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The Art of Economics
This blog discusses the debt crisis in the US and the impacts of this crisis on Canada. As this is an artist’s blog, it includes a few samples of my artworks that have investigated the economic system that has led to this debt crisis and its impacts on society and the environment. The discussion then looks at some alternative approaches to the art of economics and propose a workable Canadian alternative to the business-as-usual approach that has not served us well.
Debt
The most important message in the excellent film, Surviving Progress was that debt is the driving force behind the world’s current economic, social & ecological crises. As apostate Wall Street bankers and IMF bureaucrats explained, debt is the force behind: destruction of the world’s most crucial ecosystems; poverty and social upheaval in developing countries; and the likely end of civilization as we know it.
In pre-capitalist societies, debt was owed to the state rather than private individuals. When the burden of debt for most of its citizens became unreasonable, in the interests of avoiding revolution, the rulers would forgive all debt, ride out the consequences & start afresh. With capitalism, however, debt ownership has concentrated in the hands of 10% of the world’s private individuals, the financial oligarchy, and they do not have any interest in the health or even continuation of society as a whole. As a class they would rather destroy the planet than give up their self-interest.
Though the financial oligarchy has a great deal of power, those of us with surviving democracies do still have the means to fight back through the political process. As Michael Moore says, “we’re a democracy – we can pass any laws we want!” Whether this is still true remains to be seen. Surviving Progress clearly advocates that we elect rulers willing to cancel debt in order to save civilization rather than the financial oligarchy.
The US Debt Crisis
This might be easier said than done. According to the US Treasury, the federal government currently has $36.22 trillion in federal debt and every day, the US spends $2.6 billion on interest. As of September 30, 2024, the US debt-to-GDP ratio was 123%. This means that the US debt was $35.46 trillion, which is higher than the GDP of $28.83 trillion for the fiscal year 2024. The main cause of this crisis is that revenue from taxes exceeds spending. If the US were to fairly tax some it’s billionaires, this problem would go away, but unfortunately the billionaires are in charge, and choose to cut spending instead. As the billionaires who hold the US government debt are also in charge of the country, they would not be willing to see any forgiveness of the debts they are owed. Fifty+ years of policies designed to enrich the few, at the expense of the country as a whole, have created this debt and the enormous inequalities in wealth & power that threaten the stability of the country and, by extension, the world.
Canada’s Government debt accounted for 69.4 % of the country’s GDP in March 2024, so it is not as dire as in the US. Many Canadians may believe that debts owed by our neighbours are not our concern, but because Canada is so closely tied to the US, it they catch a cold, we sneeze. Or more accurately, we catch our death. The current US president’s threats to annex Canada stem directly from the debt crisis in that country. That crisis has been exacerbated by de-industrialization and de-funding of the educational and other social systems so hat the US has become less competitive internationally. Other countries like China have surged ahead economically and creatively, especially in technology, and the US is falling ever-further behind.
Instead of reforming an unworkable economic system of distribution, ruling elites in the US, both Democratic and Republican, have chosen to step up the extraction of wealth from other countries. In addition to the list of countries from which the US has traditionally appropriated their wealth, the US has added Mexico, Panama, Denmark, Europe and Canada. So US debt has become Canada’s problem.
Image representing the annexation of Canada to the U.S., Oliver Lawrence Georgeson Annexation
If the US were to “Annex” Canada, it is unlikely that we would we become a 51st state, as Trump has said, but instead would become a protectorate like Puerto Rico, without voting rights. As in Puerto Rico, the main source of revenue for the country would be from impoverished young Canadian women leaving their families to become US nannies and cleaners, while Canada’s natural resources would go south. Would Canadian ruling elites fight to prevent the annexation of Canada by the US? Canadian Author and Activist, Yves Engler suggests that Canadian armed forces are so heavily integrated militarily with the US, that they might instead participate in a possible invasion.
“The depth of the Canada-U.S. military alliance is such that if US Forces attacked this country it would be extremely difficult for the Canadian Forces to defend our soil. In fact, given the entanglements, the Canadian Forces would likely enable a US invasion.” Engler goes on to suggest that, “It’s time politicians start demanding Canada decisively break away from the US empire and the place to start is severing the military ties.”
In addition to withdrawing from NATO & NORAD, Engler suggests that Canada should sever its economic ties to the US, as it’s global aggression will not solve it’s economic problems and debt crisis. “The G7 has successfully asserted capitalist/NATO influence. But the imperial alliance is facing renewed pressure from the expansion of the BRICS. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa recently added Indonesia as a full member and numerous other associate members. As an expansionist Donald Trump becomes president of the USA, all those who support a truly independent Canada must work towards a multilateral world. We must expand our relationship with other countries and move away from our dangerous economic, diplomatic, social and military reliance on the United States. A good first step would be Canada withdrawing from the G7. “
Who Runs Things? Running Man
While heightened US aggression to Canada & others can be traced to its debt crisis, the US debt crisis itself can be traced to the incredible wealth that has been allowed to flow from the public to the private sphere – to individuals, corporations and oligarchies. With that wealth has come unlimited power so that the wealthy are able to manipulate the political system to ensure wealth continue to flow from the public to the private sector.
How is a mere artist to respond to the threat, not only to Canadian, but to global economic, social and political stability? This is, of course, not a new threat, as this situation has been brewing since corporations first began their rise to power and the possibility of true democracy began to fade in North America. As an artist, my response, 25 years ago, was a series called Running Man. This was an overtly political theme and it drew criticism from my peers, as the dominant paradigm is that contemporary art must not be didactic and present a point of view.
Running Man appeared as three drawings for Artmoney, an international art project presenting a global, alternative currency. Artmoney is currency-sized original art, contributed by artists around the world. My contribution was 3 bills showing the evolution of a running man into a corporate man – or the man who runs things.
Artmoney #1, 2000, scratchboard & ink, 12×18 cm, (4 3/4 x 7 inches) 
Artmoney #2, 2000, scratchboard & ink,12×18 cm (4 3/4 x 7 inches) 
Artmoney #3, 2000, scratchboard & ink, 12×18 cm (4 3/4 x 7 inches) The motto on each bill, “This is the way the world will end“, is an embarrassing misquote from the poem The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot. The final stanza may be the most quoted of all of Eliot’s poetry: “This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.”
This motto was also carved around the base of a piece called Special Cases in 1999. As described in more detail in my blog On Corporate Power, that sculpture was about Running Man in his bureaucratic context – ensuring that economic demands must always take precedence over social or ecological needs.
Special Cases #2, 1999, Maron-Lea Jamieson 48″ x 72″ x 30″ 
Running Man, 2002, Marion-Lea Jamieson, 16’6″ h x 12′ w, painted steel, cast resin and baubles, installed In Kelown BC Running Man also took the form of a public art piece in Kelown BC, where he stands today.
Economics: The Dismal Science
There is one dominant economic philosophy that has led to the unmanageable debt and enormous inequalities that now threaten the stability of the US and Canada. This is the approach to economics characterized as The Chicago School. The economic philosophy of the Chicago School, of unfettered free markets and little government intervention, has been adopted by ruling elites and has led to waves of successive financial crisis and growing income inequality. One alternative economist suggested that the Chicago School economists are, “the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.”
Progressive Canadian Economist Stuart Jamieson, age 88 My father, the late Dr. Stuart Jamieson, was an economist who applied his hard-won knowledge to improving the lives of working people. As a Keynesian and Labour Economist, he supported the rights of workers to organize and improve their negotiating position with the owners of the means of production.
Like many progressives, Stuart Jamieson’s faith in the union movement was shaken by events in the early 1980’s in British Columbia. A draconian far-right government, bent on removing the social safety net, had managed to galvanize the many opposing factions into a unified force. But on the eve of a threatened general strike, the unions struck a deal with the government that protected workers and left the poor, sick, disabled & otherwise disadvantaged to fight for themselves. Disillusioned with the union movement and the potential for Economics to solve real-world problems, Jamieson turned to direct action. He joined the movement to save the old-growth forests in Clayquot Sound on Vancouver Island from timber harvesting and was arrested for blocking access to logging trucks. In his late eighties, he was fitted with an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet and placed under house arrest at his home on Bowen Island.
What was seen as a betrayal of a unified opposition to a right-wing attack on human rights was an example of why many on the far left distrust the union movement and socialism as a whole. When push comes to shove, they tend to sell out any larger movement in order to strike a deal that will protect their interests. This distrust of unions and socialism was based on the writings of Proto-Economist Karl Marx.
Marx is described as one of the most influential figures in human history and in a 1999 BBC poll was voted the “thinker of the millennium” by people from around the world. He argued that accumulation of capital shapes the social system and that social change was about conflict between opposing interests driven, in the background, by economic forces. He theorized that human history began with free, productive and creative work that was over time coerced and de-humanised, a trend most apparent under capitalism. Marx criticised utopian socialists, arguing that small scale socialistic communities would be bound to marginalisation and poverty, and that only a large scale change in the economic system can bring about real change. In other words, the workers of the world should unite in order to create a force large enough to confront capitalism. But this large scale change seems farther off than ever as workers in the US support politicians whose interest are diametrically opposed to their own.
John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Portrait of Karl Marx (1818–1883) Environmentalist David Suzuki tried to provide an alternative economic model in an article in the now defunct magazine, Common Ground.
Cover of Common Ground Magazine Suzuki suggested that Economics can address the narrow focus of the dominant economic model by putting a value on natural capital such as wetlands and forests. He reinforced this suggestion by noting that “These economic benefits have even received the attention of the World Bank, which plans to assist countries in tracking natural capital assets and including them in development plans, in the same way we track other wealth using the GDP index“. However, given that this is the World Bank, they would likely be interested in tracking natural assets the better to turn them into wealth for transnational corporations. The concept of turning natural resources into wealth was the inspiration for my sculptural piece below called Conversion, where green trees become gold to a backdrop of graffiti.
Conversion, 2001, ML Jamieson plywood, brackets, paints 18″ x 36″ x 12″ Suzuki’s idea of using capitalism to fix capitalism is the preferred path for those who want to tinker with the system to protect the environment, but leave the system itself intact.
Other ideas in that issue of Common Ground were more practical. The article by John Restakis, Beyond the Camps: Occupation and the Co-op Connection, provided a more practical approach to change that can be activated by ordinary people. John Restakis was the author of Humanizing the Economy – Co-operatives in the Age of Capital. He advocated participation in the co-operative movement which has a long history in Canada. As he said, “we have the experience of 170 years of co-operation to see that the tenets of democracy can be applied to economics just as in politics and that they work. It is this heritage of economic democracy that is invaluable to the movement that so ardently seeks an alternative to the status quo“.
As examples he pointed to the survival rate of co-ops which is double that of conventional businesses. He highlighted how credit unions, by responding to the actual needs of their members, didn’t engage in the fraudulent financial speculations that bankrupted the economy and had no need of massive public bailouts. He suggested that shifting our money from banks to credit unions is something concrete everyone can do. Co-ops reduce inequality on a global level because fair trade, based on the return of profits to small producers through their co-ops, isn’t based on the extraction of profit by exploiting the weak. And at a time of global economic recession, the experience of the recovered factory co-ops of Argentina, Uruguay and elsewhere shows how workers and the communities in which they live can take back control of shuttered factories and provide a living for workers and their families.
The left-wing Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, or CCF, was a Canadian political party that was the forerunner of the now centrist New Democratic Party, or NDP. Founded in 1932 in it was an aggregation of socialist, farm, co-operative and labour groups,with a number of goals, including: public ownership of key industries; universal pensions; universal health care; children’s allowances; unemployment insurance; and workers compensation. It also stated that “No CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Co-operative Commonwealth.” In 1939 and again in 1941, my grandmother, Laura Jamieson, was the first CCF MLA elected in Vancouver Centre.
Laura Jamieson’s 1940’s campaign photo In 1944, the CCF formed the first socialist government in North America in Saskatchewan, but during the Cold War, it was accused of having communist leanings. The party addressed these accusations in 1956, by replacing its original goals with more moderate ones, and becoming the NDP.
This underscores that Canada has roots in the cooperative movement and that this philosophy can provide an alternative to the global, dog-eat-dog capitalist system that now threatens us. This alternative would entail local and regional self-reliance and shortening the supply lines for imported and exported goods. This would not only make areas of Canada less reliant on global trade, but would lower greenhouse gases produced from shipping products over long distances. If the regions of Canada were to shorten supply lines and become as self-reliant as possible, this would lesson impacts from extortionist trade policies of the current US administration. The art of economics could be made to work for, rather than against, Canadians.
It would not, however, protect us from invasion. If Canada survives this administration, the ruling elites would do well to learn from this period. That lesson is: if we side with the school yard bully while he steals all the other kids’ lunch money, it should come a no surprise when he comes to steal ours.
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Running Man
I’m coming back to this blog about the Running Man theme, 14 years after I wrote it, because of the recent events that bring the hollow guy to mind. The new US President is threatening to annex Canada, as well as the Panama Canal, Greenland and a few other useful places. Instead of reforming an unworkable, unequal and unsustainable economic system, the US has chosen to step up extraction of wealth from other countries, such as ours. The image of Running Man has never been more apt, as he runs off with his briefcase full of ill-gotten gains.
Running Man, 2002, Marion-Lea Jamieson, 16’6″ h x 12′ w, painted steel, cast resin and baubles, installed In Kelown BC I worked with the Running Man image exclusively from about 1997-2002. This series, using an image of a man running headlong into the future and oblivious to the past, explores the ideas and assumptions behind the corporate free-enterprise paradigm, consumerism and the impacts of these ideas on society, economy and environment. The Running Man image is also a vehicle to explore the inner workings of individuals who are pressured into participating in relationships of dominance and ruthless competition. These people are always in a hurry, rushing toward their own and the planet’s demise. They must avoid personal attachments that might jeopardize the struggle to get ahead, so personal relationships are neglected in favour of business acquaintances.
Running Man sometimes becomes aware of the emptiness of his inner life but the feeling soon passes as the strength of his ideological commitment to the accumulation of wealth reasserts itself. A wonderful French film in the Vancouver Film Festival called My Piece of the Pie depicts the character of Running Man. This film was especially powerful because it did not follow the usual Hollywood formula where the nasty, ruthless rich guy sees the light at the end of the movie and, through personal transformation, becomes more sensitive & caring. This film illustrated the reality of the right-wing corporate mind-set: they just don’t get it. No matter how clearly he is shown the evils and grief caused by a fundamentally unethical economic system, Running Man is just is too entrenched in his position to change it. From where Running Man sits, everything looks just fine and when he is exposed to criticism of his world, he can’t figure out what people are griping about. To him, self-interest is the basis of a divine plan for the creation & distribution of wealth. Those with the most self-interest create the most wealth and then this wealth will trickle down to the rest of us. If wealth doesn’t trickle down, but continues to float up, this is caused by a lack of gumption among the have-nots. He believes free-enterprise capitalism is an economic system perfectly aligned with natural human impulses, and those not benefiting are just too lazy to take advantage of its opportunities. Like the pre-revolutionary French aristocrats, Running Man lives in a hermetically sealed world, protected against morality, reality and empathy.
The Personal is Political
The series began as a personal catharsis for understanding men who flee attachment. But in the process, I became aware that I too was a running man, avoiding real life by chasing success and worldly concerns. As they say, artists always make self-portraits.The Running Man image first appeared in a series of oil paintings in 1997. Below is its first appearance as a painting/sculpture study of a potential clear sheet acrylic sculpture.
Sculpture Study #1, 1998, acrylic paint on board, 
He’s Leaving Home,1998, 48″ h x 36″ w, oil on board Though women can and do participate in institutions of dominance, Running Man remained gender-specific to reflect the predominantly male corporate culture.
Another very early Running Man study in oils, was again, a study for a sculpture. There is a figure in a business suit cut out of clear sheet acrylic and superimposed on a scene, in this case, a selection of homey items.
I began to make the connection between the problems that men face in relationships with the larger competitive, alienating, consumer culture. As my understanding of the scope of this series progressed, I began to cut figures of the man in the suit out of plywood, put a clear acrylic briefcase in his hands and set him up in 3D configurations. This business-suited figure represented discorporate man, optimizing capital and cutting losses. The 3D series went on to examine the larger influences that were breaking down family, community and society and became a larger critique of global capitalism and its impacts on the economy, society,and the environment.
Another Running Man painting/sculpture study from this period introduced the idea that later became the wooden sculpture All That Glisters (shown below) and finally the large steel sculpture Running Man installed in Kelowna BC (shown above).
Sculpture Study #2, 1998, Acrylic paint on canvas, 42″ x 42″ The first sculptural piece in the Running Man series was called Special Cases (shown below) and it was an image about the exploitation of natural resources. The clear acrylic briefcases contain water, trees and fish, which are the big three resources of my home province of British Columbia. The piece illustrates that resources are extracted here, then processed elsewhere so that the value of resources does not benefit local economies. I exhibited this piece in 1999 in a sculpture exhibition at the University of Northern BC.
Special Cases, September 1999, Wood, plexiglas, 48″ x 72″ x 30″ At the time, I had no capability for shipping transporting or installing sculptures, so I roped the plywood figures and the large wooden base to the top of my Ford Escort wagon and headed toward Prince George. Just before Hope I could see plywood figures sliding off the back of the car in my rear-view mirror, so I pulled off the highway and struggled to tie down my load. Somehow, I got to Prince George where I installed the piece, stayed for a couple of days with a kind friend, then headed home.
