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If You Don't Agree with Me,
You're Stupid: A Scientific Approach

The human brain evolved for a single purpose: not to make money, not to make angels, but to give mankind a shot at survival in a neutral environment that doesn't care about us one way or the other. The greatest asset we possess as a species, slugging it out against forces bent on our destruction (presently we have the most to fear from man-made dangers), is abstract reasoning, the ability to think about what will happen next using symbols and language. We don't need to position our senses in a present-time, critical moment to identify and react to a threat or an opportunity; instead, we have the ability to abstract our environment and work out problems in advance, the way a chessboard represents medieval war and a map represents some unknown country.

If you are with me so far, I know you don't need to be told the importance of having a brain. (Not that bodies aren't useful. Most bodies.) Clearly, a majority of humans develop abstract thinking at about the age of twelve, just in time to figure out how to get laid, a fact that we know intuitively but has also been confirmed scientifically by Piaget and a gazillion other psychologists. I am less certain everyone knows what Kohlberg discovered during his review and extension of Piaget's work: he estimated that 30% of people in the US never fully develop abstract reasoning (Kohlberg and Gilligan, 1971). This deficit has consequences more dire than the prospect of these folks going home alone from the Deer Park Tavern after last call. Smart people need to contemplate the mental fitness of the population as a whole, because our survival as a race means negotiating a complex global environment where mostly the danger isn't predators, meteors, or a plague of locusts; the dangerous obstruction is other, stupid people.

One hallmark of abstract thought is drawing conclusions based on authentic, empirical evidence as opposed to getting some cockamamie notion at 3 AM and sharpening the cutlery. In the essay form, it's standard practice for the writer to cite other scholars who gathered experimental evidence in advance of the writing. Prof. Bouree, do that evidence thing you do for the nice people.

It doesn't seem that the formal operations stage is something everyone actually gets to. Even those of us who do get there don't operate in it at all times. Even some cultures, it seems, don't develop it or value it like ours does. Abstract reasoning is simply not universal. (Boeree, 2009)
We have all these folks running around who literally can't do the math. I'm not talking about slack-jawed yokels bounding out of Dogpatch and the mind of Al Capp. I'm talking about accomplished people, college men and women, some of them with enormous power over the rest of us and chests of money! I'm talking about Al Capp, for instance, and others like him who don't have the ability to calculate their own best interest except in concrete, immediate terms. An absolutely telltale indicator of the inability to think abstractly is the failure to recognize that all human life, indeed all life on this planet, is interconnected.

I'm not arguing that calculating one's next move based on the best possible result is easy; I'm saying it is difficult, and many of your neighbors and countrymen lack cognitively the formal operations to do it. Because we can't actually see, taste, or touch the way our behaviors impact others and vice versa, many folks believe they are secret agents, acting alone, with no accountability to anyone. Capitalists prattle on and on without understanding about individual initiative and how we are in competition with others and that this is a good thing. Their view, while true in a limited and immediate way, lacks understanding of the long-term, the big picture, the ultimate goal of survival of the human species. Don't these libertarians or Ayn Rand objectivists watch Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946)? Well I do, every Christmas, and my favorite part is when George patiently explains to the radically individualist banker the old codger's own self-interest in giving poor people a chance to get out of their slums and poverty.

Here, you're all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You...you said...What'd you say just a minute ago?...They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait! Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken-down that they...Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about...they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community.

The whole concept of mass markets and entrepreneurial initiative to access mass markets relies on a large population with the resources to use goods and services. A financial situation like ours in the US, where wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few, is actually bad for the economy and especially dangerous to those short-sighted few. Writing for Business Insider in an article called "Plutocracy Reborn," Gus Lubin remarks that the last time wealth was so concentrated in the hands of the top 1% of families was in 1928, just before the Great Depression, and conditions today are more dangerous for the superwealthy than they were then. (Lubin, 2010)

Resistence to my premise-- that people with wealth and power very often are too stupid to understand what's good for them-- is great in my country because we are obsessed with money and material things and harbor the absolutely false, untested attribution that people with vast sums are smarter and better than people without it. A recent study indicated that people with money, even if they understood that they received special breaks and advantages to get it, were most susceptible to the opinion that their wealth confers upon them a special, heavenly grace, and they were less likely to have consideration for others. (Szalavitz) My argument against the mistaken attribution of exceptionalism to the beneficiaries of monetary success is that someone with a very limited ability to apply abstract thought can, nevertheless, acquire a huge fortune. Intelligence is not the prerequisite for wealth.

