Turning The Art World Inside Out

by Drew Martin

Turning The Art World Inside Out is a BBC arts documentary from 2013 hosted by Alan Yentob as part of its Imagine series. It serves to explain what is Outsider Art. I became particularly interested in Outsider Art in the late 1980s when I went to school and started to officially study art history as part of my art studio curriculum. Western art history was all fine and good but the formality of it made me switch to African art studies because I was interested in art that was more part of day-to-day celebrations and rituals. But then I found out about Outsider Art and how all-consuming it is for the artists. While the total immersion of this kind of art for its creator is often associated with debilitating mental issues and histories of childhood sexual abuse, the idea of living in one's own creative landscape is a romanticized notion for many trained artists; it certainly was for me. One of the artists featured in this documentary, Ionel Talpazan (a Romanian artist based in Harlem who only paints  and sculpts UFOs), expands the scope of an imagined world,

The artist is like an astronaut. With the mind you can travel the entire universe. 

I was first exposed to Grandma Prisbrey and her Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California, and then a visit to Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in Los Angeles made me even more interested, especially when I learned that his eclectic scrap material towers were visited more by people living outside the United States than by Americans. [Unfortunately, neither of them are mentioned in this film.]

The real turning point for me, however, was when I got to see dozens of work by the Swiss outsider artist Adolf Wölfli in a show at my campus art gallery at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Wölfli, was one of the first outsider artists to put this kind of work on the map. He even created his own system of musical notation, which was embedded in his densely packed drawings.

The professional French artist Jean Debuffet is credited with bringing this kind of work out of the asylums and into the art world in the 1940s. He loved that it was a stranger to culture and innocent of calculated trappings. He gave Outsider Art its first name, l'Art Brut, a term he borrowed from the wine industry, meaning raw and without sugar. The term Outsider Art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for l'Art Brut.

While I certainly did not need an introduction to this type of art, I really liked this BBC production because it showed me the work of many artists and centers I did not know about, and Yentob is a patient and thoughtful host.

Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap

by Drew Martin
Another great documentary I saw this weekend is the 2012 Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap. Directed and hosted by Ice-T the documentary takes you across America to hear from the masters of rap about their personal introduction to hip-hop and their unique anecdotes. When Ice-T puts everyone from Eminem to Salt of Salt-N-Pepa on the spot to rap something that influenced them, they all seamlessly jump into verse committed to memory. My favorite part was hearing how they work. Immortal Technique makes himself physically hungry first or gets pumps up at the gym. Rakim starts with a piece of paper where he draws 16 dots for a 16-bar rhyme so he knows "what he is dealing with." Ras Kass used to "go to school" at a desk he stole from his junior high school and brought home in order to have a focused place to write. Everyone has different approaches but they all acknowledged the hard work it took to become great, the embarrassing failures they endured in the beginning, and the importance of creativity.

Buddhist Art: A Fragile Inheritance

by Drew Martin
Last night I watched an interesting documentary called Buddhist Art: A Fragile Inheritance, which is about the state of Buddhist wall paintings around Asia. The documentary focuses on China, Bhutan, and India, and the conservation efforts to minimize the damage from humidity, earthquakes, floods, tourists and other factors that jeopardize a multitude of hundreds-of-years-old works of art. Some of the worst damage is even done by poorly-trained teams of restorers who have patched cracks with incompatible materials, painted over the artwork with modern pigments, and varnished the walls in an attempt to make them look better. One cultural difference is that in many places the imagery is part of the religious concept of reincarnation and cycles of life; so repainting the originals has been a tradition. But now the residents of these places understand the importance their paintings have on a world stage and are willing to preserve them. The Courtauld Institute of Art in London has been involved in recent years to help determine the best way to maintain the paintings with the least amount of restoration. The documentary scratches the surface of the vast number of wall paintings that are in disrepair but gives a pretty good overview about what is being done to conserve them, especially the various techniques to analyze the damage, and the materials used to prevent them from crumbling such as special adhesives and grouts based on the composition of earthen walls. At the Mogao Caves in Jiuquan, China, also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes, the 492 cave temple paintings can have 18,000 visitors a day so the national park has handled the influx of tourists and the damage their presence brings by building a massive center complete with exact replicas of the temples. The feeling I had at the end of the documentary was that it is remarkable that on one hand we have a group of people dedicated to preserving art that is crumbling while there are also people in the world determined to destroy such works. The more recent destruction of the architectural heritage of Palmyra, Syria by ISIS brought back the bad memories of the destruction of the 4th- and 5th-century carved Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan by the Taliban. Even if the efforts of the art restorers can never be complete, the hope behind their actions is even more important than what they physically save.