When I made Special Cases, I had a day job as a planner for the BC Agricultural Land Commission (ALC), and was sculpting on days off. The title of the piece, Special Cases was inspired by my work at the Commission and an earlier job with the BC Ministry of Environment . Both bureaucracies were charged with the responsibility of protecting natural resources, but in both jobs, senior bureaucrats and politicians would find ways to avoid carrying out their legislated duties.
A favourite method of weaseling out from under the requirement to protect agricultural, forests, water and other resources, is to class them as “Special Cases”. So for instance, though the ALC was mandated to preserve & protect agricultural lands, a category of lands would be classed as Special Cases so that they can be developed in a business-as-usual approach. So new highways, roads, pipelines, pumping stations and prospecting for gravel, oil or minerals could be approved without an application.
This is Running Man in his bureaucratic context – ensuring that the dominant paradigm, which is that economic demands must always take precedence over over social or ecological needs, prevails. Briefly stated, the dominant paradigm assumes: 1) the universe revolves around the economic needs of one species (human beings) rather than the needs of the other 1.7 million species; and 2) human beings have a God-given right to consume an unlimited amount of other species and natural ecosystems. This paradigm forms the basis of individual, corporate and government decision making in BC and throughout the world.
The next piece in the series was called Colour Theory and it examined the social impacts of unrestrained capitalism on the lives of workers and others. In this piece, Running Man comes in two sizes: large and powerful, and small and powerless, and expresses relations of dominance. Poorer males accept the domination of wealthy, powerful elites only because the system allows them to dominate females and those further down the economic ladder. The more rigid and repressive the power structure in a society, the greater is the need to encourage subjugation of one group by another. Otherwise, that large pool of disaffected males whose lives are getting harder each year, would turn on the ruling class.
The larger version is the man in the business suit, with a clear acrylic briefcase and a hole where his heart and should should be. His look is outdated because his character was formed in the 1940s and ‘50s when the current system began. In a world of diminishing natural capital Running Man must become increasingly fanatical in order to ignore the fact that the system is unsustainable.
In this piece, the briefcases contains smaller, less powerful naked running men, some of which are dismembered. They represent the social dislocation that occurs when workers are transients, chasing uncertain employment created by increasingly mobile capital. These smaller figures also appear in a sub-series on the theme of graffiti, discussed in another blog. The title Colour Theory also comments on the ways in which elites set various ethnic groups against each other in order to deflect attention away from the fact that the economic system does not serve the majority’s interests.
Colour Theory, May 2001, Wood, Plexiglas, paints, 90″ x 96″ x 40″ The third sculpture in this series of wood & sheet acrylic works is called All That Glisters (shown below). In this piece, the briefcases contain bright but worthless baubles, illustrating the distorted values of a corporate culture in which economic wealth is valued over ecological and social health. This piece served as a model for the monumental sculpture of Running Man that was created in & for the City of Kelowna in 2002.
All That Glisters, 2000, Wood, Plexiglas, found baubles, hardware, 48” x 72” x 30” I created a mock-up of the sculpture as it would look onsite. Here is one of the first images I sent to the City.
image of initial Running Man proposal I used the above image of All That Glisters, placing it on a pedestal and photo-shopped it into the site. Originally, I had wanted to place the Running Men on a stack of coins & experimented with versions of a stack of coins as shown. The edge of each coin was to be ribbed like a real coin, but the cost of an 8′ pedestal of that diameter and the plasma cutting of the ribbing was prohibitive.
Running Man on a stack of coins I soon realized that 3 parallel figures did not create a sufficiently stable form, so using cardboard models, I triangulated the figures as shown.
cardboard maquette I also reduced the pedestal to one coin balanced on a column with CNC routered images of naked running men. The column referenced ancient columns that featured ancient Running Man successfully defeating his enemies.
Though I did as much work as possible myself, much of the fabrication was done at a fabrication facility called Monashee and other metal shops. Shown below are one of the figures freshly cut out of one 3/8″ sheet of mild steel 8′ x 24′ and being sand-blasted prior to painting..
Column of Pedestal 
Running Man figure cut out 
sand-blasting prior to painting 
Off Center, November 2002 After the symposium I wanted to experiment with concrete, especially casting in concrete. I cast 3 small running men using a rubber mold, (Smooth-On’s Brush-On 35) and a plaster mother mold to cast the three concrete guys for Off-Centre (below). The concrete mix I use for casting was just cement & sand (1:3) and water mixed 1:4 with white glue (Polyvinyl acetate). I got the steel flat stock machine rolled and hung a mossy rock from a steel chain.
Off-Centre depicts Running Man‘s world. The rock represents the earth and around it run the guys in suits. They see the earth as a small part of the economy, an “externality”. As it is external to the economy, it has unquantifiable economic value and therefore isn’t factored in as wealth. This is an inversion of the real world in which the economy is merely one activity by one species on the planet, which is entirely dependent on the earth’s ecosystems for its continuance.
Off-Centre was shown at Peace Arch Park which straddles the Canadian/US border. The rock originally hung from a single chain so that it dangled within the steel rim. But viewers swung the rock on the chain until it flew up and broke one of the figures. So a second chain was attached to prevent people from playing with the artwork. Mindless abuse such as this has had a profound effect on contemporary outdoor art. In order to withstand the rigours of public interaction, funding bodies favour stolid geometrical shapes designed to withstand oafs that climb on, swing from and have their pictures taken atop any and every artwork in the public realm. This is a far cry from earlier works that overcome the limitations of the material to create sweeping, swooping lines and delicate forms . Nothing can project from public art that will not be snapped off; no small part can be attached that will not be removed; and no paint, powder-coat or other effort to create a durable finish can survive being scuffed and scraped by shoes, pen-knives, stones, skateboards and anything else.
This phenomenon is discussed in more detail in another blog bu suffice it to say that most people have no respect for public art that is unlucky enough to be placed in their path. Everyone assumes that if something is not a sidewalk, a park bench or a fire hydrant, it must be a climbing apparatus. We in the West need to educate people not to abuse sculpture the same way that people have been coerced into not blowing smoke in the faces of fellow diners or not letting their doggies poop on the sidewalk. In Paris or Rome, every museum and art gallery had groups of school kids sitting in front of works of art learning that these things are an important part of their culture. As you tour the Tuileries Garden you do not see kids swinging off heroic outstretched arms or using urns as skateboard ramps.
Here in North America we accept that this is will happen and only permit idiot-proof works to be displayed. But even the sturdiest, most well-designed & fabricated work isn’t safe from the public. An example is a great sculpture called Olas de Viento or “Wind Waves” by Yvonne Domenge which sat overlooking the beach in Richmond’s Garry Point Park. When I last came across it there were several children climbing through the piece while their Mom attended to her cel phone. The kids were throwing rocks at the inner surfaces, which is clearly a common activity as the paint finish was chipping off in many places.
Though it is outdoors and relatively unprotected, Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park discourages vandalism of its priceless sculpture collection by unambiguous and continuous signage “Do Not Touch the Sculptures”. No namby-pamby “please do not climb on the sculptures for your own safety” here. So no one so much as steps off the foot paths for a closer look. Every sculpture everywhere should have such signage.
In addition to favouring bullet-proof public art, funding bodies are also reluctant to fund controversial art. Since Kelowna’s bold commissioning of Running Man for its downtown core, there have been no further Running Man commissions. Carved Bears, leaping fish, abstract forms and colourful banners abound and are not likely to generate outraged letters to the editor. And private commissions or purchases of anything in the Running Man series have been noticeably absent as well. Those who can afford to buy artworks (the big collectors in my town are property developers) don’t want artworks that challenge the status quo.
The last piece in the Running Man series was a maquette for a steel & resin screen called The Many Moods of Running Man. This would entail plasma-cutting running man figures out of 3/8″ steel then filling in the cut-outs with coloured sheet acrylic. I can see it now at a scale of 1:3 or maybe 1:4, astride a grand plaza with a water feature murmuring in the background and the sun casting colourful reflections of Running Man! Below is the maquette in wood and Mylar.
The Many Moods of Running Man, 2003, 3′ h x 8′ w; wood & Mylar The piece is suggestive of the way corporatism co-opts spontaneous creative cultural products for its own purposes. So if, for instance, grass-roots organizations are successful in promoting human rights, ecological awareness or if an art movement or school arises that captures the public imagination, corporations are quick to co-opt this energy to their own ends. Thus the life in every worthwhile cultural development from rap to the “Green” movement is neutralized as a vehicle for profit.
This was the last piece in the series as I had to admit that buyers weren’t lining up to put a Running Man over the sofa. So for the next 5-6 years I worked on abstract sculptures, creating a two and three dimensional vocabulary of forms that were complete as discreet units and worked together as an overall theme. I also pushed the limits of my technical abilities to design and fabricate works in three dimensions.My thoughts on abstract art have been marshalled in another blog.
The Running Man series challenged the unspoken yet pervasive artistic convention that overtly political art is somehow diminished by its subject-matter. In many ways, I agree that art should operate on several fluidly interconnected levels, rather than be nailed in place. And no matter how strong a point of view an artist intends to project in a piece, viewers see it from their own perspective and interpret artworks in various ways. For instance, most people I spoke to about Running Man assumed it was an almost humorous depiction of how rushed and harried we all are, and didn’t connect it to any larger context. As I had put out a request for baubles, many citizens of Kelowna responded, creating a community connection to the piece.
But at a time in history like the present, when the political spectrum keeps moving farther & farther to the right, as an artist it is difficult to focus on creating new artworks. Yes, performances, galleries and books counter the violence and destruction that is taking place. But these can act as a counter-balance while at the same time trying to engender political awareness. This was the goal of Running Man.
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This Is Happiness
This is Happiness, by Niall Williams, is a gorgeously written book in a self-described Baroque style. Many reviewers have simply said, “this is happiness”, to read an author who weaves us into an intricately colourful tapestry of words.
This Is Happiness describes the transition of a small community from a traditional way of living to one of modernity. The transition takes place in the Irish village of Faha on the western edge of Ireland, via the arrival of electricity in the 1950’s. Until that time, the villagers are described as living much as they had for the last thousand years, using horse drawn carts, oil lamps, and in touch with the rhythm of the seasons. Very few ventured outside the limits of the village if they could avoid it and most were suspicious of “foreigners”, such as those from the next village. The community was largely self-supportive, interdependent, close and for the most part, happy. The villagers entertained themselves with music, stories and interpersonal relationships and didn’t miss modern conveniences they’d never had.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, This village is a classic example of what Max Weber, a founding figure in sociology, would have called Gemeinschaft or one with strong traditional bonds of family and local community. Villages like Faha offer support and a sense of belonging that is important to everyone’s identity, so that people in Gemeinschaft communities tend to be grounded and emotionally strong.
Max Weber, 1918, Leif Geiges, Publisher, Encyclopædia Britannica Modern or Gesellschaft-based relationships, according to Weber, are rooted in “rational agreement by mutual consent”, the best example of which is a commercial contract. In these societies, the individual is the important element rather than the community. But because of this fragmentation of community into autonomous individuals, people are less connected to each other and where they live, and therefore less happy.
This is Happiness doesn’t describe the world after the electrification of the village when it becomes part of modernity. But Williams provides hints of what is coming and what will be lost, especially the music and language that provide connection and joy to the villagers. With electricity will come the tyranny of clock time, as opposed to the unregulated, convoluted but free sense of time that it replaces. He describes this pre-electrified sense of time:
“To conquer both time and reality then, one of the unwritten tenants of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion. And because in Faha, like in all country places, time was the only thing people could afford, all stories were long, all storytellers took their, and your, and anyone else’s, time, and all gave it up willingly, understanding that tales of anything as aberrant and contrary as human beings had to be long, not to say convoluted…”
Williams also describes the villager’s music, like storytelling, as insubordinate to clock time:
“One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You can begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that,, and unlike the clear edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound map Even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. Something like that. Which, I suppose, is both my method and aim in telling this story too.”
https://bookatradband.ie/irish-folk-bands/ It is rare and pleasurable for an author to so clearly link his writing style to his subject and theme, and Williams has succeeded in writing a novel that reflects the time, the music, the people and their stories. Williams’ novel takes us deep into the heart and soul of the community of Faha which is the source of the power of the music and storytelling in that place:
“It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realize once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.”
This is as good a description as any I have read of what makes any book, music, or painting worthwhile.
This is Happiness is an unabashedly nostalgic look at a pre-modern Irish countryside that fostered local arts and language born of the people and the place where they lived. Though not described, there is an implicit contrast with modern cities and arts that are divorced from the souls of those who write or create. But Williams is not attempting to provide a balanced vision of that rustic Irish past. As many other novelist have written about small town rural life, it can be stultifying and even violent toward those who don’t fit into the village norms.
In his study, Suicide, Emile Durkheim said, “…the taste for individuation, and the love of progress…cannot exist without generating suicide.” In order to combat “corrosive individual egoism,” and “the moral poverty of our age”, he suggested that decentralized occupational or social groups could replace the strong sense of community and connection to each other that we have lost with modernity. Ideally, these would also tolerate differences and allow for individual beliefs outside the norm.
Émile Durkheim, (photographer unknown) This is Happiness raises similar questions about progress. Are we any better off driving in cars rather than horse drawn carts? Are we any better informed with electronic devices rather than books? Are we any happier with the over abundance of consumables in our stores? Williams doesn’t temper his strongly held conviction that we are not, having given up the true sources of happiness, which are the stories and music that come from our souls and connection to the place where we live.
In earlier blogs I have delved into the issue of modernity and the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of progress that has devastated the planet and risks the continuing existence of life on earth. If we had stayed at the pre-modern, pre-electrical, pre-industrial stage, there would be a much smaller number of human beings consuming a much smaller proportion of the earth’s resources. Other species would have benefited if we had remained in a state of Gemeinschaft, living in damp stone huts at a subsistence level. While this state may not have been one of happiness for all human beings, it would have been a state of greater happiness for other species and the Earth as a whole.
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Behind the Times
This blog explores ideas around art and the times in which an artwork is created. It questions whether art must somehow, or for some reason, “keep up with the times” in order not to be “behind the times”. Next, the concept of time itself is touched on and whether artists can step outside of time or become timeless. In other words, can the process of creation transcend time?
Time’s Arrow
The assumption that artists must produce work that reflects the time in which they live is a widely accepted and unquestioned truism. This is part of the paradigm that, as time is moving forward, we must all keep in step, or that art, like technology, must progress. Otherwise, we may become “behind the times”, believed an undesirable place to be. This means that artists whose work is considered daring, cutting edge and contributing to a progressive understanding of art, are constantly supplanted by the next wave.
An example of this was enacted in a play produced many years ago called Red, by John Logan, directed by Kim Collier and performed at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre. It was one of the last main stage plays the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company performed before it closed in 2012. What a delight it was to see such great acting, dialogue, direction, & sets. Classical, full-on theatre such as this is scarce these days in Vancouver and elsewhere, as there seems to be less and less funding for the arts. Available performance space is increasingly devoted to “multi-media performances” with video, photography, sound (as opposed to music) and as much new media as possible, perhaps to appear contemporary & relevant to the Tweet generation. Not that Red didn’t use video & stills, but they were used in such a way that they didn’t clutter up the play unnecessarily.
Four Darks in Red, Mark Rothko, 1958 The play, taking place about 1968, foreshadows artist Mark Rothko‘s suicide in 1970. The visual metaphor is that of the colour black, symbolizing death & destruction, gradually engulfing the colour red, symbolizing life in all its beauty & horror. It was an apt penultimate play for an excellent theatre company about to be scrapped.
The play suggests that much of Rothko’s mental anguish was caused by his feeling of growing irrelevance as the art fashion of the day moved to Pop Art as defined by such artists as Roy Lichtenstein
Artists who follow their inner direction and volition with luck can find themselves on the crest of the latest fashion in art. Then, when the tide turns and brings the next wave of young artists, influenced by a new set of circumstances, the formerly fashionable artists are considered behind the times. As the critic Harold Rosenberg said, Rothko and his contemporaries tore down “…unlimited formal experimentation and parody and fragments of radical ideas” only to have their own ideas derided as egotistical and outdated by the next generation of artists.
The following is a quote that I wrote down without noting the source.” The rhetoric of isms and counter-isms has vexed the art world since the Second World War with new stylistic trends set up every few years to oppose whatever has become fashionable (postmodern succeeding modern, deconstruction succeeding that, and so on). The superficial theoretical pretensions of the various after-modern “schools” use cheap pronouncements cribbed from works of philosophy or literary theory. Art enjoys an oedipal energy in which creation is always destruction, usually of one’s most intimate influences.”
This Oedipal energy is as integral to art as it is to the culture of consumption. We are constantly reminded that we must have the newest, best, most fashionable and most cutting-edge of everything, from electronics, to hairdos, to art. God forfend that we should have last-year’s, let alone last decade’s, version of anything. More profoundly, this is a belief that we are moving ever-forward on a trajectory of constant improvement. In this view, we are ever-striving onward & upward toward social & individual perfectibility in which all wrong thinking & wrong acting will be eradicated. So the clunky cars of the 50,s, the horrendous politics of the 40’s, the economic errors of the ’20’s, the stultifying social mores of the 1900’s, and all the ignorance and pestilence that went before is being left ever-further behind us. And the more recent & contemporary the art movement, the more likely it is to be closer to the goal of full understanding and intelligence. It’s a view solidly ensnared in the belief that time’s arrow moves in only one direction – forward into the future and we must be constantly changing with it. The type, quality or direction of change is not important, as long as we are not left behind the times.
