooklyn would have on Clarks, shark skins, Cazal glasses with no lens in it, and a Kangol crease like I don't know what. That was a Brooklyn cat. He didn't have to say anything. You knew he was from Brooklyn.

A guy from Harlem would have on...a velour sweat suit, and whatever brand the sweat suit was from, he would have the sneaker to match.

Same with the Bronx. The Bronx was a mix of Harlem and Brooklyn together.

Queens - - Queens had their own flow too.

If one of your New Year resolutions is to take your fresh to another level then definitely watch this flick. 

A Year in Review: The Museum of Peripheral Art in 2015

To see past annual reviews for the Museum of Peripheral Art, click on the years under the blog archive. The last entry each year is the annual review.