Genuinely smart people have arranged society such that, in the US at least, survival doesn't require extremely difficult skills like tracking prey for food, finding water, and building shelter. Boy Scouting requires skill; one can achieve financial success with luck. Much of the empty sloganeering of the American Dream comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in Self-Reliance romanticizes the power and glory of the individual, self-made man. Emerson's creation inspires, but ought to include the caveat that everyone benefits immensely from the society in which he or she lives; other people matter. A less quoted philosopher is Don Novello's stand-up character, Father Guido Sarducci. In a routine called "Five-Minute University," he tells us everything we need to know about business boils down to this: "You buy-a something and sell it for-a more." Bill Gates is intelligent enough to realize his enormous fortune came to him partly by accident (Borsook), and he's also sharp enough to know that spending huge sums of money to eliminate disease in Africa and put computers in classrooms in the US benefits all people and himself.

The Koch brothers, Charles G. and David H., inherited the fortune of their father and the second-largest privately held company in the United States. Dad was a chemist who invented a process essential to the refinement of oil into petroleum, which indicates intelligence, and he was also a founding member of the John Birch Society, which indicates an utter lapse in abstract reasoning. His sons continued his work of spending huge sums to promote libertarian ideas, free-market economics, deregulation, and eensy weensy government. They have vociferously opposed universal health care and raising the minimum wage, two ideas that sound economics predicts would save the nation billions of dollars and create wealth (Zieler, Krugman); they also deny the existence of man-made global warming against overwhelming scientific and fact-based opinion. (Mayer) Obviously, it is in their immediate and concretely understood self-interest to reduce their own taxes and block legislation that regulates the oil industry, but they are unbelievably stupid not to anticipate the future catastrophe of tens or hundreds of millions of the poor and uneducated and an even warmer planet, which is already experiencing historic weather extremes--heat, cold, rain, drought, and storms.

Especially when one is born with a monetary advantage, success doesn't require advanced cognitive skills. In fact, the pursuit of money for its own sake shows a pathological deficiency in abstract thought. Money is the ultimate abstraction.The paper it's printed on is nearly worthless; money is a symbol of something else, something with an ever-changing value. Amassing billions and billions of dollars without regard for the planet and one's fellows on it demonstrates an abject failure to distinguish substance from the representation of it. (Pause) "These go to eleven." Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap is the best known example of an utter confusion of a symbol for what it represents. This next one is from my experience teaching high school. One of my 16-year-olds was looking at two expensive pull-down maps, one of the United States and one of her home, Pennsylvania. Her wide-eyed reaction was, "I never knew it before: they're the same size!"

A professor of sociology of my acquaintance was asked by a think tank to express what he expected in the future for America. He predicted doom and gloom. The biggest culprit in his mind was the rise of the belief that any government is intrinsically bad for the citizens and against their self-interest. The nitwits of the so-called Tea Party understand certain catchy slogans (No New Taxes! Big Government Off My Back!), but lack the mental acumen to apply them appropriately. (Incidentally, they got their own name wrong. Those early patriots were protesting the British failure to tax tea imported from Holland, not the opposite.) Government enacts laws that protect citizens from those with an excess of financial power, and the primary function of government is to redistribute the collective wealth of the nation.

When the stock market crashed in 2008, the Tea Party and its minions in Congress resisted higher taxes on the rich, the bailouts of threatened banks and industries, assistance to people whose mortgages were for more than their houses were worth and other government actions that are economically necessary when private investment dries up. They even shut the government down and refused to pay its debts unless these actions included spending cuts, ignoring the failure of similar austerity measures in Europe, and a lowering of the US credit rating that makes money more expensive. Since 2008, the people have actually profited from the payback on the loans it made to banks and business, but job creation remains stagnant. What we needed were huge investments in infrastructure and education that create taxpaying jobholders, improve services, and in the long run reduce deficits. Short-term thinking that flies in the face of evidence gutted support for the poorest working families, reduced public schools to rubble, endangered colleges, and the recession has dragged on for longer than it should have. Smart guys--help the dumb guys.

It's not only the wealthy elite who lack "moral development" (Kohlburg) that we should fear, but also the millions of voters whose understanding is stunted by deficiencies in dealing with the abstract, for our powerful nemesis distracts and misleads the huddled mass who ought to be its natural enemy. An insistence that every word in the Bible is literally true redirects workingclass anger towards narrow "family value" issues, when they ought to be railing against war-mongers and environment defilers. Belief in the imminent return of Son-O'-God leads to an ignorant disregard for long-term, scientifically demonstrated damage to our planet. Rampant global warming denial is based on a misplaced faith that God won't let his people be remembered only from the fossil record when insects take over the archeology and museum-building.