ARROW OF TIME, Vladimir Kush, (undated print) 10.5 x 21.5 Recent thinking is that time moves not only forward but also sideways (backwards is disputed). We are programmed (no doubt for our own sanity) to only perceive the forward motion of time, but it’s sideways mobility accounts for the frequently reported non-linear temporal events. This has implications for our attitude toward not only art but all human creative activities throughout time.
unattributed image. Anyone claims it let me know. 
Found on Quantum Art and Poetry by Nick Harvey. Transcending Time
An excellent website called Art History Unstuffed provides a meaty discussion of Abstract Expressionism. In the section called How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art: Abstract Expressionism and Meaning, the author, Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette, states that, “The Abstract Expressionist artists translated “meaning” from subject matter to the broader and deeper intent of the word. For these artists, “meaning” had to be profound and transcendent so that art could rise above the rather minor role it played during the Thirties as handmaiden to politics.” She sums up her section of this discussion on Abstract Expressionism by saying:
“With Abstract Expression the primary moral act is the decision to paint, followed by the question of what to paint at the time of the end of painting. In a world that has experienced an all engulfing war and a horrifying holocaust and a brilliant blast of annihilating light, painting becomes a moral activity, one of the last possible ethical gestures. Abstract Expressionism was an art of pure idea, considered to be sublime, even transcendent and thus reconnected with the early Romantic tradition of landscape painting in America. Nineteenth century American painting had sought God in Nature, but in a universe that had be denaturalized and had been scourged of God, the only transcendence or saving grace was art itself, the last refuge of godliness.”
On the one hand, this assumption appears to be the epitome of hubris – the idea that we can attain spiritual transcendence and godliness by playing with colour & form. And it suggests arrogance and egotism to assume that the arduous discipline necessary to find God, as taught by the world’s major religions over thousands of years, can be cheerfully circumvented by picking up a paintbrush and going at it.
On the other hand, as Barnett Newman said, “The artist expresses in a work of art an aesthetic idea which is innovate and eternal.” This idea captures the essence of abstraction as the artist seeks to remove all vestiges of identification with a particular place & time and creates a work that is universal. In this there is an element of spiritual transcendence and some abstract art could act as a bridge between the spiritual and the worldly. This appears to be the case for the Rothko Chapel, in Houston, Texas. As the magazine, Texas Monthly says: “To its devotees, the chapel is sublime: a darkened cosmos that facilitates powerful spiritual experiences. The space, which features fourteen dark paintings by Rothko, is famous for being dim and moody. It’s a sensory deprivation chamber that also functions as a theological deprivation chamber. Many customary signifiers of religion—statues, altars, stained glass—have been stripped away. It is, as Houston architectural historian Stephen Fox puts it, “a space that seems sacred for a post-religious world.””
Interior of the Rothko Chapel, Houston Texas.Interior of the Rothko Chapel, Houston Texas. Murals range from 134 7/8 in x 245 ¾ in to 180 in x 297 in. But transcendence in abstract painting is not easy to achieve, and much of it is either a substitute for the ability to draw and create realism, or is a lifeless copy of a fashionable abstract painting style.
Impact of a drop of water, a common analogy for Brahman and the Ātman. Photo by Sven Hoppe, 2005 But to imagine that one artistic approach, such as Abstract Expressionism, can replace the search for spiritual enlightenment is suspect, since some of the most brilliant artists found more solace in drugs or the bottle than in their work. For Mark Rothko, a successful career of creating powerful paintings was not enough to defeat despair. To imagine that we can replace God, however understood, with Art is like assuming we can replace the signpost for the road, or more accurately, the road for the destination. Art is a genuine bridge between the spiritual and the worldly, but not the only one, or the one that works for all artists. Art, like yoga, prayer and other disciplines can lead toward spirituality, but surely the guidance of tried & true religious practices is needed. Art alone is too amorphous.
Conclusion
If there is a point to this discussion, rather than just being a ramble about the mysteries of Art, it is this: art is not, and should not be, time bound. There is no overarching need for artists to be limited to expressing the fashions or paradigms of the culture of the time in which they live. Artists can work with what Wllette called, “an art of pure idea“, or can build on the best work of past eras, confident that time is elastic and art can transcend time. There is more on the topic of art and the time in another blog.
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The Gift by Lewis Hyde: With Thanks
In her forward to The Gift by Lewis Hyde, Margaret Atwood says: “If you want to write, paint, sing, compose, act, or make films, read The Gift. It will help keep you sane.” This is because it is a book “about the core nature of what it is that artists do and also about the relation of these activities to our overwhelmingly commercial society”.
Not the Gift I Had Hoped For
Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach, June 2022; Margaret Atwood, Author, As an artist, I had high expectations for this book, and that it would, if not keep me sane, at least help me understand and work within the commercial context of our lives. Hyde goes some way toward helping with the understanding part by looking at late capitalism from a unique perspective. And he describes the relation of artistic activities to our overwhelmingly commercial society in (for the most part) an interesting way. But he makes no attempt to help artists work within this system, because, as he puts it, “this is not a “how to” book. So I was disappointed because it is very easy to come up with a critique of capitalism, no matter how unique, but it is another thing to suggest alternatives, either at the individual or the governance level. I was also disappointed that the book did not translate all that well across disciplines.
Works for Writing Maybe Not Other Arts
Hyde claims many of his assumptions hold for writers, painters, singers, composers, actors, and film-makers, but he is writing from a writers perspective. For instance he talks about the suspension of disbelief, “by which we become receptive to work of the imagination”. But in painting, there is no real requirement to suspend disbelief as belief is more of a verbal/intellectual process that does not hamper or enhance a viewer’s perception of visual art. The writerly focus ovetakes the middle section of the book, which is an exhaustive analysis of the work of two poets, Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, that was of limited interest to this reader, a painter.
George Collins Cox, photograph of Walt Whitman in 1887 – United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division The book was started in 1979 and first published in 1983, a time when it was still considered appropriate to use the masculine pronouns, “man”, “his” and “he” instead of non-gendered plural forms like “humans”, “people” or “they”, and Lewis uses masculine forms throughout. He does, however, include Chapter 6, A Female Property that has to do with women being given in the marriage ceremony as a gift. He points out how clearly this underscores that women are still considered as property to be used in bartering. His very practical suggestion is that, in addition to a father giving away his daughter to the groom, the groom’s mother should give away her son to the bride.
These may be niggling criticisms because the real point of Hyde’s book is to understand the market economy – how it evolved, its most salient characteristics and what it means to be an artist in such an economy. He develops his argument in the first part of the book where he differentiates between a gift economy where items are given without expectation of rent and a market economy where anything given to another is expected to come back with interest. In the last part of the book he explores how art fits into this.
He has some keen insights and, like most good writers, can put into words ideas that the rest of us have trouble expressing. For instance, he describes how a gift economy differs from a market economy: in a market economy, all gifts are destroyed. “If the increase of gifts is in the erotic bond, then the increase is lost when exchange is treated as a commodity transaction (when, in this case, it is drawn into the part of the mind that reckons value and quantity).(p196)
Artists with Dark Sides
Flannery O’Connor
Though in some ways The Gift does not translate well among artistic disciplines, Hyde includes great quotations that are universal, such as this one from Flannery O’Connor:“No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.” (p.195)
Flannery O’Connor, Courtesy of Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University While this is an eloquent, uplifting statement, it illustrates that an artist can be gifted with imagination and skill but step outside the zone of self-forgetting and become as blind and bigoted as the most brutally ignorant. Recently found correspondence indicates that O’Connor had a “habit of racial bigotry…She was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.”
Ezra Pound
This is the shadow side of many successful artists that is not adequately addressed in Hyde’s book. For instance in the chapter dedicated to analyzing the life and work of Ezra Pound, he does not address the question of how Pound can be a self-forgetting artist capable of making poetry that “meets the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made” and a rabid anti-semite. Instead he goes into a somewhat annoying digression about Hermes and the shadow side that doesn’t ring true.
So-called “Hermes Ingenui”, Marble, Roman copy of the 2nd century 
Pound photographed in 1913 by Alvin Langdon Coburn Pablo Picasso
It is not only writers like O’Connor or Pound with a shadow side, such artists abound in every discipline and their presence is not clearly explained in The Gift. For instance, Pablo Picasso has been called the most influential artist of the 20th century but today, Picasso is more often talked about as a misogynist, sociopath and narcissist. Yes, it is difficult to be a sensitive, creative person in a culture of getting and spending, but Hyde does not explore how an artist can be gifted in one area but spiritually disabled in others. He believes artistic creativity “has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes”, but this is clearly not the case for some artists who have stunted relationships with fellow human beings.
Photo by:Argentina. Revista Vea y Lea, January 1962, “Pablo Picasso 1969” So we have to go along with Hyde’s compartmentalizing of the creative imagination so that the person making art is in a different zone than the person out in a culture distorted by the marketplace.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Esemplastic Power
He relates artistic creativity to the concept of the gift in that “the imagination has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes: it has the gift.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes the imagination as “essentially vital” and takes as it’s hallmark it’s ability “to shape into one,” an ability he named “the esemplastic power.” An artist who wishes to exercise the esemplastic power of the imagination must submit himself to what Lewis calls a “”gifted state,” one in which he is able to discern the connections inherent in his materials and give the increase, bring the work to life….the artist who succeeds in this endeavour has realized his gift. He has made it real, made it a thing: it’s spirit is embodied in the work.”(p.195)
Peter Vandyke , 1795 portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, held at the National Portrait Gallery, UK Hyde goes on to describe how “…the spirit of the artist’s gift may enter and act upon our being. Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives…any such art is itself a gift, cordial to the soul.”(p.196)
And “we participate in the esemplastic power of a gift by way of a particular kind of unconsciousness, then: unanalytic, undialectical consciousness.” “The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person. Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual world.”
Joseph Conrad
Hyde quotes Joseph Conrad, “the artist appeals… to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mysteries surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of enumerable hearts, to the solidarity… which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”
Thanks Anyway
As I have said in earlier blogs, the greatest gift writers can give to other artists is to put into words truths about art that practitioners of other disciplines do not have the skills to do (this sentence is a case in point). So I forgive the gender-specific pronouns, the long diversion into analyzing poetry and the lack of a “how-to” because The Gift is one person’s offering to nature, the group, the human race, history, tradition and the spiritual world. Thanks so much, Lewis.
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Bird Watching: A Love Affair
For many years i have been an amateur, yet ardent, birdwatcher and this blog, Bird Watching: A Love Affair, describes how & why birds have formed an important theme in my artwork. Yesterday I spent the day at the French Creek Estuary, on Vancouver Island, counting birds on the eBird app. In 2 1/2 hours we counted 18 different species of birds. In or near the water there were scores of Mallards, a few Common Mergansers, some Buffleheads, a Kingfisher and more Seagulls than we could count. Fortunately the estuary’s riparian zone is protected as a nature preserve.
In the adjacent upland area of the French Creek Estuary we counted more Juncos and more Spotted Towhees than I’ve ever seen in one place, a couple of Hummingbirds, some Quail, many Sparrows, and a few birds that are rare at this time of year such as a Townsend’s Warbler. There were at least 14 majestic Great Blue Herons nesting in the trees and flying overhead to fish. On a cold day in March the trees and bushes were simply alive with birds and it was entrancing.
The joy of seeing these exquisite creatures up close in my binoculars is my reason for bird watching. These elegantly feathered animals so entirely at one with their surroundings, are a strong contrast to us humans in our environment. We constantly ward off our surroundings with walls, heating/air conditioning, machines, clothing and devices. But birds belong to a different, more attuned, more perfect way of life than us domesticated human beings. Is this innately what it is to be human or were we at one time more like birds and other wild beings? Their beauty, super-awareness and finely-focused attention on the present moment, every moment, is like a lesson in how to be in the world.
The Golden Bird, 2023, Marion-Lea Jamieson, printing inks on wood, 23” w x 15” h In Margaret Atwood’s forward to The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany, by her late husband Graeme Gibson, she describes what bird watching meant to him. ”…every new Bird was a revelation to him. He wasn’t much interested in making lists of the birds he had seen, though he did make such lists as an aid to memory. Instead it was the experience of the particular, singular bird that enthralled him: this one, just here, just now. A red tailed hawk! Look at that! Nothing could be more magnificent!“
The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany, Graeme Gibson, 2005 But yesterday it was difficult to be enthralled in the present moment knowing that an area of marvellous bird habitat, adjacent to the protected area of French Creek, will be bulldozed for more human habitat. Sadly this is not a protected area but private land slated for development of 14 homes. This is the dilemma of bird-watching: the more you watch them the more you treasure birds, and the more pain you feel as their habitat is destroyed, lot by lot, forest by forest, ecosystem by ecosystem.
Then Again, 2019, Marion-Lea Jamieson, oil on canvas, 42″ h x 35″ w In several earlier blogs I have explored birds in both sculptures and paintings such as the painting below. Then Again was part of a series called Time Lines, that used schematic images inspired by European Neolithic art from 7000 – 3500 BC. The series examined the linear concept of time or the understanding that we are constantly moving forward into the future and out of the past. It explored the possibility that time is a more circular phenomenon that is relative or even illusory. The simplification of images in Neolithic culture produced an abstract, symbolic, conceptual art that subverts the idea that art is progressing, and that whatever is created today is superior to what went before.
Creation, 2020, Marion-Lea Jamieson, oil paint on canvas, 5′ w x 4′ h Time LInes also continued the exploration of the relationship between humans and other species using figures with both animal and human characteristics in 2D and 3D. This investigation was ongoing for many years and always seems relevant. Creation is the largest and final piece in this series. The melded figures contrast with the belief, common in Western and modern cultures, that humans are separate from and independent of nature. The series referenced ancient animal/human mythological images suggesting that the split between mind and body, human and natural, is a fairly recent paradigm that replaced the previous understanding of a more interactive relationship with other species.
Some of the paintings, like Flight, shown below, were painted as though sculptural. Flight, features a melded human/bird figure, and visualizes a sculpture that I could make in steel at some time in the future. It was inspired by the elegantly constructed armour in European museums, and how wonderful it would be to use the same techniques to build a sculpture on the animal/human fusion theme.
Flight, 2019, Marion-Lea Jamieson, oil on canvas, 42″ h x 35″ w 
Conversation in Blue, Marion-Lea Jamieson, 2007 wood & spray paint 24″ h x 24″ w x 12″ d This series included some sculptures such as the one in wood shown here
These works are in praise of birds – these gorgeous, jaunty, mysterious beings. May they persevere, survive the Anthropocene era and continue for eons to come as they have done for the past 150 million years.
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Good, Evil, Transcendence & The Divine
As an artist I depend on writers to put into words their thoughts on some of the issues that philosophers perennially grapple with: Good, Evil, Transcendence & The Divine. A work of art is sometimes loosely referred to as “transcendent” but what does that mean? The definition of transcendence has been hotly debated among philosophers and religious theorists but Wikipedia defines it thus:
In everyday language, “transcendence” means “going beyond”, and “self-transcendence” means going beyond a prior form or state of oneself. Mystical experience is thought of as a particularly advanced state of self-transcendence, in which the sense of a separate self is abandoned.How does the word relate to art? In her book, Summer, Ali Smith takes a stab at it: “Art is about the moment you’re met by and so changed by something you encounter that it takes you both into and beyond yourself and gives you back your senses. It’s a shock that brings us back to ourselves. Art is something to do with coming to terms with and understanding all the things we can’t say or explain or articulate with help from something which we know will help us feel and think then articulate those things even at times like this when feeling and thinking and saying anything about anything are under impossible pressure. What art does is, because we encounter it, we remember we exist too, and that one day we won’t.“
Then there is Aldous Huxley’s ambitious work, The Perennial Philosophy, (1945, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, edition 1990) that makes the connection between transcendence and the arts.
Huxley says the perennial philosophy has to do with”… the metaphysic that recognizes a divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds: the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the imminent and transcendent ground of all being -the thing is immemorial and universal.“(p.vii)
This is a meaty tome and not an easy read, but I ploughed through it wondering why a gifted writer like Huxley would be interested in such an esoteric topic. The answer becomes apparent about halfway through the book where he talks about simplicity.
“…real simplicity, so far from being foolish, is almost sublime. All good men like and admire it, are conscious of sin against it, observe it in others and know what it involves; and yet they could not precisely define it. I would say that simplicity is an uprightness of soul which prevents self-consciousness…. That soul which looks where it is going without losing time arguing over every step, or looking back perpetually, possesses true simplicity. Such simplicity is indeed a great treasure. How shall we attain to it? I would give all I possess for it; it is the costly pearl of holy scripture.”(p113)Huxley and Pablo PIcasso agreed on the goal of simplicity and spontaneity:
“Only the most highly disciplined artist can recapture, on a higher level, the spontaneity of the child with its first paint box. Nothing is more difficult than to be simple.”(p116)
Girl Before a Mirror, Pablo Picasso, 1932, Oil on canvas 63.9 in × 51.3 in and
“…it is by long obedience and hard work that the artist comes to unforced spontaneity and consummate mastery. Knowing that he can never create anything on his own account, out of the top layers, so to speak, of his personal consciousness, he submits obediently to the workings of “inspiration”; and knowing that the medium in which he works has its own self nature, which must not be ignored or violently overridden, he makes himself its patient servant and, in this way, achieves perfect freedom of expression.”(p117)Another example of an artist who acheived exquisite simplicity is the sculptor Alexander Calder, whose mobile is shown below.