10 Little Paintings

by Drew Martin
If you look too long at fingernails they start to look like little hooves. In a sense they are.  As an unadorned male I never personally thought too long about painting my nails so I never really appreciated their potential. Not until I found out one of my friends from childhood has a salon. Her "mostly nail pics on here" Instagram feed was a bit of a revelation for me for what can be done with the 10 little blank canvases at the ends of our hands. Here are some of my favorites. To see more follow her on Instagram @michellerose222.

A Man Full of Trouble

by Drew Martin
I was walking around taking pictures of Alex Da Corte's show A Man Full of Trouble at Maccarone this afternoon when the gallery assistant said, "You know we have professional pictures of the show already, right?" Perhaps he felt bad seeing me in the contorted positions I assumed to get certain shots. He did say it as if he wanted to help me...or better yet, to relieve me of my own efforts. I said, "Yeah, but I am trying to get pictures like this." And I showed him the following photo on my camera display.

He was a little surprised that I showed this particular shot to him because it seems like the least significant piece in the show. He said, "Oh yeah. That's actually the artist's favorite piece here. In fact, it was the inspiration for the rest of the show."

There are some really interesting pieces such as this free-form neon light sculpture.

And because I start off every morning with a bowl of cooked oats, I immediately gravitated to a tall sculpture with an over-sized replica of a Quaker Oats container. I did not pick up on the reference of this and the stack of $100 Ben Franklin towels to Da Corte's hometown - Philadelphia.

One of my favorite pieces is this pair of Kit Cat Clocks because in a span of almost 30 seconds their pendular tails seem to be matched for about five seconds before they fall back out of synchronicity.

 Here are a few more pictures I took of the show:

Right Here, Write Now

by Drew Martin

In our busy schedules and hectic days there is still an oasis of idle time where routine takes a late siesta. It’s a a fuzzy hour in the mid-afternoon. If you try to do work during that time you won’t be efficient so you might as well get up and walk around and discover something new. I was at a late luncheon today and instead of joining a couple colleagues to take a taxi back, I decided to walk off the meal and stop in a gallery or two before returning to my office. The first place I visited was the Westbeth Gallery where I took some pictures of the participatory installation Write Now. The gallery has multiple rooms and tables with Post-it notes, pens, and messages on the wall: What Do You Want To Leave Behind in 2016? or What Do You Want The World To Bring Into 2017?

When I was about to leave, the gallery sitter asked me if I had written something. I hadn't, so I put down my camera and drew the following Someone For Everyone Post-it here.

William Carlos Williams and Paterson of Paterson in Jim Jarmusch's New Film - Paterson

by Drew Martin
Last night I saw a special screening of Paterson that was introduced by its writer and director Jim Jarmusch at the Williams Center for the Arts in Rutherford, New Jersey. The Center honors the great poet and physician William Carlos Williams, or as joked in the film Carlo Williams Carlos, who was born, practiced, and died in Rutherford.

The City of Paterson is close to my heart and home. I go there for runs by its beautiful waterfall and up in the hill-top park of Garret Mountain. I bring my friends there to show them the falls - the largest east of Niagara, and I talk about it to everyone I meet. Paterson is one of the most historic cities in the country and has a wealth of culture. If you have read On The Road, it is where Jack Kerouac begins his quest, and returns to visit his aunt. More famously, it was the inspiration behind Williams' epic poem Paterson.

Jarmusch’s Paterson is an ode to Williams through the uneventful life of a NJ Transit bus driver/poet in Paterson, named Paterson (played by Adam Driver) whose more eccentric wife, Laura (played by Golshifteh Farahani) has a thing for black and white patterns, which she uses to adorn their small home, dog, and cupcakes.

The main theme in Paterson is duplication and once you start thinking about how ubiquitous it is in the film, you feel like it is the underlying structure of the universe. We start with the repetition of words in the poetry-narrative by Paterson conceiving and then writing down his thoughts. And it is in the dialogue: in one of the first scenes Paterson and Laura discuss having kids - twins. “One for you, and one for me” Paterson offers in a tone and manner that does not expand the conversation but rather neatly wraps it up. This is how he approaches his life through poetry – packaging ideas in tidy, economic lines.