The Word takes on a magical significance that symbolic language does not have, resulting in misunderstanding and harm. If the purpose of the Bible is to give us consolation against a cruel world and show us the best way to relate to our fellow man, why can't it be understood metaphorically, and why insist that every word means exactly what it says (which is impossible)? The answer must be that many people are completely uncomfortable with symbolism; they must have everything in concrete terms. Ironically, they cease to believe that nature is governed by dependable scientific forces. "Magical thinking" describes a phase of cognition in which objects appear to have no physical continuity and where their every behavior isn't fully covered by the Laws of Physics, and, generally, the human brain outgrows it in infancy.

Other than insisting that a virgin can have a baby, or a man can walk on water, or that a burning bush can talk, evidence of an utter discomfort with the tricky subtleties of language surfaces every time one of Obama's enemies tries to compare his actions to something else. Conservatives demonstrate an utter clumsiness with figures of speech. Thus, on 10/13/13, conservative spokesman Dr. Ben Carson called Obamacare the "worst thing that has happened in this country since slavery," North Carolina state senator Bob Rucho, on 12/15/13, tweets that "Obamacare has done more damage to the USA then (sic) the swords of the Nazis, Soviets & terrorists combined," (yeah, three groups reknowned for their swordplay), and an Idaho state senator, Sherly Nuxoll, emailed to supporters this month (January, 2014) that "insurance companies are creating their own tombs...[m]uch like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps." These analogies are reckless, unfeeling, and pitifully clumsy, English language fails that are worst disasters than, um, the Titanic and New Coke combined!

As a Pennsylvanian, I'm always rooting for two-term (!) US senator and erstwhile Presidential candidate Rick Santorum to top everyone in spastic word play, and the sweater-vested little chowderhead never disappoints. "Gay marriage is an issue just like 9-11," he said, in February, 2004, and outstandingly, when Nelson Mandela died, he said on The O'Reilly Factor (12/5/13)

Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that's the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed. ..And I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people's lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that.

Sometimes people who are weary with politics like to claim that the guys and gals who say and do ridiculous, mind-boggling things like shutting down the government for two weeks to make a quixotic, extremist point about government services, or hand the regulation of our environment over to the worst polluters of it, or compare health care to Apartheid must be accepting bribes from some lobby or corporation. I've always been opposed to conspiracy theories and their flimsy speculations. For one thing, I don't think the Far-Right is skilled enough (abstract wordplay coming) to organize a pack of gum let alone a vast extremist conspiracy. Thinking about the deficiencies of the conservative brain that ignores science, facts, and complex reasoning for the sake of immediate concrete satisfaction is plenty scary enough, but disagree with me and I won't think you're evil, just stupid.



Boeree, C. George. "Jean Piaget and Cognitive Development." Shippensburg University, 2009.

n. pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.


Borsook, Paulina. "The Accidental Zillionaire." Wired. 2003. n. pag. Web. 19 Jan 2014.


Gilligan, C. and Lawrence Kohlberg. "The adolescent as a philosopher: The discovery of the self

in a post-conventional world." Daedalus 100(4)(1971): 1054-1087. Print.


Krugman, Paul. "Obamacare's Secret Success." The New York Times. 29 Nov. 2013.

n. pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.


Lubin, Gus. "Plutocracy Reborn." Business Insider. 1 Sep. 2010. n pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.


Mayer, Jane. "Covert Operations." The New Yorker. 30 Aug. 2010. n pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.


Szalavitz, Maia. "Why the rich are less ethical: They see greed as good." Time.

28 Feb. 2012. n. pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.


Zeiler, David. "The surprising benefits of raising the minimum wage." Money Morning.

20 Dec. 2013. n. pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.

Considering "Last Days" with Pompeo

The 19th century geologist Charles Lyell first observed the principle of uniformitarianism in nature: the processes we observe shaping our today-world are the same as those that have always ground mountains into grains of sand. Linda Pompeo’s searching presentation of oil paintings and prints showing at Muse Gallery in May of 2022 strongly suggests that the transformative forces in human experience have been as consistent as gravity for as long as the species has been on the planet. For an artist, certainly, the desire to express the soaring, spiritual power of the human form can’t burn much differently in the breast of a contemporary painter than it did in a sculptor of Samothrace in the year 190 BCE. Similarly, the problem of how the individual artist fits into a humanist tradition over two thousand years old has many of the same features for a 16th century Dominican nun as it would for a photographer whose fluid gender enraged the German reich.

Pompeo works like an archaeologist trying to infer the life of our ancestors from remains in the geologic record. Two of her studies, Winged Victory of Samothrace and Croatian Apoxyemenos, embrace not only the unmatched naturalism of the Classical period but also the astronomically good fortune of recent man stumbling upon the millennia-old treasure of our forebears in graves of field and sea. One effect of making culture the subject of more culture, as the postmodernists do, as Pompeo does, is that the reframing of an original exposes the final painting to ironic interpretation. Does the contemporary artist believe whole-heartedly as the artists of the Hellenic period did that man is the measure of all things? Pompeo seems at least in awe of massive evidence of the faith and bluster of our ancestors finding its way to our museums and coffee table books. Some comfort may be had considering that, given the same pieces of nature as our increasingly unmoored selves, ancient artists assembled them into such inspiring forms. After all, our world isn’t unrecognizable in the annals of humankind but superimposed over the past, like a layer of differently hued sediment exposed beneath the sky on a carved up hill.