However, Huxley goes on to clarify that perfect freedom of expression and even the creation of perfectly beautiful and inspiring artwork is not the highest goal. The ultimate goal is overcoming the sense of a separate self and instead, identifying with what is called “the ground” which is God or the Tao as it exists in an eternity outside time.
Alexander Calder, Red Mobile, 1956, Painted sheet metal and metal rods, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. And he says the corollary of this explains the nature of good and evil:
“… good is the separate self’s conformity to, and finally annihilation in, the divine ground which gives it being; evil, the intensification of separateness, the refusal to know that the ground exists.”(p184)The problem arises when Huxley gets onto the topic of “subhuman existences”. He states that “…every other species is a species of living fossils, capable only of degeneration and extinction, not a further evolutionary advance…of all this living matter only that which is organized as human beings has succeeded in finding a form capable, at any rate on the mental side, of further development. All the rest is now locked up in forms that can only remain what they are or, if they change, only change for the worst. it looks as though, in the cosmic intelligence test, all living matter, except the human, had succumbed, at one time or another during its biological career, to the temptation of assuming, not the ultimately best, but the immediately most profitable form. By an act of something analogous to free will every species, except the human, has chosen the quick returns of specialization, the present rapture of being perfect, but perfect on a low level of being. the result is that they all stand at the end of evolutionary blind alleys…. as species, they have chosen the immediate satisfaction of the self rather than the capacity for reunion with the divine ground.”
https://www.seacoastsciencecenter.org/2016/07/18/one-crafty-critter-common-octopus/ According to Huxley, for this wrong choice, nonhuman forms of life are punished negatively, by being debarred from realizing the supreme good, “…to which only the unspecialized and therefore far more highly conscious human form is capable.”(p183)
https://www.amazon.co.jp/Supreme-Human-Being- So despite the rigorous thought that has gone into other aspects of his book, this section reveals that Huxley is a man of his time who believes that “Man is the Measure of All Things”. Huxley’s version of the perennial philosophy thus negates the arguments against separateness that have gone before. Unfortunately, he has internalized the Christian view that, while the human goal is oneness with the divine ground, separateness of human beings from all other forms in nature is almost a prerequisite for this oneness. But if goodness is the annihilation of separateness, then evil must be the intensification of separateness whether from God, the Tao or the Earth.
Burdened by this illusion, humanity’s damage to the planet has come about through intensification of our separateness, which by the above definition, is an evil belief in ourselves as a superior species with a unique capacity for union with the divine ground, but not part of nature.
Since 1945, science is confirming that everything is connected. A closer more biocentric examination of forests shows they are a gigantic interconnected being with what could be called a mind connecting its various forms. If this observation of inter-connectedness were to be expanded, we can assume that the entire surface of the earth is one interconnected being, with one mind or what has been called Gaia. Awareness of this inter-connectedness could be called a recognition of the ground of being.
So though the goal of the perennial philosophy is to recognize the oneness of all things, the assumption that humans are a separate species with a higher calling than all other species means that this philosophy is deeply flawed. Rather than adhering to beliefs that elevate humans as aspiring divinities, we should contemplate our humble role as only one of 2.16 million species on the planet all interconnected in nature. Perhaps it is in a complete recognition and acceptance of this connectedness that our true divinity lies.
As noted above, Huxley is a man of his time and his flawed thinking is apparent from the perspective of this 21st Century blogger. He refers to humanity as “man”, uses the pronoun “his” consistently and sees no relation between the female principle and divinity. He also refers to “primitive” religions and “savages” as people who are less mentally and spiritually developed than people like himself or the thinkers he admires. However, in fairness, it is likely that mainstream ideas of the 21st Century will appear just as deluded to people of the 22nd Century.
But Huxley admitted that he had not overcome his sense of a personal separate self, was filled with pride in his many and admirable achievements, and clearly struggled to be the best person he could be in his life. While his views have been limited by assumptions common to his place and time, in other ways his book is a valuable contribution. It is a compendium of what he considers the best writings on philosophies that seek to overcome the separateness of individuals and nations as they struggle and strive in errors that bring destruction to themselves and the world.
Leaving aside Huxley’s blind spots, he has made some astute observations about the role of the artist. Huxley suggests that the best art, what might be called transcendent art, is created by artists who have overcome the separate self – a separate ego. Through discipline these artists create works that are not the product of their pride, desire for fame and recognition, or even pecuniary rewards. The most meaningful, worthwhile art is created to bridge the gap between the separate and the eternal self, or ground of all being. This is as good a definition of transcendent art as we are likely to find.
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Love and Life
First Comes Love/ Then comes marriage/ Then comes Marion-Lea/ With a baby carriage.
It was 1974, I was pregnant and suffused with the peace & contentment that I suspect is The Great Creator’s way of ensuring women are willing to undergo birth. I was in my fourth & final year at the Vancouver School of Art and joyfully producing a plethora of pregnant forms. My work was as round, expansive and shiny as my belly. I was fascinated with eggy shapes and anything to do with eggs. Love and life was good.
Broken Yolk, 1974, Marion-Lea Jamieson, molded Sheet Acrylic, 36”h x 48” w x 30”d
Group of Egg-Boxes, 1974 ML Jamieson Acrylic, cast resin I had just discovered how to take photos & had borrowed a camera from the Art School. The Egg Boxes were photographed in a number of configurations and locations. Unfortunately, I had not yet learned to ensure that the lens was clean.
4 Egg Boxes, 1974; ML Jamieson; each 10” x 12” x 3″ 
Stack of Egg Boxes, 1974; Marion-Lea Jamieson 
Coffee & Egg-Boxes, 1974, ML Jamieson, acrylic & cast resin, found objects. I also choreographed & performed a couple of dance pieces during this period. The first was called Egg-Hanger, a dance piece for 6 dancers that I choreographed and was performed at the Simon Fraser University Theatre under the direction of Iris Garland. Though I don’t have a visual record of the piece being performed, I have images of the sculpture that I made for that dance:
Egg Hanger, 1974; Marion-Lea Jamieson; 8′ h x 3′ w x 8″ d; wood, red enamel paint, styrofoam & silver paint The photo above was taken at the New Era Social Club, an artists’ studio on Powell Street. Other artists working there at the time included Glen Lewis, Dave Rimmer, Taki Bluesinger & Chris Dahl.
Silver eggs & Silver Shoes, 1974 photo by ML Jamieson. 
Silver Eggs, 1974, ML Jamieson; 12″ h x 6″ d I choreographed & performed a solo dance piece when I was about 8 months pregnant in the dance space of the Western Front Artists’ Collective in Vancouver, as part of a performance directed by Linda Rubin.
Amnion, 1974, choreographed & performed by ML Jamieson Called Amnion the piece began with me inside a large clear polyester sac that I had made with a large zipper that allowed entry & exit. The dance, was done inside the sac and in front of a large blue heart, to the accompaniment of thumping music. The piece ended in a symbolic birth with my emergence from the sac clad in flesh coloured leotard & tights
Amnion, 1974, ML Jamieson solo performance During the pregnancy I continued to create images of the fecund female body with an interest in exploring the, to me, interesting paradox that the female body is celebrated for it’s sexuality while, in the West, its amazing reproductive capability is almost an embarrassment. My theory is that reproduction is an instinctual process that unequivocally links humans to their mammalian natures and belies the assumption of our species’ separateness & superiority.
While still at art school in 1974, I created a series of sculptures using vacuum-formed sheet acrylic in the shape of a heart using the Vancouver School of Art’s fabulous Thermoplastics studio. This studio was amazing as it had a giant oven capable of hanging a 6′ x 8′ sheet of acrylic that could be heated, then formed. For this there was a giant vacuum-form press where the heated acrylic could be either sucked onto a mold through the vacuum function or the direction of the airflow could be reversed so that the hot acrylic could be blown through a cut-out. I used heart-shaped cut-out to create 3 big acrylic hearts, 4′ x 4′, with a circular fluorescent light fixture inside. The blue heart was used in the Western Front performance. Sadly, the entire Thermoplastics studio was not moved the the School’s new campus on Granville Island that eventually morphed into the Emily Carr University of Art & Design.
Below are some other photos of the big blown acrylic hearts. A big heart shape was cut out of 3/4″ plywood and clamped over a sheet of hot acrylic. Then the air was forced through the cut out & the heart shape bubbled into life.
Light Hearts, Marion-Lea Jamieson, 1974; formed sheet acrylic, flourescent fixtures & hardware; each 4′ x 4′ x 1′. I also played around with vacuum-formed female torsos in the form of heart-shaped boxes. As a pregnant woman I was interested in the concept of vessels – of things within things. These vacuum-formed acrylic, heart-shaped torso boxes were filled with various items and photographed in a number of locations & juxtapositions.
Torsos with Molded Jelly, 1974; 
5 Torsos with TV, 1974, each, 12”x12”x3” . 
Clear Torso With Egg, 1974, Marion-Lea Jamieson 
Yellow Torso with Dried Split Green Peas; 1974; As part of the heart-shaped container series, there was a series of heart-shaped boxes. Like the torsos, these were photographed filled with various objects;
Heart Boxes, 1974
Plexiglas and found objects
12” x 12” x 3″ and 6″ x6″ x3″There was a heart shaped, drop leaf table that was part of a series of red-painted wooden sculptures. These included Egg-Hanger, shown above and a piece called Brass Stand at right. Though Brass Stand was not strictly speaking a part of the pregnancy-inspired “hearts & eggs” series, it is included as it was part of the red-paint that seemed to be an important aspect of my work at the time.
Heart Shaped Drop Leaf Table, 1973, ML Jamieson 
Brass Stand, 1974; ML Jamieson Brass Stand was part of a project grant received from the Vancouver School of Art that allowed the recipient to explore beyond the capabilities of the Art School. Recipients were encouraged to pay outside trades to create all or part of the artwork. I choose to explore the potential for spun brass, and created a wooden mold to be used to form the brass. I then approached a metalwork shop and asked them to recreate the wooden forms in brass. The guys in this metalwork shop couldn’t figure out what I was doing there and why I was asking them for such outlandish work. A couple of them figured I was there because I was looking to get laid, and became so unpleasant that I was afraid to go back and pick up the remaining work. I was shy & unsure of myself at that stage and like most women of that time, blamed myself for creating the unwanted attention.
My beautiful baby girl was born soon after I graduated from art school. The birth was difficult, and I came home to an empty, ground floor apartment with no money and no help. I collected welfare and wandered around a dank apartment with no furniture, carrying my baby, with both of us weeping for the first three months. I hadn’t really foreseen that as a penniless female artist, I would not have the leisure or resources to create artworks once I was a mother. The isolation was also a shock as artist friends came by, saw that I was no fun and didn’t return. They couldn’t understand why I had done this to myself. But I knew why. I fell in love with that baby and have never fallen out of love with her, or the next baby, who came along 6 years later.
The first three months were the hardest and the paintings I did, shown below, were the only works created during that time. They were exhibited in a gallery in Chinatown specially set up to show the work of artists on welfare (those were the days).
Baby # 1, 1974
acrylic on canvas,
36” x 36”
Baby # 2, 1974
acrylic on canvas,
36” x 36”Six years later, I had a second baby, my son James, even though the marriage was shaky and we were no better off financially. I often say that having my two children was the smartest move I ever made.
Many years later, my second husband Colin, my children and grandchildren and his children & grandchildren are the greatest blessings of my life and I thank the Creator for having given me the wisdom to choose love and life over good sense.
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Transcendence
The concept of transcendence has been explored in other posts and this one traces how the concept has fared in the shift from the dominant art paradigm of modernism to post-modernism.
Modernisms & Postmodernisms
The art historian/critic James Elkins made an interesting statement in his 2005 book on modernisms & postmodernisms, Master Narratives and their Discontents. The focus of the book is the role of painting in modernist & postmodernist theories and the core question of whether painting is irrelevant to contemporary visual arts.
If our understanding of contemporary visual arts is based on the assumption that there is a clear trajectory of progress in art-making where the avant guard reject the outdated, unconscious approach of the past and present and lead us forward into the future through new ways of presenting images, then the Postmodernist rejection of painting is justified. Postmodernism and painting are mutually exclusive because painting is a creature of modernist theory, and modernist theories rest on belief in the ability of art, specifically painting, to transcend the human condition.
Postmodern theories suggest that modernism’s belief that art can transcend entanglement with the political, moral and social failings of the time in which it is created are at the core of paintings irrelevance. From this perspective, the whole history of modernist painting is its coming painfully to an understanding of its place in the disenchantment of the world. Criticism of modernism is essential based on the uselessness of the received rules of painting and the hopelessness of proceeding as if painting could be the place where the world is “re-enchanted” (pp. 52-55).
In response to modernism and painting’s association with hopeless efforts to re-enchant the world, contemporary art schools and postmodern critics reject painting in favour of other visual art media, such as video and other new media. And those who do continue to paint are careful to avoid using received rules. Elkins touches on the problems with this approach:
“It is certainly much easier to make an acceptable piece of video art than it is to make an acceptable painting, and…the reason for the relative ease of video art is that painting has a longer history: more strictures, more limitations, fewer possibilities, a much denser lexicon of critical terms. Therefore…the ease of video is a reason to keep considering painting, especially when it’s a place where things seem to keep going wrong, or where the artists are deliberately misbehaving themselves, piling kitch on camp on kitch without end”. (p. 164) He uses the example of Jeff Koons, whose “…place in the history of twentieth century art is assured in part because of his apparently deeply sincere endorsement of kitch ideas and kitch media“(p. 70) .
Titi, 2004–09, Jeff Koons, High chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating. The Torment of the Artist
The disenchantment of the world is captured in a few evocative sentences by my author, Richard Powers. In his 2009 novel, Generosity, he describes the torment of the artist reluctant to contribute to the meaningless torrent of artistic works flooding the world at any given moment. In the face of ecological, social and economic megadisasters an artist can only tell,”...the odds against ever feeling at home in the world again. About huge movements of capital that render self-realization quaint at best. About the catastrophe of collective wisdom getting what we want, at last.”(Powers, Richard, Generosity 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 152) This is the quandry that postmodernism has met with scepticism, suspicion and anti-authoritarianism.
Powers outlines the decline of modernism through the disenchantment of a budding art historian who “…nurtured the belief that the deepest satisfaction lay in those cultural works that survive the test of Long Time. But a collision with postcolonialism….shook her faith in masterpieces.A course in Marxist interpretation of the Italian Renaissance left her furious. For a little while longer she soldiered on, fighting the good fight for artistic transcendence until she realized that all the commanding officers had already negotiated safe passage away from the rout.” (p. 61)
Elkins describes postmodernism not as the name of a period with a definable approach such as postimpressionism but as “…a condition of resistance that can arise wherever modernist ideas are in place. Postmodernism works like a dormant illness in the body of modernism: when modernism falters and fails, postmodernism flourishes.” (p. 89)
Elkins’ & Power’s complementary works agree that the assumption that art can transcend the human condition is a core value of modernism that the postmodern critique rejects. So how can artists, especially painters, step out of the here and now and create works that are timeless, universal and make transcendence possible?
The Return of Myth
In his blog, [Re]construction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth, Brendan Dempsey, a graduate student at Yale University, courageously entered the fray. He suggested that “metamodern mythopoeia reasserts a form of ‘transcendence’ without forfeiting postmodern immanence as it reconstructs artificial paradigmatic models for the twenty-first century“. He includes the work of several young artist who he feels are involved in is artistic mythmaking that oscillates between the poles of discredited modernist myths and postmodern superficiality.
The Roses Never Bloomed So Red, Adam Miller, 2013 Dempsey used this work by Adam Miler as an example of a painting that, “reconstructs artificial paradigmatic models for the twenty-first century” and “oscillates between the poles of discredited modernist myths and postmodern superficiality“. In The Roses Never Bloomed So Red, Miller delivered an impassioned critique of late-capitalist decay by depicting a fauness vanquished by the violent spirit of development.
This is an early work by Miller and the egregiously curvaceous fauness dooms this painting to the level of soft-core porn, despite its censoriousness. Some of his later work, while still featuring voluptuous nudes being violated in erotic ways, is undeniable in its technical mastery and force. But Miller’s latest work, such as his Comedia Humana” project, is more strongly connected to myths so that, for the most part, the female nudes escape the problem of the male gaze. But overall, Miller has been lured into the same traps that have ensnared artists of earlier epochs.
Perhaps myths are not something that can be conjured up by modern men, steeped in a myth-denying culture. Myths are stories that live in our DNA and make sense to us because they are part of the fabric of ourselves as human beings. As Joseph Campbell would say in his book The Power Of Myth, “…true myths are our ties to the past that help us to understand the world and ourselves.The myths that have come down to us through thousands of years of oral and written history are precious strands of our true selves and attempting to discredit them is like trying to discredit the seasons“. Myth is clearly not a vehicle that will automatically “reassert a form of transcendence” but must be used with conscious awareness and humility to work.
Post-Clement Greenburg
It could perhaps be said that much of post-modernist theory has been developed in reaction against Clement Greenburg‘s definition of what makes or breaks good painting. Greenburg simply defined good painting as something that someone with good taste, such as himself, could see was a good painting. His point of view is somewhat offensive to our post-modern sensibilities, but he was not aware of post-modernism’s greatest contribution to criticism in all genres – the disparaging of bias.
Scientific research on perception showed that the mere act of observation affects the thing observed. This has led to a general understanding that it is impossible to be objective – that the observer sees based on a set of values and assumptions that influence what is seen. This understanding has led to a cultural revolution in all areas including the arts. This cultural revolution meant that dead white men were no longer automatically considered the “greats” of literature, drama, music and the visual arts. It was no longer intellectually acceptable to assume that women and minorities were grossly under-represented among the “greats” because they were less capable of creating masterpieces. But once using the “greats” as a yardstick for excellence was gone, the very concept of excellence came under attack, all criteria for assessing the arts was dismissed and everybody is now an artist.