Twins of all ages and walks of life serve as a double-take visual motif throughout the film, and the theme of duplication gets played out even more in the repetition of things people say to him. At one point his bus breaks down and he asks everyone to get off. An elderly twin bus passenger asks him if the electrical problem that stopped them might cause the bus to burst into a ball of fire. This dramatic question is later repeated by his wife, and then his bartender.

Duplication in inherent in the name William Carlos Williams, as it is with Paterson (of Paterson). And for that matter within the name Paterson – pater-son or father-son; and New Jersey, a copy of Jersey. It also gives more meaning to the repetition of life: waking up to his wife, eating Cheerios out of a glass, walking to and from the bus depot, talking with the dispatcher, walking the dog, and visiting a local pub at night. By showing these repeated events, the details that deviate from the norm stand out that much more - both in what is introduced as well as what is absent.

In contrast to the theme of duplication is the idea of one-of-a-kind and irreplaceable originals. Paterson keeps all of his poems in a “secret” notebook, which his wife urges him to photocopy. He never gets around to it and this leads to a great loss in the end. But through this we understand that creativity flows like water over the waterfall and what is not lost is the repetitive urge to write. 

I have not seen all of Jarmusch’s films but one scene that stands out in my mind from his Broken Flowers is a fragment of a conversation between teenage girls on a bus. It is just part of a discussion but it is a microcosm. I think this shows off Jarmusch's greatest skill - he lets you listen. In Paterson we get much more of this as Paterson overhears his passengers' conversations as he drives the bus. A discussion about anarchism is even kicked back and forth by Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman who played opposite each other as young, platonic lovers in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Here we see them grown up, riding the bus in Paterson.

The most endearing scene is when Paterson meets a young girl by the old mills who reads him her poem Water Falls and discusses poetry with him. There is also a series of mini scenes of a leaning mailbox that Paterson uprights each time he comes home from work, which functions like the broken newel cap of the staircase in It’s a Wonderful Life. It is a source of frustration but also comments on the human attention needed to maintain a home/relationship. In Paterson it plays out for one of the biggest laughs when we find out his dog is behind the gag. 

The City of Paterson is more than a set for Jarmusch. It is a city and land that yields the poems. You see this in the scenes of Paterson at the falls, where he writes at lunchtime, and also in a late night laundromat that he passes where he hears a local rapper working on his bars. Also with a reference to Fetty Wap, Jarmusch nods to a new generation of word craft.

I met Jim Jarmusch last night. I had not planned to. In fact, I was nicely asked to not approach him as press but he came over to me and somehow I got engulfed in a conversation about Paterson. So I asked him why Paterson, and he said that he started thinking about doing a film there 27 years ago. He had moved out from Ohio (he says escaped) and settled down in New York City. He said he had heard a lot about other cities and was surprised to discover all the great history about Paterson. 

You could tell it was important for Jarmusch to screen this film so close to where it was filmed and have our local support, in Williams' home town. There was a great turnout at the Williams Center for the Arts and Jarmusch said a very nice introduction to the film. Even though the movie can be shown over and over again, the effort to organize the evening that gathered an enthusiastic audience and Jarmusch’s youthful presence certainly made it a one-of-a-kind event.

The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places

by Drew Martin

When I worked in a zoo in the north of the Czech Republic during a mid 1990s I was always impressed by the range of exotic sounds that reached out to me at the crack of dawn as I walked from the nearby trolley bus station to the entrance gate. Some noises were difficult to match to an animal, or even a species. The gibbons in the zoo, for example, had a high-pitched looping call that I first mistook for a tropical bird. 

Recently, I was perusing the arts section of my local library when a book on this subject caught my attention: The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places by Dr. Bernie Krause. The cover features a few different creatures: a long-legged bird, a monkey, and a couple dragonflies. There is also a bar of music. 

I expected this book to speak to my audio experiences from my zoo days through a journalist-style narrative of the animal kingdom. On this it delivers but it is so much more than what I had imagined. For one thing, unlike a lot of non-fiction books, this masterly written work follows a great arc of thought. When you read something by an author such as Malcolm Gladwell you basically get a thesis upfront followed by supportive case studies to prove the author’s point. It’s that or simply a collection of magazine-type articles. Krause, by contrast, develops an incredibly well-conceived 236-page history of sound on Earth. He outlines this through three general sound categories: Geophony, Biophony, and Anthrophony.