The struggle to devise one’s place in the artistic fossil record is clearly not the same for women as for men, but a person of any gender recognizes that struggle in the stories of two artists Pompeo interprets in her exhibit, Claude Cahun, the 20th-century French, gender-ambiguous photographer, and Plautilla Nelli, the Rennaissance-era nun who was the first known female artist of Florence, and a master of devotional themes. Pompeo expressed to me that she feared her oil painting versions of Cahun’s surrealist photos or interpretations of Nelli’s devotional work, showing the weathering of the centuries, were only copies, perhaps justifiable for introducing modern audiences to great past artists who were ground-breaking women, but undistinguished as paintings on their own. Just shows how wrong we can be! Pompeo’s paintings, with their gauzy atmosphere that suggests looking through layers of time and culture, are nothing if not original personal statements. The artist translates her own, unique experience with art history, conveying to her audience the features of artist's lives and works that are most marvelous and relevant to her.

The subjects in these paintings pose against a solid background, not in a particular historical context. Pompeo distorts the perception that some object is peculiar to a particular time by patterning the space around it with a stenciled crown, for instance, or a lemon. (“What does the lemon mean?” “Everyone knows what a lemon means.”) The stencilling recalls wallpaper. She captions paintings with words: “Claude Cahun; Don’t kiss me” and “Pray for the paintress.” The application of text substitutes the flat space of a commemorative stamp for material depth. Pompeo expresses a desire to confound the conventional inference of background and foreground. Indeed, the sensibility of her work suggests anachronism and a particular place known only to this artist where distances and the speed of approaching objects can't be determined, and all acts of passion happen concurrently under a luminous blanket of fog.

The re-imaging of canonical art inherently changes the original in even the most faithful copy. (Who remembers Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998)? I didn’t think so.) Treating the model ironically has been mentioned; alternately, Pompeo rendering a statue or a photograph in paint or imitating the work of a cloistered Renaissance nun by plucking those subjects out of their original context explodes their original meanings. Instead of the artist Cahun trying to map out a sexual and artistic identity, or an artisan of the ancient world celebrating the temporary glories of a now obliterated city-state, Pompeo’s indiosyncractic work acknowledges with a hint of surprise the unquenchable artistic spirit of the past, chiefly its endurance, the primary motivation behind every creative act. Random events become icons and patinated monuments. The language of frames and grounds in painting is as arcane as the rules governing grammatical punctuation: we put a question mark after a sentence recalling a person’s howl into the blackness, but we put a period at the end of a sentence reporting that someone asked a particular question. The visitor to Pompeo’s show may consider the present’s indecision and desparate inventions in the context of a very long history and the immutability of forces within and without the life of man.

Using Art to Excavate Her Story

Brightening the Study Hotel at University City, Moon Garden is Rashidah Salam's exhibit of biographically themed paintings in acrylic. The artist represents the accumulation of her personal story in the depth of layers of paint applied to a blank canvas. The first member of the Drexel faculty to show in the space adjacent to the hotel lobby, the Malaysian-born artist suggested to me that narrative, flattened as it is to the two-dimensional plane of a canvas, exists in space but not in time. The mind randomly stacks memories, one-atop-another, disregarding when the image was first assembled in our interior Photoshop.


Rashidah Salam is a colleague from Muse Gallery in Old City where she conducts the co-operative's monthly critique sessions. These free-form conversations between artists describe the different ways the nature of their materials imposes a pattern on the fabric of life. Abstract artists depict the process of applying a wet swatch of paint to a resistant canvas surface, and their strokes going left to right and right to left are each a personal account of how the picture was made. The different challenge of the figurative artist is to depict how the artist sees a subject in space, and in a broader sense, how the consciousness of the artist, their own indelible subjectivity, was formed. The artificiality of the canvas surface as a representation of three-dimensional space becomes a part of the subject.

In Matahari, the colorful leaves and flowers of grandmother's garden span a triptych of 20 X 16" panels. The artist explains that the sunshine of the work's title changes in her mind's eye as she recalls herself as a child of five or six running from one end of the garden to the other. The three panels narrate the deformation of the image, a conceit ground upon the same observation that compelled Picasso and Braque to present what the artist sees as the proverbial "explosion in a shingle factory." The light passing through the bougainvillea is sometimes, for instance, illuminating the details of the individual leaf, and other times shining on the surface so brightly it obscures the delicate lace there. Salam commands beautiful colors and powerful natural forms to create a vivid analogy to the way her consciousness accumulated. Bright acrylic paints are the material proxy for the overlapping transparencies of intangible memory.