But the postmodernist critique, while entirely justified and rational, has been taken to extremes, until, as Elkins says, we have been subjected to exhibitions “piling kitch on camp on kitch without end”. So it is worthwhile to revisit Greenberg’s worldview to retrace our steps.
Greenberg never examined his assumption that, because he was a person with good taste, what he saw as a good painting was a good painting and he needed to provide no further evidence of this. But the reason his attitude is still appealing is because he is right in assuming that the point of art is to abandon oneself to the pleasure of viewing. It is not an intellectual activity that requires several wall-feet of text to understand. Art should be a visual, visceral, sensuous experience that bypasses the busy brain and transcends mundane day-to-day life.
Jackson Pollack was Greenberg’s most famous protégé and is a good example of a painter whose work as a visual experience is not narrative, not conceptual and certainly not banal. It is a pleasure to lose oneself in this artist’s ability to weave a surface of textures and patterns with all the complexity of nature but the intentionality of a human sensibility.
Convergence, 1952, Jackson Pollock Other painters that Greenberg loved, such as Larry Poons, also confirmed his good taste.
Larry Poons, A Sky Filled with Shooting Stars Not all of the painters Greenberg admired are immediately recognizable as a visual, visceral, sensuous experience. Perhaps, as he said, you had to stand in front of them. But the point he was making is that a great painting can transcend entanglement with the political, moral and social failings of the time in which it is created. Paintings is not and never can be irrelevant because we only have to look at a great painting like those above to know that they can create a place where the world is “re-enchanted” and can achieve transcendence.
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This is not an Essay
This blog is part of an ongoing investigation into the visual arts, primarily painting, and with a side interest in why important public galleries feel obliged to exhibit work that alienates all but those initiated into the world of artspeak and arcane discourse. But trying to make sense of the art world is like trying to nail jelly to the wall – as soon as you think you’ve pegged it, a later re-think makes the whole thing slide. So this is not an essay because, as I often say, I’m not a scholar or an essayist, but a mere artist trying to make sense of the art world and my place in it.
So I look for ideas from writers that have tried to capture a sense of what is happening in and to the Western visual arts. This is a daunting challenge as it is impossible for anyone living in a period of time to stand outside of it and look objectively and from a future perspective to say that this or that phenomenon, philosophy or paradigm represents the times. Harold Rosenberg was just such as writer who tried to see where art was going in his time and what might be expected in the future.
Though written 50+ years ago, Rosenberg’s early 1970’s book on art criticism Harold Rosenberg was prescient. At first I was put off by his use of terms like “the artist is a man who…”, but I came to overlook his gender insensitivity. Rosenberg’s primary concern is that art, and he is primarily concerned with painting, is in danger of going over the edge that separates it from crafts, commercial design and the mass media. This concern no doubt grew out of the success of artists like Andy Warhol, a former commercial artist, who wholeheartedly embraced popular culture and commercial processes.
Marilyn Monroe, 1967, Andy Warhol, Printed by Aetna Silkscreen Products, Inc., NY What’s interesting about Rosenberg’s views, is that, though he is deeply immersed in the art world, he is not aware of the term, or the fact, of post-modernism. He is writing at a time of huge changes in attitudes toward art and he is documenting this change as it is taking place. Thus he is able to report on the transition between the philosophical endorsement of modernism that was widely accepted by the art establishment, and the shattering of this consensus through emerging artwork critiquing that philosophy.
In many ways, his writing was prescient as it can be said that art has since gone over the edge he described. But this jump was a conscious choice by the artists involved and made out of a sense of necessity. That felt necessity was to rebel against the commodification of art and the modernist illusion that the art object could meaningfully convey a response to a world that was capable of creating two devastating world wars and weapons of mass destruction. The jump was also motivated by photography that could record life much better that painting and had replaced it in many ways.,Instead of making irrelevant art for money, artists such as Marcel Duchamp were making art as criticism through parody, irony or subversion. Artists like Troy Emery continue that tradition today. though one has to question whether using parody, irony and subversion has become an avenue to sure commercial success. Whereas Duchamp only made one Fountain, like Jeff Koons, Emery makes dozens of pieces, with slight variations. He has fully embraced the post-modern acceptance of commercialization as a defensible and even central aspect of an art practice.
Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz 
Woolly Woofter, 2013, Troy Emery, 62 x 45 x 37 cm Titi, 2004–09, Jeff Koons, High chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating. Perhaps one of the reasons that painting has been considered an outdated art form is that it is difficult to crank out paintings at an industrial/commercial scale. While it is accepted that sculptors will farm out the actual casting or fabrication of their artworks to artisans, there is no similar tolerance for painters. Sophisticated collectors of paintings expect it to have been the work of the artist that signs it, not a painting factory. Of course there were the screen prints of artists like Warhol, and currently there are Gicleé prints of paintings, and paintings that have clearly been mass-produced. But these never have, and likely never will, achieve the recognition and respect given to mass-produced sculptures.
Rosenberg’s primary concern was that painting would become commercial design and mass media, but this has not happened. Instead, it became somewhat irrelevant to the art establishment and by extension, the art market and many artists. Rosenberg’s insensitivity to gender issues reflects his lack of attention to other important issue that created the post-modern revolution. Though he touches on the fact that taste in art, especially modernist painting, was set by an elite made up of white, middle & upper class males. They in turn found they most admired the work of white, middle-class male artists, so that women & visible minorities were excluded from exhibitions & sales.
There were many other artists who did not accept that there were insurmountable problems with making artworks such as painting. For instance, Rosenberg suggests that “…if Miro had a “problem” it was how to reach a state of creation unhindered by problems”. And as Rosenberg says, many artists saw the only other alternative to be making art for oneself.”For Barnett Newman, painting was “…a way of practising the sublime, not communicating it
Others such as Piet Mondrian, believed that it was possible to “…conceive of a grand vision such as the salvation of the human race.. that could be expressed in paint.” He believed his work was a “plastic vision” that would help to set up ” …a new type of society composed of balance relationships”.
Mondrian was aware that his work could not speak for itself without a “new phase in human development” so he wrote statements and manifestos explaining his ideas. The irony, for Rosenberg, was that in contemporary art, the meaning of artworks is not in themselves, but in the personality of the artist, “…his ideas, his role, his pathos.” He saw with clarity that what would become post-modernism would replace ideas in art altogether.
Modernist painters wrestled with the issue of content and the reaction against using recognizable images. Rosenberg refers to “pre-formlist abstraction” as that which has an unmistakable subject but “…projects a content that is implicit in but not restricted to the marks on the canvas”.
Abstraction, Willem de Kooning,1949 – 1950, oil on canvas, 46 x 37 cm, In this approach, a painting “…comes into being through unanticipated responses to what is taking place on the canvas”, as Rosenberg describes the work of Joan Mitchell. Whatever has gone on before provides the clue & the motivation for the next move.
The “meaning and emotional intensity of Mitchell’s pictures] are produced structurally, as it were, by a whole series of oppositions: dense versus transparent strokes; gridded structure versus more chaotic, ad hoc construction; weight on the bottom of the canvas versus weight at the top; light versus dark; choppy versus continuous strokes; harmonious and clashing juxtapositions of hue – all are potent signs of meaning and feeling.”(1)
Joan Mitchell, Wood Wind, No Tuba, 1979, Oil on canvas, two panels, 9′ 2 1/4″ x 13 1 1/8″ Rosenberg describes these as pre-formalist modernist painters as differentiated from the formalists who conceived abstract art in terms of “…a grammar of dimensions, edges, and color relations”. Formalism also focused on eliminating metaphorical references, perhaps in reaction to what had become a cloying use of metaphors by some artists in earlier periods.
But the ultimate destination of this formalist direction were paintings that eliminated not only metaphor, but dimensions, edges, and colour relations as well, to become a flat plane of one colour. My question is, where’s the fun in that compared to Mitchells’ aim and method: to express delight at having been taken by surprise?
This is not an essay in that it does not attempt to wrap up an argument with a neat conclusion that summarizes previous rambles but is an ongoing exploration that can be continued in another post.
1) Nochlin, Linda (2002). “Joan Mitchell: A Rage to Paint”. In Livingston, Jane. The Paintings of Joan Mitchell. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. p. 55. ISBN 0520235703.
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The Secret Keeper of Jaipur: A Best Seller
The goal of The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, by Alka Joshi, was clearly to provide a window into India’s complicated politics and culture. Though the novel provided a wealth of information about the area in which the novel took place, I found reading it a slog. Rather than simply dismiss the book & move on, I am writing this review in order to understand the reasons for this.
Map of India
1) West vs East
The novel is the second in a trilogy and is based on reminiscences of India circa 1969 by Alka Joshi’s mother. The author herself left India at the age of nine and has been entirely educated in the west, which may account for this novel’s oddly pedantic style . She writes as someone looking at India from the outside rather than as someone immersed in the culture. Her book focuses on the material details of Indian life such as interiors, clothing, jewelry, and food, rather than providing insights into how Indians think, feel and relate to each other on a personal level.
the Secret Keeper of Jaipur, by Alka Joshi, 2021 Publisher: MIRA Books 2) Excessive Detail
The Secret Keeper shares some similarities with Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese, an expat Indian author who, in my view, also crammed far too much information into one novel. He too used relatives’ reminiscences of an earlier time as material and it appeared that he, like Joshi, couldn’t resist putting in every anecdote. However, because Verghese grew up in the rich Indian tradition, rather than in the West, he has a unique and poetic writing style. But his book was far too long.
The Secret Keeper is also too long and full of unnecessary information that slows down the pace and strains the attention span. There are constant digressions and the story bogs down at points of potential interest with detailed descriptions of clothing, jewelry, food, interiors and traditions extraneous to the plot. Joshi’s main goal is clearly not to write a literary novel, but to bring Indian culture in an accessible style to a western audience. But the culture would have been better served by fewer words and better writing.
Types of Indian Jewelry https://www.goldcityjeweler.com/types-of-indian-jewelry/ Because this is the second in the series, Joshi also provides backstories about the characters from the first book, The Henna Artist, that break up the flow. These are not well integrated into the story and are repeated far more often than necessary, so that we hear about Radha’s birth of an illegitimate son, Lakshmi’s affair with a married man and the loss of Nimmi’s husband, over and over again. This novel needed the guidance of a more critical & rigorous editor from the beginning.
3) Cardboard Characters
Though there is extensive detail about everything else, none of the characters come alive and important emotional events are left out or unconvincing. For instance, Malik’s character is inconsistent in that he responds according to context, rather than interior motives we readers are made privy to. First he is in love with Nimmi, then he is lusting after Sheela, then he is devoted to Nimmi again but his motivations for these transitions are not revealed. Malik and Nimmi’s relationship is also sketchy in that there is an abrupt transition from meeting at the flower stall to becoming lovers with no real explanation as to how this came about. There is nothing persuasive in what we are told about both characters to account for their supposedly strong feelings and devotion to each other.The personal relationships in the novel may be sketchy because the author is not interested in describing inner lives or considers them secondary to describing life in Rajasthan. In the back of her book, Joshi explains that including descriptions of jewelry, garments, food etc., is a way to “…enrich a plot and show character development”. In fact, all these descriptions of “things” took up so much of the book there was little room left for character development and an enriched plot.
4) Tough Act to Follow
Day, by Michael Cunningham, 2023, published by Random House
The fact that I read The Secret Keeper immediately after a brilliantly-written novel by Michael Cunningham, Day, is largely responsible for my disenchantment. Day‘s characters are vehicles for explorations of the human condition. They are everyday people who transcend everyday life and isn’t that the task of art – to be transcendent? Day is primarily a work of art rather than a slice of life, a page turner, a historical drama or a commercial product.Of course, not everyone wants to explore the human condition or transcend everyday life. Not everyone wants art and many (most?) readers are happy to pass the time with an undemanding book. In fact, even internet blogs such as this one are criticized for being too demanding. The Flesch reading ease rating for this blog is 47.8, which is considered difficult to read. According to site analysis, I should use shorter sentences and less difficult words. Does this mean that, in a world that demands simple sentences and easy words, it is futile to criticize novels that fall short of their potential? Should we put such a book aside rather than take a writer to task for not trying hard enough – for not struggling, failing, and struggling again to create something better?
Others would argue that literary character development is a remnant from the modernist era when readers expected and demanded 3D characters that come alive through the author’s insight and skill. Cunningham’s characters search for meaning in their lives, which is considered so last century to post-modernists. The Guardian’s review of Day has this to say: “…he returns, with undiminished faith, to the project that united modernists as different as his heroes Joyce and Woolf: the effort to articulate the vast inner lives of a few unexceptional people…”. For instance, Cunningham, a middle-aged gay man, is able to articulate the inner life of five year-old Violet and with a few deft strokes, make her so alive that the reader “knows” Violet. Again from the Guardian: “The liveliest and most memorable portrait is of the little girl, Violet, already a shrewd performer in every moment, dutifully pre-empting the responses of her devoted but exhausted audience….Now here is Violet, twirling in her dress, abundantly cared for. Cunningham allows her to be sad, nonetheless, to feel the weight of a difficult world on her shoulders, and occasionally to turn away from human feelings to animals and stars.” Cunningham clearly studies people and puts effort and skill into making his characters believable. In contrast, Joshi uses Nimmi’s children as stage props and we never get to know Rekha and Chulla. Her characters are tools for introducing descriptions of costumes, traditions, foods, interiors, etc.
Indian Cuisine https://www.rainforestcruises.com/guides/india-food 5) Writing Style
This is only Joshi’s second novel and hopefully in future she will develop as a novelist, but at this point, there is no innovative use of language and storytelling. Though the plot of The Secret Keeper could have been compelling, the story was fragmented by digressions and backstory repetition. The author’s intention was that by inserting a wealth of information about Indian culture, she would bring it alive in “…all it’s chaotic phantasmagoric glory.” If the writing in the novel had captured this “phantasmagoric glory”, or was richly lyrical and imaginative, or the characters were drawn with more skill and inventiveness, or the sentences had more magic and less pedantry, this novel could have worked. But the writing has none of these and the book was overlong. The Secret Keeper did not bring to life a culture that is ancient, complex, & spiritually rich. Unfortunately for Joshi’s development as an artist, her present style of writing and narrative structure have been a great success, so her readers, publishers and promoters will want more of the same.
Communist leader Jyoti Basu (sixth from the left in the front row; no glasses), who later became the Chief Minister of West Bengal, at a Bhukha Michhil (’procession of the hungry’), during the Food Movement of 1959. Ganashakti 6) Issues
In the late 1960’s there were serious socio-political problems plaguing the Indian sub-continent including poverty, famine, wars with China and Pakistan, internal uprisings, political turmoil, and violence in cities. Social mobility and social cohesion were then, and continue to be, hampered by a rigid and punitive caste system and widespread religious intolerance. This has led to the success of communist parties and inevitable clashes with established elites.Though we should not expect every novel to address it’s socio-political context, The Secret Keeper is written from the point of view of established elites and is uncritical of the system as a whole. There was, and continues to be, discrimination against Muslims and lower-caste groups in Hindu-majority India, but this is glossed over. In The Secret Keeper, it is through the compassion and intervention of those well-connected to aristocratic ruling elites that lower class groups, represented by Malik and Nimmi, are rescued from lives of hardship & poverty. Malik achieves upward mobility with the help of a Brahmin with aristocratic connections and the much abused tribeswoman, Nimmi, is also rescued through the personal intervention of elites. The novel does not challenge the structure of the social system but suggests that all is well if a few “bad apples” (such as gold smugglers) are incarcerated. It’s a naive point of view.
Reeses Book Club; https://hello-sunshine.com/ 7) No Meritocracy
According to Wikipedia, Joshi’s first book in this trilogy was adopted and promoted by Reese’s Book Club, a celebrity book sales club run by Reese Witherspoon under her media company Hello Sunshine. Today 2.5 million people follow @reesesbookclub. In 2021, Witherspoon sold part of the company to Candle Media, for $900 million. This is big business. A celebrity endorsement has a huge impact on sales and the publishing industry and Reese’s Book Club has gained a reputation for boosting the sales of its Book Club Picks. As of 2019, no Book Club Picks had sold fewer than 10,000 copies and novels selected as Book Club Picks reportedly outsell other fiction books by 700%.So it is not surprising that the second book in the trilogy, The Secret Keeper is highly rated on Goodreads and became New York Times bestseller. It would seem that reader’s ratings respond to media hype rather than the actual merits of novels as literature. For instance, Day, by Michael Cunningham, who is generally described as a brilliant mind, Pulitzer Prize winner and Creative Writing Prof at Yale, gets only 3.5 stars on Goodreads, while The Secret Keeper gets 4.09.
Michael Cunningham reading at a W. H. Auden tribute in New York,
2007, photo by David ShankboneThe question is whether readers who read and highly rate books promoted by celebs would actually prefer books with more literary merit? One reviewer of The Secret Keeper said,”I had happy tears reading it. Almost everyone had a happy ending and the author had tied up all the loose ends.” Another said, “The writing remains soft and simple which is wonderful…”. There is a huge market for novels that are simplistic, unambiguous and have a happy ending. If more complex, nuanced and challenging novels, such as Day, were marketed by celebrity media, would they sell as well? As the CEO of Hello Sunshine says, storytelling can shift the culture and change the world. But story selling can also shift the culture and change the world – perhaps not for the better. What impact is hyper-capitalism having on arts & culture as a whole? This is an interesting area for further study.