Geophony covers the sounds made by the Earth: wind blowing, water gurgling, ice cracking, storms thundering, volcanoes erupting, wildfires raging, and the ground rumbling. Krause takes the reader back millions of years when the only sounds you would have heard on the planet were that of the Geophony. Even more mind-boggling is the idea that these sounds influenced all the other sounds that came after them. He explains how a bird’s call is fine-tuned to the Geophony soundscape. For example, a bird that lives near a waterfall will have a call that can be heard over the constant rush of water. I could add that this seems in line with the loud call of seagulls who are typically communicating over the crash of waves. 

Most elegant is Krause’s description of waves around the world and how the cadence and strength differs greatly and is even affected by level of salinity, and the rake of the shoreline. He compares the drawn-out thunderous crashes of the surf at Big Sur to the delicate quick patter off the coast of Tanzania. 

One thing I question after reading this book is his inclusion of plant life in the Geophony. For example, he describes how the wind blowing over broken reeds is nature’s first Pan-flute, which presumably could have been an inspiration to music-making humans. In terms of evolution, plants and animals share a common primordial ancestor; the same spark of life. For this reason, there should probably be a Botaphony to speak entirely to plants including their slow growth sounds, and the array of animated noises they can make including that of falling trees and limbs, and the rubbing together of branches. In fact, the sound of wind and fire are often botanical. Think of the rustling of leaves and the crackling of burning wood. 

The Biophony, as described by Krause includes the noises made by creatures great and small. Whale calls can circle the Earth in open water. Shrimp snap their claws so loudly that they create a sonic bubble around them that stuns their prey.

Krause is a professional musician and sound technician but what is expressed most in this book is his skill of being a good listener. This translates to his talent as a writer and makes me realize that reading is simply a form of listening. The most notable takeaway from Krause is to appreciate the sounds of our world and to really understand the connections within the bandwidth of an environment. The most poignant example of this is the common notion that certain creatures vocalize simply for mating and territorial claim but this overlooks the most fascinating element of how they might harmonize and synchronize their calls, which still provides them with a medium for hooking up with mates and staking their turf, but is also a defense from their auditory predators who cannot pinpoint a single source when confronted with their surround-sound. That is, until this sound is disrupted by another noise, which might come from the Geophony, such as a storm; the Biophony, such as a howl or a growl; or more commonly, the Anthrophony, which is the noise we and our creations make. 

Krause breaks the Anthrophony down into Electromechanical noises from that range from pencil sharpeners to pile drivers, and Physiological noises from sneezing to shouting. He also explains Anthrophonic sounds as controlled and incidental.

Krause’s mission with this book seems two-fold. First, it is an educational read about understanding sounds and learning to listen. But it also has a sound-environment protection agenda. He writes about “bioacoustics information” versus “uncorrelated acoustic debris” or less politely, “acoustic garbage.” He explains how our brains labor to filter out harmful noises. Interestingly, while we might feel that we can adjust to invasive sounds, our bodies unconsciously continue to display the same nervous tension, fatigue, and irritation as they did when the noise was first introduced and perceived as stressful. He compares artificial white noise to fluorescent lighting. Not too long ago some employers introduced artificial white noise to their companies in hopes of focusing the attention of their staff. The results were counterproductive and could not compare to natural white noise such as waves and waterfalls, which have unique cadence patterns with subtle signatures that do indeed pacify humans. 

The most upsetting part of Krause’s exposé is the fact that fatal whale beachings, which are sometimes induced by the hemorrhaging of their inner ears, might be due to Navy sonar testing. Aside from the physical pain they experience, they become disoriented and go off course.  Krause’s environmentalism via the natural soundscape makes perfect sense: he illustrates the density of sound with graphs of his recordings that reflect the shocking but expected reduction of life through various activities such as logging. The removal of vegetation is devastating but Anthrophonic noise pollution alone is enough to disrupt a habitat as well. 

While Krause certainly struggles with the fact that our natural environment is rapidly diminishing, with technology fueling this decline, he does offer some hope that a new generation of smart-phone kids would use the recording technology in their hands to rediscover and appreciate natural soundscapes as he himself did on assignment decades ago.