For some painters, demonstrating a mastery of the materials means superimposition of a transparent layer of paint over an undercoating. Salam invents several means to suggest one layer of being wafting down upon another like a fine linen kerchief. She creates precise grids of dots, like the Ben-Day artifacts that are integral to Roy Lichtenstein's Pop masterpieces. Capricious as the light in a lush garden, a grid of dots can be stretched either under or over a broad, aqua-edged leaf. Supplementally, Salam makes use of the density of acrylic paint when it's not much thinned by a medium. She lays down an underpinning recalling the pattern of flocking on old-fashioned wallpaper. Graphic festoons representing flowers may be either exposed to the eye or visible as a millimeter tall ridge under an opaque layer of pigment. The narrative of which we are the living embodiment happens a layer at a time, but the past is always available in the present.

Rashidah Salam has a philosophical attitude towards her history, a disciplined acceptance that could have been learned from the discipline imposed upon any artist trying to represent lived experience with fussy pigments on a canvas. The surface changes; that much is inevitable. We can be the instrument of change, but the especially forceful acrylic paint imposes limitations. The gardens in Salam's work abound with life and possibility, but, she says, a painter is "stuck with the garden she has." Perhaps she means the universe of opportunity that opens before the practicing artist will nevertheless be bound by that person's own history and their lifelong habit of repeatedly working out the same patterns on the unformed canvas landscape.

--Drew Zimmerman, February, 2022

Carolyn Harper Drapes a City's Invisibles in Brilliant Cloth

By January of 2021, the phrase "in the middle of a pandemic" has come to express a wonder over the audacity of committing any number of mundane acts, considering. Carolyn Harper's Muse Gallery show with portraits, quilted and embroidered, of homeless citizens of a stricken city ought to leave the viewer gasping at its brazen defiance, which is a refusal to set aside humanity and generosity towards our fellow man even as terror and a numbed, me-first disregard for others is one bleak subtext of the new normal.

To be sure, the presentation of the striking collection of vivid characterizations of persons on the margins of public consciousness, whose dignity is challenged by devastating circumstance, is irregular, an improvisation appropriate to unprecedented times. A visitor to Philadelphia's oldest artists' co-operative finds Harper herself steadily embroidering a monumental fabric construction in plain view, with a section of the work stretched over a table, covered with pins, scissors, thread, and a styrofoam cup. The gallery, she says, is a more adequate studio space than she has access to when it isn't her month to mount a show. Also, the pandemic has altered Muse's usual sitting schedule; as a practicality, only the artist most intimately engaged with the exhibit has a reason to risk interaction with the occasional passerby, who must also weigh the probability of infection against the thrill of seeing masterful art in the moment of realization.

For one such daredevil, an effect of seeing the artist sewing away, masked of course, on a work that is already a striking likeness, is that the reality it expresses has more immediacy than a work encountered in a frame, occupying the abstract space of a finished exhibit. "Yes! Here's a homeless neighbor on the pavement out-of-doors, even as we speak!"

Other considerations the show brings to mind have to do with the art history context of quilting, and the decades-long rise to prominence of the homespun creations of mostly rural, mostly Southern exponents of art as necessity. The meticulously researched and lovingly curated museum shows and permanent exhibitions of quilts both gorgeous and homely are at the forefront of a movement to seize on the native imperative of everyday craftspersons who elevate typical experience to a level of meaningfulness. While we may regard the work of an artist rigorously trained in an academic environment as a step or two removed from the spontaneous compulsion to impose a human hand on the erraticisms of physical reality, the unschooled practitioner of the highly refined--yet unofficial--practice of quilting is substantially free of pretense and self-consciousness.

Harper's work has in common with the outsider quiltmakers of the South the use of fabric, that most natural and earthy of materials, and the instinctive use of art to distinguish the commonplace. Highly trained in the academic rigors of the textile artist, she has a dazzling arsenal of fabric treatments at her disposal. In some pieces, she utilizes a batik process to create a rich, multi-layered appearance to her portrait surfaces and admits that the randomness of batik's effects makes collaboration with chance part of the finished work. So much as the best modern art balances between controlling design and an appreciation of accidental, unwilled results, the sensibility behind her honest and often monumental portraits of the homeless implores the viewer to accept the cruelty of circumstances in their lives. There but for the grace of God... In the middle of a pandemic, Harper's affirmation of the dignity of those most wronged by fate makes one want to weep for the fragility of all existence and cherish especially a superbly generous gesture towards the least fortunate members of our much-threatened community.