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The Keeper of Lost Things: A Heartwarming Escape
I am writing this review because I feel obliged to understand why I abandoned the The Keeper of Lost Things after the first couple of chapters. I usually try to plow through any book I start because, as an artist, I understand the amount of effort, time and commitment that goes into publishing a book. Sometimes that time & effort is well spent and sometimes it is not, as appeared to be the case with The Keeper. So while I hesitate to show a lack of respect for the labour of writing, publishing and distributing a novel, I just couldn’t force myself to overcome my initial aversion to this one and read it to the end. Life’s too short to fritter away reading time when there are so many well-written novels by accomplished authors out there.
The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan I try to give any novel the benefit of the doubt because I question my own capacity to be an informed evaluator of the written word. I’m just a visual artist who reads in my spare time. Though I did get 3/4 of the way toward a BA in English Literature a lifetime ago, I have forgotten how to apply analytical techniques. Prose either excites me or leaves me cold, so this blog is an attempt to understand what makes for good writing.
Art Appreciation
Not that experience or expertise in one art form is irrelevant when evaluating the success of another form. I’m a former dancer, so if I’m zoning out while watching dance, I scan to see whether the source of the problem is my own lack of attention or out there on the stage. If I’m struggling to stay awake, perhaps it’s because the rhythms or movements are repetitive and predictable, or the performers are not clear on what they are trying to say, or the idea is sophomoric and not worth saying. Dance that works is transcendent like no other art form, when dancers pierce the fourth wall in real time, in real space with real bodies. Technique is an important, as is charisma, presence, and talent, none of which can be faked on stage.
In an art gallery, my eyes skim over paintings that are like thousands of other paintings and not taking any chances, or are derivative and made to sell. Conversely, I find pieces annoying that repeat the same old ironic/angry/outraged, post-modern themes in an attempt to be relevant. Good painting, like good dancing, requires technical prowess (whatever the post-modernist, post-post-modernists, anti-artists, etc. might say), talent (which no amount of technical skill can supplant) and originality. So there are overlaps among the arts and a general understanding and appreciation of one form provides insights into others.
Sentimentality
In any discipline, one area fraught with danger is sentimentality. Images of nurturing mothers with children, happy carefree children, sad children or any children, really, are hazardous as they so easily tip into the maudlin. Images of old people can also be deadly if they rely on one-dimensional stereotypes: the kindly old man/woman/; the wise old man/woman; the old woman/man with a lifetime of regrets or one huge regret that must be resolved before her/his death, and so on.
Image of a sweet old lady on Caia Park Partnership Care Home website https://caiapark.org.uk/older-people/ Any character that is always kindly or always evil or always played on one note is not interesting and this is the sense I got from the first few chapters of The Keeper of Lost Things. The characters were not likely to reveal startling unexpected sides of themselves or take the trajectory of the story in a completely unanticipated direction. I must admit that the reviews on the back cover put me off: “it left me smiling”, “charming and gently moving”, and “heart warming”. I want insight, daring, and a unique and adventurous use of prose. I do not want heartfelt, heartbreak,heartwarming or the redemptive power of friendship. It is all just too cloying – too obviously designed to pluck the heartstrings with egregious sentimentality.
If the writing is unique, flamboyant and poetic I can forgive a writer for manipulating my emotions, but if it is also pedestrian, clunky and predictable, there can be no forgiveness. In the first few chapters of The Keeper, clichés abound, such as: “a safe pair of hands”, “weary to the bone”, “it had been their song”, “a lovely cup of tea”, “a prickle of anxiety”,”his presence always lifted her spirits”,”that whistle of the kettle pierced her reminiscence”. I could go on and on but I didn’t – I put down the book and returned it early to the library.
Sitting in Judgment
Still the doubts gnawed at me: What do I know? Who am I to judge? The Keeper was nominated for Goodreads’ Best Fiction 2017, and 41,766 readers gave it 5 stars. One reviewer described it as, “…a little lacy, dressy, decorous, cultivated, rosy, sweet, courteous, cordial, romantic, a little mysterious, quirky, touching, sad, humorous, warm, cozy, and loving”. Another “…an enchanting story about love, loss, friendship, and healing. A wonderful cast of endearing, quirky characters made this book a pleasure to read!” How can I say that the point of the novel is not to create heart-warming, heart-felt stories where everything is warm, cozy and loving?
Zadie Smith
So I turned to Zadie Smith, an award-winning writer, for some insight into what makes good writing. In an article in The Guardian, Smith argued that fiction should be “not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both”. A good novel doesn’t just tug at the heartstrings it engages the mind. But as one reader said about The Keeper, “…it is a heartwarming escape. Not every book has to be critically reviewed for style and all kinds of other attributes…”. I’m realizing that readers are divided into those who read to employ head and heart and those who want to escape into an easy, feel-good world. So if tens of thousands of readers are happy with escapist fiction, rather than plots that make you think and virtuostic writing, I will leave them to it and spend my precious reading time devouring the best literature I can find.The best novels have dialogue that rings true. In her collection of essays, Feel Free, Smith talks about, …”that trick of breathing what–looks–like–life into a collection of written sentences….it really is a sort of magic. I like writing that makes you hear voices.” Where this magic is lacking, less dedicated authors rely on repeating what others have written time and time again, rather than experiencing and transcribing the voices real people.
Here’s Smith on author Paula Fox. “A fresh crop of writers sought a way of writing “around–the-house–and–in–the–yard” fiction…A new domestic realism: unsentimental yet vivid….”. While there is a plethora of “around–the-house” stories, they fail to seem real if told through a lens of sentiment. Fox explains her gift thus: “I can see”, and this does appear to be the crucial ingredient in good writing. Not a soft-focus lens on life but a 50-1350 mm zoom.
Photo of Paula Fox from Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1/the-art-of-fiction-no-181-paula-fox Smith quotes E. M. Forster: “she gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch words”. Smith contrasts this with the writing of Edward St. Aubyn, “…it’s a joy. Oh, the semi-colons, the discipline! Those commas so perfectly placed, so rhythmic, creating sentences loaded and blessed, almost o’erbrimmed, and yet sturdy, never in danger of collapse. It’s like fingering a beautiful swatch of brocade…”. While no one could accuse St. Aubyn of heartfelt, heartwarming prose, his writing is a gorgeous fabric of colourful threads even as he takes the reader on a torturous and frightening route through the human psyche.
Smith discriminates between the real world, “where we often want our judgments and moral decisions to be swift and singular and decisive”, and fiction that, “messes with our sense of what it is possible to do with our judgments. It usefully suspense our great and violent desire to be in the right on every question….” This accords with my empirical observation that good writing forces even the less introspective among us, such as myself, to question our assumptions and open our minds to new ways of thinking. It creates hairline cracks in our most dearly-held stereotypes and prejudices, in this way paving the way toward social change, or at least a more conscious readership. And surely this is the point of the arts, to act as a conduit for greater awareness, rather than as a soother.
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On Frogs
Next to the sound of birdsong, there is nothing lovelier than frogsong of a Spring evening. This blog, on frogs, describes the many artworks I have created over the years in celebration of frogs and their critical role on the earth.
Jumping Frogwoman, October 2007, 17” h x 22” w x 20” d, painted wood, found hardware Above is a silver-painted wooden version of a frog piece that is part of the animal/human fusion theme. Below is a gold-painted version in steel.
Golden Jumping Frogwoman, 2014, MLJamieson, 17″ h x 22″ w x 20″ d,
painted mild steelThe frog/human figures continue my fascination with melded animal/human figures, the myths that feature them and how they relate to changing human history. In ancient religions these figures were symbolic expressions of a deep spiritual understanding and represented a particular human function/attribute in its purest form. This indicates that there was a recognition of and respect for the similarities between humans & other species and an understanding that all sentient creatures share more commonalities than differences. This understanding was lost over time as humans became farther removed from the natural world and failed to appreciate our dependence on it. This has led to the degradation of the planet through over-expansion of human habitat and the disappearance of the habitats of other species.
Another small sculpture using the frog/human image is a second version of Jumping Frogwoman in plaster.
Jumping Frogwoman II, 2008, 6.5″ h x 12.5 ” w x 7″ d The frog is often considered the “Tunnel Canary” in the human global experiment of mining the earth and converting its resources for our use. Frogs are one of the most sensitive species to global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer.
A male Dendropsophus microcephalus displaying its vocal sac during its call. Wikipedia states that frog populations have declined dramatically since the 1950s: more than one third of species are believed to be threatened with extinction and more than 120 species are suspected to be extinct since the 1980s. Habitat loss is a significant cause of frog population decline, as are pollutants, climate change, the introduction of non-indigenous predators/competitors, and emerging infectious diseases. Many environmental scientists believe that amphibians, including frogs, are excellent biological indicators of broader ecosystem health because of their intermediate position in food webs, permeable skins, and typically biphasic life (aquatic larvae and terrestrial adults).
Frogs feature prominently in folklore, fairy tales and popular culture. They tend to be portrayed as benign, ugly, clumsy, but with hidden talents. “The Frog Prince” is a fairy tale of a frog who turns into a handsome prince once kissed. The Moche people of ancient Peru often depicted frogs in their art.
Moche Frog, 200 A.D. Larco Museum Collection Lima, Peru In Panama local legend promised luck to anyone who spotted a golden frog in the wild and some believed that when Panamanian Golden Frogs died, they would turn into a gold talisman, known as a huaca. Today, despite being extinct in the wild, Panamanian Golden Frogs remain an important cultural symbol.
I have love frogs since childhood when my sisters & I would collect them from creeks & ditches & bring them home to live in our backyard pond. Unfortunately, our cats would catch them & kill them, thus we and a million other children and cats did our bit to reduce frog populations.
One of my earliest works that melded animals and humans was the drawing below. Called, Elegy, it comments on the extinction of frogs and is an elegy that mourns their sacrifice to human sins. In the process, it questions the Biblical assumption that God only sacrificed his human/divine son to human sin two thousand years ago, as other species, just as precious, are being sacrificed here and now.
Elegy, 1985, Marion-Lea Jamieson, watercolour on paper, 11″ h x 14′ w Like the Three Graces in the bird blog, Elegy used a famous classical painting as a point of departure and modified it to change the message to include other species beside humans. Later I used the drawing as a basis for a painting shown below.
Elegy, Dec. 2015, Marion-Lea Jamieson, 32″ h x 42″ w, oil on canvas The famous painting on which it is based is the following:
Pietà (1516), Fra Bartolomeo, colour on wood, 62.2″ × 78.3″, Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Though the drawn version of Elegy was done in 1985, then translated into oil paints 30 years later, I have been uncomfortable about showing it publicly in case some might find it offensive, which is the very opposite of my intention. I have never subscribed to the theory that the role for art is to shock the comfortable into questioning their beliefs, and I have the greatest respect for the human search for spiritual understanding and faith. I do, however feel strongly that the mass species extinction of frogs is tragic and am using the pieta symbol as a way to communicate the scope of this tragedy. Because frogs are considered a lowly species, the use of a frog figure to depict Christ may appear blasphemous to some people. But the use of animal figures to depict Him is not something I made up to annoy people. When in France, I was surprised to find ancient sculptures & paintings with Christ depicted as a fusion of different animals: part lion to reflect courage; part lamb to show His gentleness; part bird to show his heavenly nature; etc. It is a reflection of our distance and antagonism to the natural world that this type of representation currently rarely appears, to my knowledge.
I used another painting from a life-drawing class that was less than successful to create another frog painting. About 1997, I did a painting called Colourful Robe that exhibited the same problems as describes in the post On Birds and another post, Exploring My Inner Woman: paintings of women (indeed any arty depiction of women, such as sculpture and especially photography) ) have a built-in Kitch factor.
Colourful Robe, 1997, Oil on canvas 36″ h x 30″ w This is because women have been over-represented as subjects for art, and have been pimped for hundreds of years to communicate such cloying sentiments as “The Eternal Woman” or “Motherhood”, or “Beauty”. Now any artist that uses an image of an (especially) naked woman must deal with centuries of sentimental abuse of the female figure in art. At one point, I thought that it was the static nature of painting, photography & sculpture that lent the female image its slightly pornographic quality, no matter how innocent the intention. So I tried making drawings of the female body in motion, which was a slight improvement but still felt uncomfortable with it.
So like the painting of the woman on the beach to which I attached the Stork’s head, I turned this figure into the Frog Queen and was much happier with it. As I said, I regard all of my paintings as works in progress and only stop working on them when they are taken away from me through sale. Below is the first iteration of this painting.
Frog Queen, 2008, Oil on Canvas, 36″ h x 30 ” d I loved the imperious expression on the models face and wanted to capture that in the frog figure. All of these works question & challenge the lowly status of other species and the assumption that they are lesser beings in terms of beauty, grace, authority and divine esteem. The Frog Queen suggests that if frogs ruled the world, there would certainly be no water pollution, climate change, the introduction of non-indigenous predators/competitors, and emerging infectious diseases. The world might be a much more livable place for all of us.
Though I liked the colourful robe, again I wasn’t satisfied with the semi-naturalistic landscape setting and wanted to make the whole painting into a sculpture study. I was interested in taking the rules that had been used with the figure and applying them to the surroundings in order to make the whole more logical or make it a world with its own logic, so to speak. In other words, I applied the restricted palette and planar surfaces to the entire canvas. The idea was to create a painting that looked carved in stone – as though the scenario was sculpted out of a rock face. I re-named the painting Heket to return to the sacred connections with frogs, as depicted in Elegy shown above.
Heket, December 2010, oil on canvas, 36” h x 30”w Wikepedia says that to the Egyptians, the frog was a symbol of life and fertility, since millions of them were born after the annual inundation of the Nile, which brought fertility to the otherwise barren lands. Consequently, in Egyptian mythology, there began to be a frog-goddess, who represented fertility, referred to as Heket (or Heqet). She was usually depicted as a frog, or a woman with a frog’s head, or more rarely as a frog on the end of a phallus to explicitly indicate her association with fertility.
As a fertility goddess, associated explicitly with the last stages of the flooding of the Nile, and so with the germination of corn, she became associated with the final stages of childbirth. This association gained her the title She who hastens the birth. Some claim that—even though no ancient Egyptian term for “midwife” is known for certain—midwives often called themselves the Servants of Heqet, and that her priestesses were trained in midwifery. Women often wore amulets of her during childbirth, which depicted Heqet as a frog, sitting in a lotus.
When the Legend of Osiris and Isis developed, it was said that it was Heqet who breathed life into the new body of Horus at birth, as she was the goddess of the last moments of birth. As the birth of Horus became more intimately associated with the resurrection of Osiris, so Heqet’s role became one more closely associated with resurrection. Eventually, this association led to her amulets gaining the phrase I am the resurrection, and consequently the amulets were used by early Christians. The link between frogs, resurrection and Christianity gives greater substance to the truth of Elegy.
Nine years later, Heket went through a further transformation when the figure was re-imagined in a piece called Metamorphosis, part of series called Back to Nature. Here the figure is shown with a more painterly approach and the colourful robe and human female characteristics are back.
Metamorphosis. 2019, Marion-Lea Jamieson, oil on canvas, 42″ h x 35″ w. The most recent frog piece, As It Were was painted in 2019. The stylized frogs were inspired by images from the European Neolithic age and the piece was part of a series from 2019-2021 called “Time LInes”.
As It Were, 2019, Marion-Lea Jamieson, oil on canvas, 35″ x 42″ Frog images may well re-appear in my work as they are an evocative image, rich in associations. Watch this space for more on frogs!
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On Time: It’s All Relative
Now that I am once again living on an island, Island Time is a real phenomenon. It feels like there is more time but the priorities for how to use it have shifted. It is more important to sit on the beach watching otters play than to be on time for an appointment; more important to cloud-gaze than to do chores. For some time I have suspected that time is not the clockwork mechanism that we have been taught to believe in, but something elastic that stretches and contracts according to the mindset. Here on this island, time is of longer duration but the days fly by. This blog, On Time: It’s All Relative is about how this has affected my work.
In John Banville‘s novel, Ghosts, the protagonist comes to live on a sparsely populated island and reflects on the slow pace of life there:
“Time. Time on my hands. That is a strange phrase. From those first weeks on the island I recall especially the afternoons, slow, silent, oddly mysterious stretches of something that seemed more than clock time, a thicker textured stuff, a sort of Seadrift, tidal, surreptitious, Deeper than the world. …This is a different way of being alive. I thought sometimes at moments such as this that I might simply drift away and become a part of all that out there, drift and dissolve, be a shimmer of light slowly fading into nothing.”
Clouds over Bay, B&W, 2023, Marion-Lea Jamieson, Printing inks on wood, 18″ h x 24″ w So it is less productive in terms of paid labour, but more productive of relaxed charm, friendliness, and ease.
My art practice has responded to Island Time by allowing for more detailed, labour-intensive work that might take all afternoon for an almost unnoticeable addition. And it has led to the creation of artwork that owes some of its technique to a time before mass produced printing when artists carved images on wood, rolled ink on top and pressed the image onto paper. They became astonishingly skilled at depicting the world using cross-hatched lines to convey light, shade, form and texture. Later they used this technique to create line drawings of incredible detail etched into metal plates. Many artists keep this time-honoured and highly-skilled tradition alive and I have studied both the early and more modern practitioners to develop my own style.
Illustration by Marion-Lea Jamieson for Canadian Pacific Airlines
by McKim Advertising Ltd. Vancouver BC 1986For many years in the 1980’s and 1990’s I worked as an illustrator for editorial, advertising and book publishing using this style of drawing. I sometimes carved my drawings into linoleum to make lino-cut prints, but due to the short time-lines in publishing, I usually used scratchboard to create cross-hatched black & white drawings that translated well into print media and could be produced on time..
To sharpen my technique, I also made drawings of landscapes, portraits and still-lives that were not for commercial applications.
Rocky Shore, B&W, 2023, Marion-Lea Jamieson, Printing inks on wood, 19.5″ h x 25.5″ w Then I got into sculpture and later, big, full-colour abstract oil paintings and away from 2D black& white images.
Beginning Again, May 2017, Marion-Lea Jamieson, oil on canvas, 48″ h x 60″ w But having moved to this Island, removed from urban assumptions and pressures, I have once again taken up the challenge of creating detailed, labour-intensive line drawings with the cross-hatched drawing techniques of an earlier era. But now the original B&W drawings are digitized and printed using contemporary technology so they are an interesting mix of the traditional melded with current technological advances. As it is neither old or new, my current work feels that it is aiming at something timeless or outside of time.
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A Superior Substitute for Life
Julian Barnes, one of my favourite writers, poses the question – “is art a depiction of reality, a concentration of it, a superior substitute for it, or just a beguiling irrelevance?” (excerpt from the novel, Elizabeth Finch by Barnes).This question opens cans of worms that have been wrestled with in earlier blogs. Is art a superior substitute for life? Is it a depiction of reality?
Cover image of the novel, Elizabeth Finch, by Julian Barnes, Published by Jonathan Cape, 2022 Is the job of artists to reflect the times we live in so as to make our fellow citizens aware of the historical mistakes we as a society may be repeating? Should artists be confronting us with our greed, stupidity, and all the other deadlies we constantly commit? Or should we be celebrating the slow progress of conscious human awareness? How can an artist distinguish between their own perception of reality and what is actually going on out there? How do we know if our sins are more numerous and deterministic than our saving graces?
The post-moderns, post-post moderns and other recent schools answer these questions by assuming that we can’t perceive what is real because reality is made up of momentary impressions that we superimpose on the world around us. Some might even suggest that there is no independent reality, there are only disparate individual perceptions created by cultural norms, personal histories, situations and emotions. By this logic, artists cannot depict reality as it is an illusion and they must avoid attempting to impose their personal understanding on their audience as this is dishonest and even unfair.
This leads us to the second part of the question posed by Barnes: is art a concentration of reality? If one accepts the logic outlined above, then reality cannot be depicted, let alone concentrated. But perhaps artists, through their craft, discipline and experience, are able to distill experience into a hyper-real depiction of the world around them. This is the case in many non-Western cultures and was the case in earlier European cultures before the pursuit of realism became the measure of excellence. In First Nations cultures on the west coast of British Columbia, artists capture the history, stories and spirit of their culture rather than individual emotional states or experiences.
Charles Edenshaw Model Pole c. 1885 (detail) Wood Courtesy Museum of Vancouver / photo Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art GalleryThe power of a work such as this can’t be denied and its concentrated energy negates the idea that art can’t depict reality. But this is a reality on a different scale that the one debated by the post-moderns. This is the type of reality that Westerners lost sight of as scientific reductionism took all our attention.
Early Europeans also used powerful images to concentrate and communicate the essence of their culture, and this has been explored in an earlier blog . One such powerful image is the sculpture below:
Steatopygous Goddess. Clay figurine of a squatting woman. Neolithic, 5300-3000 BC. These works provided a schematized, abstract rendition of human traits, in this case, fertility (mother-goddess). They were depicted in stages of pregnancy, giving birth or showing maternal affection, parts of life independent of individual artistic bias.
Is art a superior substitute for reality? Can we attain the same level of understanding from an excellent novel by Julian Barnes as we can by exposing ourselves to life in all its variation, wonder & squalor? Does a well-written novel, riveting play or mind-altering painting represent a more refined and accurate conception of reality than the lived experience of a non-artist?
This topic can be diverted by the issue of digital vs. non-digital reality and the current worry that for many, if not most of us, “real” reality has become a dull reflection of what we can find in our devices. Is a well-written novel, riveting play or mind-altering painting intrinsically more valuable than an hour or two on Facebook, Snapchat or TikTok? If we accept that there is no “real” reality anyway, it’s quality doesn’t make any difference. But if we don’t accept this, we might suggest that an undifferentiated virtual world with no limitations or standards is a formless, dumbed-down alternative to a well-written novel, riveting play or mind-altering painting. These collate societal experiences into artworks that don’t substitute for reality but distill it into something greater than all of our busy minds. So in that way, yes, good art is a superior substitute for mindlessly getting through the day.
But the last part of Barnes’ question is the big one: is art just a beguiling irrelevance? Is it defensible to be working diligently to create artworks in the context of world hunger, war, climate change, mass migrations, mass species extinction etc.?
Shouldn’t we all down pens, paintbrushes, ballet shoes and violins to distribute needed supplies to exhausted refugees? Remove invasive species from nearby wildlife habitat? Sit in front of our legislature with a placard demanding a sustainable future?
We artists defend our practices by arguing that in a world of greed & violence, the arts preserve the best part of humanity and provide an alternative paradigm to getting & spending. This doesn’t really answer the big question, but it will have to do for now.
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Backing into the Future
I am currently re-visiting past work because I can’t remember why I stopped doing it. Why not do landscapes? For years I accepted the imperative that a serious artist must avoid sinking into prettiness. But lately, I’m wondering if the future of art is one of creating lyricism and loveliness as these qualities become increasingly scarce in the world. This is an idea from Richard Powers‘ novel Orfeo where he suggests that ”… the key to re-enchantment still lay in walking backwards into the future”. By backing into the future, artists would return to the aesthetics of the past without forgetting the lessons of the last century.
For the last hundred years it has been a truism that the job of art is to progress by creating shocking images that shatter past expectations. But how relevant is it to épater la bourgeoisie anymore? The bourgeoisie have happily lapped up bold artistic experiments designed to shock them out of their complacency and have cannily turned them into marketable commodities. And the international bourgeoisie have transformed the art market into the world’s most effective and rewarding money laundering vehicle. In Orfeo, Powers uses a musician and composer as protagonist to explore this unhappy situation and that of the arts in general. He also pokes into some other thorny questions such as, do artists have a free pass to ignore their worldly responsibilities in pursuit of their art?
The novel is a wealth of information about music and describes a world of skill, sensation and experience that most of us don’t get to share. In his youth, Powers’ protagonist had accepted the challenge of his professors and peers to create music that thumbed its nose at accepted mores. This was in the ’60s when the task of all modern artists was to be outrageous. This protagonist musician was at the heart of a no-holds-barred musical/theatrical happening over the course of a decade in which he created work that pushed boundaries and was on the leading perimeter of the cutting edge. The risks, successes and highs of these bold experiments are enviable and the reader feels comparatively earth-bound.
Not that artists didn’t enjoy a period of youthful artistic exuberance in 60’s & ’70’s Vancouver, BC where I came of age. It was much like the time Powers describes in Illinois: artists had funding to carry out crazy experiments without the marketing imperative. For instance, in 1973 I had a Canada Council grant to photograph costumed fellow artists in various scenarios on the streets of Vancouver.
Circus, Circus, 1973, B&W photograph, scenario by Marion-Lea Jamieson, photo by Chris Dahl, actors R-L : Susan Molloy, Jim Skerl and Toni Rutter 
The Bag Lady, 1973, B&W photograph, scenario by Marion-Lea Jamieson, photo by Chris Dahl, actor, Marion-Lea Jamieson 
Shaughnessy, 1973, B&W photograph, scenario by Marion-Lea Jamieson, photo by Chris Dahl, actors R-L: Marion-Lea Jamieson, Susan Molloy and an unidentified actor. At the time, artists had ideas and ran with them – there wasn’t the amount of self criticism required then that there is now, though perhaps there should have been. From the perspective on 2024, these scenarios could be viewed with suspicion. Were they pitiless, stereotypical caricatures of sex workers and homeless old women? Or were they scenarios that described a city (Vancouver) at the beginning of its transformation from sleepy sea-side town to World Class City with World Class social upheaval? I have always disapproved of photographing real people going about their every-day lives and appropriating their images as art. So I used actors to express the changes I saw happening in my home town: expanding transactional sex; a growing and visible cohort of disadvantaged people; and an associated growing and visible cohort of the super-wealthy who were getting away with murder.
Later, with an Opportunities for Youth grant that Chris Dahl & I received, we worked with Bob Amussen to collect a sample of work from all the artists we knew of in Vancouver and the surrounding areas, the good, the bad and the ugly, and collated them into a published book.
Three Hours Later: A Catalogue of British Columbia Artists and Their Work, A New Era Social Club Publication, January 1974. Cover photo by Taki Bluesinger 1973. From R-L, Marion-Lea Jamieson and unidentified letter carrier/artist. The dance company I worked with, a tortured and anarchic artists’ collective, produced cutting edge work that toured the province on a shoe-string.
Terminal-City-Dance,1975, B&W photo by Chris Dahl, dancers kneeling from L-R: Peggy Florin, Savannah Walling, Michael Sawyer, Menlo MacFarlane and Karen Jamieson. Lying on floor, Marion-Lea Jamieson. There was even a hodge-podge artists’ band that gathered at the New Era Social Club with found instruments that created dissonant, unstructured sound.
But as I found out, non-paying gigs and widely-spaced grants are fine for the childless. But, as in Powers’ novel, the moral question arose – is it OK to sacrifice one’s children to one’s art? Successful male artists are usually careful to equip themselves with an admiring mate to support their work. And if the child-rearing thing doesn’t work out, they leave it to the spouse to manage on her own. As The Gorilla Girls pointed out, especially at the time, male artists were 98% more likely to become successful and able to find paying work. But I was not so blessed and had to find a day job.
Now, many years later, the imperative for art to be outrageous still stands, but as asked at the start of this blog, how relevant is it to épater les bourgeoisie anymore? Looking back, Powers’ protagonist in Orfeo says “ …rebelling is itself a passing fashion, as fragile as any. The manifestos of Peter’s 20s – the movements and lawless experiments, the crazy climbs up onto the barricades – feel like a tantrum now, like his daughter refusing to take her nap. Who can say what the Academy champions these days? … but he knows that cool will give way to warm, form to feeling, as surely as a leading tone tilts forever toward the tonic.”
This is the pattern one finds in Western art movements over the last couple of centuries. Whichever Academy of Art has the funding and commissioning leverage that makes or breaks artists, also decides that either form or feeling is the necessary ingredient for the times. The Classical period demanded form; the Baroque and Romantic periods fetishized feeling; the Neo-Classicists yearned for lost formality; the Impressionists ramped up feeling; the Modernists progressively reduced form to its essence, and the Post-Modernists pushed this until art itself was almost eliminated.
Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” Are we at the point where “cool will give way to warm, form to feeling”? Is it an inevitable pendulum swing or does it swing back because those denied recognition, funding and acceptance by the current Academy push back through dedicated hard work? We shall see. Or likely not “us” but commentators far in the future who will look back over the last 100 years and describe how Western civilization finally emerged from a dark age of anti-art to an age of …what?
Powers hints at the possible next phase as his protagonist hears one of his musical contemporaries, “a rigid serialist”, serve up “…a bouquet reeking of lyric consonants…a serious composer surrendering, turning his back on the last hundred years, and sinking into prettiness. And yet what courage in this backsliding. Els shakes his head at the loveliness of the florid finale. it makes him remember old pleasures condemned for reasons he can’t now retrieve.” (Orfeo, p.270)
Lyricism, loveliness, “Old pleasures condemned for reasons he can’t now retrieve”; could this be the new rebelliousness? In this spirit I am currently re-visiting past work because I can’t remember why I stopped doing it. Why not do landscapes?
Rocky Shore, Marion-Lea Jamieson, 2023, 21″ h x 27″ w, printing inks on wood. Why not go for beauty? It feels like a repudiation of everything artists have been conditioned to believe. But let’s face it, art is not going to solve the climate crisis, mass species extinction or mass human migration. It is not going to shock the middle-classes and 100 years of attempting to do so has done nothing for society or the environment. So artists may as well return to their original job of facilitating reverence: for nature, for stillness, for God, however understood. Artworks made with and for reverence may not appeal to the Academy, but will speak to “the usual hearty few …hungry for some transcendent thing that the human mind may never produce.” (Orfeo, p.276)
Powers suggests a way forward: “a middle path between romantic indulgence and sterile algorithms, between the grip of the past and the cult of progress”.(Orfeo p.274) No need to return to Rubenesque pink bottoms floating on Cumulus clouds or pastoral scenes of vanished country life.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) Ixion, king of the Lapiths, deceived by Hera (Juno), 1615, oil on canvas, height: 175 cm (68.8 in) width: 245 cm (96.4 in) thickness: 20 cm (7.8 in) , Collection: Louvre Museum Also no need to eschew landscapes, work exclusively with recycled waste or communicate that hopeless despair is the only sane attitude possible.
So my current approach is that ”… the key to re-enchantment still lay in walking backwards into the future”. I’m revisiting traditional drawing techniques of the past, from the 15th C. woodcuts and engravings of Albrecht Dürer to the 19th C wood engravings of Thomas Bewick and of Paul Nash in the 20th C. I studied and used these techniques as an illustrator and they became my trademark style. Now I am re-discovering the potential for these techniques when brought into the present via Photoshop. The melding of traditional techniques with current technical hardware opens up an unlimited potential for exploration and re-discovery of old pleasures condemned for reasons I can’t now retrieve.
Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) “The Yellow Owl, Gillihowlet, Church, Barn,
or Screech Owl.”, 1797, wood engraving print
Source: A History of British Birds, Volume I: Land Birds (1847 edition) -
Art for Art’s Sake
Now that I live in semi-rural area, I am relying more and more on books to provide the assurance that making art is relevant. My new home is one of natural beauty, is visually inspiring and has recharged my desire to paint and draw and make art. But art is a mercurial lover and tetchy muse that often goes off in a huff. So it is with gratitude that I read an author like A. S. Byatt who is so unashamedly a master; who excels in her discipline and can confidently push its boundaries into unsanctified areas. An artist who unapologetically defends making art for art’s sake because it is so important.
A.S. Byatt at home in west London in 2009. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian A. S. Byatt’s last book of short stories, Medusa’s Ankles, was a joy to read after having waded through a slew of glib novels by young writers seeking to take liberties with the form without having mastered it to begin with. The introduction to Byatt’s book is written by David Mitchell who describes the author as an art historian whose scholarly knowledge of art informs her prose. He says her characters act as conduits for ideas about making art, looking at art and art’s centrality to the mind and the world. For instance she incorporates ideas from John Ruskin “…from whom art lecturers claim professional descent“.
John Ruskin Ruskin argued that the principal duty
of the artist is “truth to nature”.
This meant rooting art in experience and close observation.Few writers, Mitchell says, embed theory in their fiction with Byatt’s boldness and success, with theories of art illustrated by the stories that house them. He uses the word “Ekphrasis” which describes a work of visual art used as a literary device. I’m delighted by the revelation that there is a word for an area I’ve been trying to talk about in the halting prose of a non-writer. But Byatt’s prose “bestows dignity upon art in all its manifestations.”
In the short story, Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary, she has the character Valasquez say, “the world is full of light and life and the true crime is not to be interested in it“. That’s an interesting idea – artists are simply those people interested enough in light and life to devote their lives to translating it into a visual, literary or some other communicable form.
Diego Velázquez: Las meninas, oil on canvas c. 1656; in the Prado Museum, Madrid. One of the collection’s outstanding stories is “A Lamia in the Cevennes” in which an artist with a creative block falls in love, not with a mythological seductress, but with art itself.
The Kiss of the Enchantress, c. 1890,Isobel Lilian Gloag,
watercolor painting. Inspired by the poem “Lamia”
by John Keats. 62 x 32 cmAs in all her stories, this one is in constant dialogue with the readers, asking, What is art? Why do we need it? What does it do for us? The protagonist, Bernard, asks, “Why bother? Why does this matter so much? What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again? I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera camp in Columbia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint on a bit of board? I could just stop. He could not.” “Art is a mercurial lover” says Mitchell in the Introduction. “The artists can no more ignore their art than a character can change the story they appear in, or a Greek hero outwit the fates.”
There are many other authors who wrestle with the point of making art. In his novel, Elizabeth Finch, Julian Barnes asks,”Is art a depiction of reality, a concentration of it, a superior substitute for it, or just a beguiling irrelevance?” In the case of a novel, it is easier to understand how the writer, an expert at communicating in language, can help readers to make sense of the world, to understand it and our place in it. But what about the writers’ or artists’ larger responsibilities to society as a whole? Whether a writer, or any artist must directly address and take a strong position on political developments in his/her country is explored at some length and with great delicacy by Colm Toibin in his novel about the life of Thomas Mann, The Magician. In the novel, Mann (and Toibin) concludes that artists are damned if they do or don’t take a political stand and by extension, suggests that an artist’s first and primary responsibility is to his/her work. He also concludes that barbarism is never far beneath the surface and that art is always the first of its victims. So artists keep alive a sense of grace and beauty that balances violence and brutality.
Thomas Mann, 1929, Nobel laureate in Literature These great artists insist that creating artworks is a balance to violence, help us see and make sense of the world and I am grateful that they have defended making art for art’s sake. Thanks Antonia, Julian, Colm, Thomas and all the rest.