A Response to "I Remember You:
Portraits of Hope"

Thirty-two months after meeting Carolyn Harper in mid-quilt at her Muse Gallery show, I attended her 2022 exhibition I Remember You: Portraits of Hope at St. Asaphs in Bala Cynwyd. I hadn’t encountered so much of her large portraiture in one space, and nothing can compare to the aura of sanctity a gallery in an actual Episcopal church confers on the art; the show was powerfully affecting. Harper’s fabric arts document the humanity of persons who are homeless or touched by homelessness. The discreet organization of dark and light in her likenesses indicates she works from photographic material; additionally, she collects testimony of the kind that conventionally completes a personal history.

Harper and I had had some conversations about whether documentary text and social activism could be relayed in an art context. What Picasso said was any subjective interpretation of reality is political because it argues for an alternate way of seeing. Even overtly political content, like the responses to Abu Ghraib by Botero and Golub, convey their makers’ unique, subjective reaction to the horrors of the external world. Harper herself argued, why should someone ever be made to justify an expression of compassion for their fellow man? Indeed.

A tougher puzzle was trying to fix documentary text within an artistic setting. Harper felt obligated to make available to the public the histories of individuals alongside their portraits. She had tacked commentary to the walls at Muse Gallery, but I didn’t see a scrapbook at the St. Asaphs show. Although we recognize an image instantaneouly, so much as a sentence fragment requires a span of time to decipher. Despite the incongruity, I had an idea that a very expressive representation of text, letter-by-letter on a handwrought ground, might earn it the right to preen next to one of those gorgeous evocations of character! Or, what about detailing the resonance between the patchwork arrangement of letters and words in a sentence and the strips of cloth that compose a quilt? I didn’t get very far with my experiments, but, although the conversation thread never made it into the stitchery, I kept teasing the questions: can bits of textual information occupy the same artistic dimension with a picture in a frame and can symbols for speech enrich what an artist conveys pictorially?

Having imagined using text to represent the life of a displaced person, I eventually came to the conclusion that any words accompanying Harper’s portraits would be, despite some accompanying intellectual contrivance of mine, superfluous. She luminously represents the humanity of persons who are callously ignored every day at Market and 2nd Street, around the block from Muse Gallery. Harper’s fine silk communicates the fleeting preciousness of life in autumnal hues; the warp and weft of Arachne’s threads evoke what Melville called the cross purposes of fate and free will; her exquisite needlework is the material representation of solicitude. Most of all, Carolyn Harper deftly conveys the history of her aggrieved subjects in the pictorial representation of their faces, eyes weary but still alight, carelines stitched in by the step-by-step navigation of an unfeeling existence. The way her gorgeous batik backgrounds lend translucence and depth to opaque materials reminds me of the random effects that are integral to the formation of every personality. The promise of the show’s title was fully realized: by acknowledging the light of humanity in others we may at least spark the hope of reconciliation among every lost soul.

Harper’s artistry restores the cornerstone of hope to the homeless, and recognition of their humanity confirms our own. Not only are fragments of text superfluous to her project, they are anathema to it. In my experience, we use words as clumsy labels for extremely delicate and complicated situations. Mental illness, abuse, addiction, incarceration, impoverishment: when we turn the nouns into adjectives, they become a compassionate person’s unnecessary reason for reaching out to another human being, and a less compassionate man’s rationalization for shunning a stranger or disqualifying someone from sitting at their lunch table. The embrace of humanity wherever it is found forms the impulse that reaches out to our fellows in need across backstory differences; angled accounts come afterwards, inadequate to do what a talented portraitist accomplishes with a few deft strokes.

The Harrow (pictured below), though it could never have resulted from a direct collaboration with
Carolyn Harper, nevertheless was inspired by our conversations and her moving show at St. Asaphs. Clumsy as my language may be, I can confidently say my expression of humanity runs in a darker direction than hers! Harper’s subject is the human spirit, and my motive is to tangibly suggest abstractions that crush it. The compelling political aspect of our two approaches seems about the same: both argue for different ways of puzzling together a familiar presence using unexpected materials. Harper, I could say, presents what humanity is and “I cover the waterfront,” what humanity is not. It’s okay: each according to their tools and skills.

In Kafka’s “The Penal Colony,” the harrow is a machine that uses a stylus to carve the crime of the penitent into his flesh. The commandant who operates the elaborate device relishes the moment when realization of the law breaks across the face of the sentenced man. In an instant, the recognition passes. After that, the men just bleed to death.

The fellow who organizes exhibitions at St. Asaphs politely asked me to submit my portfolio when Harper was kind enough to introduce me to him. I wrote to her afterwards and remarked how strange–even inappropriate–it was that my work would follow hers in the same space. I mentioned Kafka’s final request to his friend Max Brod: ”Destroy my writings. They offer no hope to anyone.” When I wrote to her, I believed Kafka’s famous request resulted from a conscience about releasing his personal horror into the stream of the world’s discourse, but I recently learned of another interpretation of his motive. Kafka’s own letters listed embarrassment over the supposed technical flaws in his writing as the reason to destroy them, a rationale more editorial than existential.

Of all my writings the only books that can stand are these: “The Judgment,” “The Stoker,” “Metamorphosis,” “Penal Colony,” “Country Doctor,” and the short story “Hunger Artist” . . .  But everything else of mine which is extant . . .  all these things without exception are to be burned, and I beg you to do this as soon as possible. ...Why resuscitate old labors?..Only because I haven’t burnt them yet? . . .  What’s the point of preserving such miscarried works, even if the miscarriage was artistic? (Literary Hub online, Sep. 2018)

When I was at the Harvard Square Coop bookstore during my senior year in high school, they had a whole shelf of biographical material about Kafka, each book having a different set of facts and assumptions, piecing together somewhat different portraits, emphasizing one feature or another. Why do we think the platitudes and labels, the heuristics we use are adequate to express the humanity of any subject? I remember the Harvard Coop because I only visited it that one time. The store detective caught me trying to steal a copy of Kafka’s Letters to My Father, and he only let me leave because I promised not to return. I never did. And that’s a biographical tidbit I’ve never put in print. Does carving my confession into flesh, paper, or a silicon chip make me a thief? Should I submit myself to the law? My god, if I had to make shelter in the nutshell of language, I’d be homeless.

Circle Gets the Square: Jim Kippen and Maureen Drdak

A pair of artists who have been members of Muse Gallery in Old City, Philadelphia, demonstrate to me a striking contrast in the way an individual artist uses technical facility to approach the thorny problem of personal expression. Jim Kippen's work typically uses square shapes to represent man-made objects, and Maureen Drdak favors the circle to symbolize natural creation.

Because the arbitrary construct of a flat surface in a frame is taken as a given by painters who work only with oozing pigment and brushes, the art world has created Jim Kippen as a potent antidote. What Kippen has discovered–-hidden in plain sight–-is the artificial yet ubiquitous rectangle, which isn’t after all a creation of nature, but is rather the means by which men slice out a tiny section of their swirling, whirling experience of the world in order to have any hope of communicating their vision to others. As the rectangular frame around a congruous surface is completely artificial, no romantic notions of what must occupy that space ought to be tolerated: can’t these self-stroking, brush-wielding, art fascists stop slathering on their pretty make-up for a second and give someone else a turn at all this persistent and infernal blankness?

Since nothing in nature is either perfectly flat or contained within opposing right angles, we ought to acknowledge that the conventional oil painting is completely a man-made construct. In fact, our largely artificial environment utilizes the classic form of the post and pillar for many, many more “presentations” than those pigment and paper vanities Fred and Barney hung on the walls of their caves. Street signs and advertisements, video screens, carpets, and, hell, doors and windows all resemble from a construction point of view the squares and rectangles painters with skin in the game call fine art. Grids are elemental to human handicraft. Put one stick over another and Voila! there you have it. (I’d say, let’s not glamorize or mystify the basic cross, but, you know…) Like the equally fundamental circle, a curve in which every position is equidistant from a central point, the rectangle appeals to some primordial aesthetic favoring balance; additionally, several of them can be neatly stacked. Artificiality is likely the point: an expression of the builder’s triumphant transcendence of nature.

Kippen’s work often literally references signage, carpets, and, as he has written, “things seen in windows.” An artist who not only organizes within a grid his dispatches to other sentient beings but also has an innate, metacognitive understanding of what the primal urge to communicate is all about, Kippen deconstructs the completely unnatural process of producing art while celebrating the wholly human impulse to create it. Just as he has noticed the inevitability from a human standpoint of the rectangularly bound image, he has explicitly sought out other commonplace activities other than dragging paint from the end of a brush that accumulate colors and shapes on a flat surface. Like the very first creators who played with their kindling before relegating it to the blazing domain of the necessary, Kippen forms parallel and intersecting lines on brightly colored surfaces by purely mechanical means, like placing and removing masking tape and string, working with the colored surface and the elemental obstruction of that color. His use of the wholly mechanical process of lightly rubbing a translucent pigment against the mottled surface of paper or canvas to illuminate its texture creates gauzy, vibrant patterns that should be the envy of any painter trying with her own hand to imitate the noisy depth of natural planes and forms.

I’m not trying to say what Jim Kippen, uber artist, is trying to do; my interest is in sharing why I admire the man’s work. He defies in an elegant and sophisticated way the tired aesthetic of so many painters of my acquaintance who glorify their mastery of paint and brushes and think, because they invested years and years (and likely tens of thousands of dollars) in attaining the formidable skill of rendering an artificial likeness of a completely subjective version of whatever is “out there,” that they somehow are the only artists worth seeing or celebrating. I, for one, appreciate creativity that takes place in the space preceding conventions about how to represent the subject in some academic code through rigorous, prescribed discipline, art that embodies, if you will, the very natural impulse to indicate one’s own existence in a cruel nature bent on erasing it.

My visit to Gross McCleaf gallery (January 2022) to see Maureen Drdak’s impressive, somber, Burning Worlds exhibition surely produced awe over that artist’s formidable technique, the striking repoussé method she uses to combine relief and the gravity of metalworking with acrylic painting. Maureen creates intricate and almost mystically beautiful forms–-some of them suitable to be the shields of warriors in the epic Mahabharata–-that are the antithesis of the gay couch paintings, the whimsies, the unschooled drek many of her contemporaries seem content to bring to market. This lady is into some serious shit.

My reaction is also a personal one, having to do with what makes a proper subject for a modern art work. Is Drdak a Mary Cassatt, another PAFA alum whose work benefitted from a way of looking at art learned from voyages to foreign lands, or is she a scary Cassandra, gifted and screeching her visions of impending doom to a burning world that probably doesn’t give a f#*ck? Plainly, art won’t solve the global warming crisis (I give us about five years until the coastline reaches Gross McCleaf’s doorstep). Remember that scary Midnight Oil song “Beds Are Burning” about Australia’s treatment of the Aboriginies? And two years ago when the whole of the country seemed to be incinerating? MTV’s video art, one must admit, was helpless to avert Apocalypse.

If 10,000 hammer strokes and the alchemy of pigments, sable brushes, and metal melting in crucibles can create some kind of talisman against temporal disasters, I guess Maureen’s the artist to figure it all out. Burning Worlds, with its Buddhist forms and techniques and references to Sanskrit scripture, reminds me that to civilizations much, much older than mine, life, death, and rebirth are inevitable cycles, and to be a contemporary artist in an urban setting whose work makes sense on the wall of a Nepalese shrine is a contradiction that a commercial art exhibition cannot easily resolve.

Constance Culpepper:
A Patterning Compulsion

Constance Culpepper is showing a recent set of large oils at the 3rd Street Gallery's new 2nd street space across from their old 3rd Street space, in Philadelphia. The show (September, 2014) is a triumph of the co-operative model, where gifted artists with much to contribute eschew the typical commercial model and manage the gallery plant themselves. Culpepper's bright, whimsical interiors and delicate handling of thinned oils are as charming as ever and give notice that the season for art of substance has returned to Old City after a summer hiatus.

Ms. Culpepper won't mind if we compare her interiors, lush with patterns and delicate inanimate objects, to Matisse. Influence is quite different than imitation. A concurrent show across town at the Barnes of Cezanne's still lifes of fruit represents the lurking presence of the human observer; Culpepper's pleasing artificial grids and scrolls of man-made objects suggest human activity without imposing a human shadow or injecting even one animate thing in the space. In Ms. Culpepper or Matisse's paintings of interiors we enjoy the compulsivity of human patterning over of an insensate and chaotic environment. Living things, the birds and bees, express their lively industrious in their constructions, nests and hives. Cezanne groups natural objects to suggest a brooding, individual consciousness, the drama of observation, exiled from what is real. A chair, a tablecloth, a painted vase, these things invite us to construct the human presence without constructing it apart from being.

The barely-off-the-fabric compositions in Culpepper's interiors, deft and confident graffitoes of oil-thinned color banding and dyeing canvas, are proud announcements of a human handiwork in the wild, the making of a home, the civilizing of an indifferent cosmic exterior. The artist just returned from Morocco, which she loves for its tradition of tile-making and human sails and archways against the blue of the infinite sky and fire of the infinite desert. It is the desert cultures that forbid the human reproduction of nature, limiting expression of the human stain to abstraction, architecture and the all-over patterning of carpet and canvas. Here then is art, not as a challenge to God or proof of some subjective leverage in an unconscious landscape, but art as the compulsion to impose fingerprints and tracks on cave walls or dunes. Nature is an irresistable canvas; Kilroy was here.

I should probably assert how beautiful Constance Culpepper's large works are and back off, having articulated nothing, but I wouldn't be doing them justice. They aren't merely decorative, like a persian rug or the worst sort of abstract drips and drags across a canvas. The work in the 3rd Street Gallery show this month implies intelligence. It implies a whole civilization. By refusing to represent an ego, a maker inhabiting the space, I think the activity recorded in these works is rather sophisticatedly reserved, feminine in the sense of posessing a social grace, and more wise than overweening. That's what you can do with your figure in the landscape, gentleman.

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