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Fail, Fail again and then Fail Better
Authors often like to use painters as protagonists because they illustrate some of the issues and concerns that are relevant to all artists. Sometimes these works reflect the reality of life for most painters but often authors use wildly and uncharacteristically successful painters as protagonists. These mythical artists are in huge demand and showing their work at the trendiest New York galleries. This bears a little resemblance to the life of most painters who struggle to simply keep working throughout their adult lives and managing to communicate their work to an audience. But other artists manage touse painters to express commonalities among all art disciplines, such as the need to fail, fail again and then fail better.
Despite defaulting to the usual formula of a highly successful artist protagonist, Roxanna Robinson has managed to express how it is to make paintings and present them to the wider world, and the inner doubts and fears that arise. In her book Cost she describes the moment when the protagonist has just entered the gallery where her latest work is being shown.
Roxanna Robinson, Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan This rather long but brilliant excerpt effectively captures the experience of an artist, especially a female artist, on showing her work.
“…her next thought was fear that she was not good enough for the gallery. The work was not what she had hoped. It was never what she hoped. She could see she hadn’t done what she intended. Nor was she breaking new ground: she wasn’t combining video with cake or making sculpture out of garbage or using pigment made from Moose urine. She was only trying to work deeper into the presence of landscape, to find something interior that had not been revealed before. She was trying to create a certain set of relationships. She was trying to create a glowing mystical terrain. Why shouldn’t you work deeper into a tradition instead of breaking out of it? Everyone worked within some tradition even if it was the tradition of subversion, rebellion. What she wanted was her paintings to mean something, to have their own speaking presence. It was feeling, it was passion. Passion was what she wanted. Giotto’s tiny angels weeping and ringing their hands, quivering with grief like anguished hummingbirds.
Giotto, 1305, Lamentation, height: 200 cm (78.7 in) ; width: 185 cm (72.8 in), fresco painting Julia had no interest in art that jeered at passion. Irony was the suicide mode of art, parasitically dependent on the culture around it, so instantly obsolete as the culture evolved. Who cared about those ancient needle sharp skewers, so exquisite, so excruciating, so on the mark, so of the moment, so hopelessly outdated? Passion would still drive the universe.
The paintings stood their ground, made their claims, said their pieces. What was it she had meant to do? Was this it? This role of coloured panels; these flat bright things hanging against the plaster walls? Now looked at from a distance, it might be failure again. There had been something else, something quick and liquid, something deeper. That was what she had been trying for, she’d wanted to make a large bright place, larger, more radiant more frightening than here, but like it. These were only awkward, shorthand comments, incomplete versions of the larger thing. She had failed, as always; she’d comes nowhere near the mark. She would have to stand here and listen people offer kind words about work, a low drone of pity thudding through the false congratulations.
She could not change things. The pictures were done, they were up on the walls, they were presenting themselves to the world. She had failed maybe, but maybe not. Maybe what she was trying for could not be achieved. She had come as close, perhaps, as she could, as anyone could, given the limits, right now, of herself. All she could do was make things come close, as close as she could get them, to the real thing.
Actually, they were close to what she had wanted to say. There was the work to be judged, and there she was, accepting authourship. What she hoped was that people would see her intentions, that she was striving for that bright, liquid, melting thing. Now she felt full of alarmed anticipation. And also full of pleasure: it was an honour to be a part of this dialogue about art & beauty & value. Everything was near-misses wasn’t it? Fail. Fail again. Fail better. Suddenly she felt deliriously happy, inflated & buoyant with pleasure, simply to have the opportunity to participate in the great discourse.
There was nothing you could believe about your work from other people, nothing. Praise sounded false; criticism, mean. Everything was biased, of course, there was nothing objective about responses to art. There were a few friends you could trust to tell you the truth, but it was only their truths. Nothing to make certain your place in the world of art. You had to find it yourself and then make it your home. You had to create your own balance your own certainty. No one else knew what you were trying to do. You had to find your own faith. You have to stand up for it against the assaults of logic and fear and the articulations of the whole critical world. You had to close your eyes to everything else, repeating your personal creed, reminding your self of what you were doing, why you were doing it.”
Beautifully said and relevant to any artistic discipline, the need to fail, fail again and then fail better in order to participate in the great discourse.
Some paintings in Time LInes series by Marion-Lea Jamieson at Place des Arts -
Exploring my Inner Woman
For many years, I explored a theme called Running Man that revealed to me that I too was a running man, neglecting the important parts of life by chasing success and worldly concerns. As they say, artists always make self-portraits. After that, it was time for me to begin exploring my inner woman, so as a counterpart to the Running Man series, I developed the Dancing Woman series. The first piece in the series was called the Three Graces, originally designed as a maquette to be scaled up into a larger piece.
The Three Graces
The Three Graces, 2004, 70 cm x 70 cm x 70 cm, silver paint on plaster This piece was a further effort to explore the problem of depicting women in art without succumbing to stereotyping about Beauty, the Eternal Woman and the rest of it. This problem is discussed in more detail in another blog .
Three Graces/Charites from Pompeii Images of The Three Graces goes back to antiquity. Wikipedia says in Greek mythology, the Graces ordinarily numbered three, from youngest to oldest: “Splendor”, “Mirth” and “Good Cheer”.
In 1482 Sandro Botticelli included Three graces in his painting Primavera.
Detail from Sandro Botticelli’s painting Primavera There is the famous oil painting by Italian painter, Raphael, who in turn was inspired by a ruined Roman marble statue in Siena, shown below, that was in turn a copy of a Greek original.
Three Graces: Roman copy of Greek original 
The Three Graces, 1504-1505, Raffaello Sanzio, Also below is Antonio Canova’s (1757 – 1822) version in marble. He was an Italian sculptor who became famous for his sculptures that delicately rendered nude flesh. His work is the epitome of classical refinement.
The Three Graces, Antonio Canova My sculptural version of The Three Graces is the opposite of delicately rendered nude flesh for reasons I have explained elsewhere. I am breathless with admiration for the technical ability of those painters and sculptors who were able to take paints or stone and turn them into a timeless msterpieces. But that was then and this is now. The problem for contemporary artists is that the female form has been used so often that it has become a cultural icon used to convey shallow, sentimental ideas about women that are conventional and formulaic. This is why my version of the graceful trio is made from flat planes to create monumental, powerful angular figures. This seems closer to the original conception of the Graces as goddesses of “Splendor”, “Mirth” and “Good Cheer.
But for the last four centuries, endless, ubiquitous, egregious representations of delicately rendered female flesh have become an issue. It became an issue, largely because of the women’s movement and a general critique of gender inequality. But the role of women in the arts was raised to the public consciousness most brilliantly by the Guerilla Girls. In 1989, this artists’ collective was asked to design a billboard for the Public Art Fund (PAF) in New York. They conducted a “weenie count” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, comparing the number of nude males to nude females in the artworks on display. The results were very “revealing” and were used in the design they submitted shown below.
Poster designed for the Public Art Fund, New York, 1989, The Guerilla Girls The PAF said the design wasn’t clear enough (????) and rejected it. The Guerilla Girls rented advertising space on NYC buses and ran it themselves, until the bus company cancelled their lease, saying that the image, based on Ingres’ famous Odalisque, was too suggestive and that the figure appeared to have more than a fan in her hand.
The problem of delicately rendered female flesh was explored in the early 1970’s in a collection of essays, later televised, called Ways of Seeing, edited by John Berger. The essays raise questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. One essay focuses particularly on the female nude as a subject for art which depicts women as a subject of male idealization or desire, rather than as herself . An example is Venus & Cupid by Lely shown below.
Venus & Cupid; circa 1640; Sir Peter Lely This portrait of his mistress was commissioned by Charles the Second. It shows her passively looking at the spectator staring at her naked. Berger calls her expression “…a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or demands.”
Berger contrasts this Western tradition of painting languid nudes to non-European traditions, such as Indian, African & Pre-Columbian art where “…nakedness is never supine in this way.”
The question posed on the Guerilla Girl’s website is: DO YOU THINK THINGS HAVE GOTTEN BETTER SINCE OUR FIRST COUNT IN 1989? As a sculptor, I am naturally interested in how often women are successful in sculpture & public art competitions or how well they are represented in exhibitions and galleries. So to answer the Guerrilla Girls’ question, I checked “sculpture” on Wikipedia and did a back-of-envelope gender analysis of the sculptors represented there. Only about 5% of the artists mentioned are women in what should be a progressive source of information on sculpture. An apologist might say that women don’t want to be sculptors because it’s too difficult for them, or they are not strong enough or something along those lines. For instance, when I was at a sculpture symposium in China, I asked why there were virtually no Chinese women sculptors among the 60 or so male sculptors participating. The response I got from male sculptors was that sculpture is dirty work & women don’t want to do it. A more likely scenario is that China, like most of the world, discriminates against female sculptors in terms of acceptance for sculpture training and granting of commissions. If in fact there are fewer female than male sculptors per capita in the West, it would be my suspicion that women chose another field because sculpture has remained a macho preserve. And even if there were as many female sculptors as male, there is clearly a strong gender bias at work in terms of getting work & recognition.
Though the Guerilla Girls are still very much the “conscience of the art world” I hadn’t seen any sign of them in my home town of Vancouver for decades. I was reminded about their artwork by an exhibition of feminist art at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris that featured them. Another of their brilliant and biting pieces is the following:
The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988, The Guerrilla Girls I love their work and wish we could see more of it. The contemporary art scene tends toward works that are careful not to take a stance on identifiable issues or real-world problems. An artist may allude to an issue, preferably taking an obscure approach that could not be said to present a point of view. But using art to clearly present an opinion is considered didactic, and contrary to postmodernism’s rule that the viewer’s interpretation is paramount and must not be determined by the creator. That’s why re-visiting the Guerrilla Girls was such a breath of fresh air.
Running Woman
To continue the series of dancing woman, I developed another image called Anima. It was first built as a maquette, shown below.
Maquette for Anima I, 2008, 13″ h x 14″ w x 12 d, wood & spray paint 
Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race) (1922), Pablo Picasso This maquette was an homage to Picasso‘s wonderful painting, Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race) (1922).
I loved the monumental qualities of the women, their strength, freedom of movement and obvious joy. It was fun to try to capture these qualities in intersecting flat planes.
It’s interesting that a confirmed misogynist like Picasso would come up with the most powerful images of female freedom and strength. That is because, though he was clearly a genius, his genius did not extend to the emotional sphere.
Anima was about the true inner self of an individual, as opposed to the persona or outer aspect of the personality. The sculpture is a celebration of the female principle, depicted using flat planes in a cubist/constructivist style to express strength. Anima also refers to the joy and momentum that I was seeking to express in steel.
In collaboration with my partner, Colin Race, the 13″ high maquette was translated into a 68″ high sculpture (5+ times as big) shown below. To scale the model up, I outlined each part & used a pantograph to increase the scale. Due to the limits of my cheap pantograph and workspace, I seem to remember I had to increase the scale by 2.5 then increase those drawings again by 2.5. I drew each part on cardboard then attached all the pieces together as a rough model to see if they would fit. To construct it in steel, we built the skirt first which created a stable base for attaching the upper body & legs. Due to small cutting errors, the dimensions of the original cardboard templates had to be modified as the sculpture progressed. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me to photo-document the process at the time. The finished sculpture currently resides in the
This experiment was quite successful, except that I wanted to leave the surface in polished mild steel with a clear finish as shown above. I spent hours researching a finish that would prevent rust & not yellow, or peel off. I found all kinds of extravagant claims for aliphatic urethane coatings that were alleged to prevent mild steel from rusting and last forever. So we used oiled & pickled mild steel, polished the picking off and clear coated Anima I with Aliphatic Urethane. But the steel started to rust underneath the clear coat within a few months of the rainy season. The clear coat was lasting well, but rust is almost impossible to eradicate, and it showed through the clear coat. We ended up having the urethane media blasted off and re-finished the sculpture with a silver powder coat.
Anima I, 68″ h x 66″ w x 68″d, mild steel with powder coat, in Lake Oswego, Oregon. The finish is not as silvery as I had hoped (though above photo taken on a rainy day), but it still looks great and is a lasting finish. The only way to get a really silver finish is by using stainless steel, and I can’t afford it for spec sculptures.
The Anima I design presented fabrication challenges as all the intersections were ground smooth which took a lot of difficult, labour intensive work. So the design for Anima II was made up of cubes, rather than intersecting planes. It was also away to test our fabrication capability for the eventual construction of my design for The Three Graces at the beginning of this blog. I submitted the drawing of Anima II shown below to a call for public art in Bremerton Washington and the drawing was accepted for a commission.
Drawing submitted to Bremerton WA. for sculpture, Anima II I used the same skirt design as Anima I, which again provided a stable base for constructing the legs and upper body. I didn’t make a cardboard model, but just waded in, using the cardboard templates from Anima I as a guide. But they were soon useless so I ended up using big sheets of tracing paper to create a pattern for each piece of steel. It was sort of like designing pattern pieces for making a dress.
As the caption shows, at the time of this submission I still wasn’t aware that no clear coat can be made to adhere well to bare steel, There just isn’t enough body for it to work. So I hadn’t factored into the budget getting the piece powder-coated.
Because the sculpture would be in a seaside location, I was advised to use a zinc-rich primer which is a very dark grey. The silver colour coat was not opaque enough to completely cover the primer, so the finish is less silvery than I had wished. Live & learn. If I were to do another piece like this in future, I would get it media blasted and spray-painted as you can keep adding layers of paint until satisfied. With powder coating, you can only add 2-3 coats max (primer, colour & clearcoat).
Not having worked in Washington before, I was also not aware that there would be sales taxes. And at about this time, the US border suddenly tightened up and we could no longer talk our way through without paying a brokerage fee and getting our Ford Ranger Pick-up registered as a Standard Carrier with the National Motor Freight Traffic Association. If it wasn’t such a waste of time, it would be funny to see us in our little red pick-up with some odd sculpture in the bed lined up for hours with rows of giant semis. Then there are more fees to actually get across the border.
The paperwork alone takes so much time away from doing any actual artwork that we now avoid bringing any sculptures into the US. We used to exhibit in many of the shows just across the border and really enjoyed meeting all the sculptors & sculpto-philes to the south. Just one small illustration of the many ways in which the new Security State is strangling the culture..
Anima II powder-coated mild steel 65″ h x 63″ w x 60″ d Installed in Bremerton WA To add insult to injury, the reception from the man-on-the-street during installation was lukewarm. Apparently there were differences of opinion in the community as to whether or not the City should be cluttering up the streets with public art.
Ironically, given its reception, Anima was meant to convey a positive message. As quoted in the Kitsap Sun:
“It’s a strong piece about optimism,” Jamieson said. “I hope people will get a feeling of optimism and hope. We’re going into the future with our heads held high and a bright outlook.” Well, I didn’t exactly say that but that was the gist of it.
As a further irony, the locals began to drape the sculpture in clothes. The local Arts Council framed it as positive interaction but the Mayor checked in with me as to whether or not I was offended by this. But to me, once a sculpture is out in the public realm, I no longer feel wedded to the original concept and if this is the way the community chooses to take ownership of the piece, so be it.
Anima II augmented, July 2010, Bremerton WA Having said that, I am not comfortable with this fad, and I have seen great sculptures in Seattle that have been draped in clothes. Maybe this is community involvement or maybe this is a fundamental disrespect for art. Or this could be part of the postmodern attitude in which everyone is an artist.
We travelled to Bremerton one last time to maintain the sculpture and removed not only the accessories shown here, but a sandwich-board advertising local fundraising activities. The sculpture had graduated from mannequin to kiosk. While we were cleaning the sculpture, people were waiting in a car for us to leave so they could replace their advertising.
In addition to its advertising function, the sculpture was serving as part of a skateboard obstacle course and there were rubber skid marks up the skirt. We tried everything to remove them and finally hit on toothpaste! For future reference, Crest with Flouride does the trick.
Like all of my experiences in art, Bremerton was a learning experience – mostly on how to combine artistic sensitivity with a rhinoceros-like hide.
After the Dancing Woman and Anima series I had not finished exploring my inner woman and years later, after returning to painting as my main medium, I came back to the theme but with a different approach. This approach is described in a later blog.
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Art & Anarchy
This blog investigates art & anarchy: what anarchy means to me as an artist, its philosophical underpinnings, and its use in political protests. It wraps up by looking at proposed solutions for the global ills that anarchy would seek to heal.
Anarchy & the Artist
As an artist, I’ve been interested in the attraction of anarchy to some, especially younger people. There is a deep undercurrent of unfocused anger in a portion of the population that can be easily unleashed. This happened during the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver and this has happened to my own artworks on display in the public realm. Sculptures that I have spent months or even a year fabricating, and that have been enjoyed by the whole community have been trashed by this irrational rage. Vandals have even brought tools for the express purpose of wrecking my artwork. My sculptures feel like a part of me, like my children, and I abandon them to their fate on the streets with trepidation. When they are attacked, I feel assaulted.
As an artist, the best way to deal with this is through my art practice, so a mini-series in the Running Man theme explored the phenomenon of vandalism and the public realm. The piece shown below, called War of All, was an attempt to understand the anger and capture its energy. It was also an opportunity to muse on the idea of anarchy. The opposite of anarchy is governance, and the title of this piece refers to “the war of all against all,” the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state of nature, or life without government.
The Philosophy of Anarchy
War of All, Spray paint, acrylic paint, wood & chain, 48″ h x 36″ w There seems to be a general misunderstanding about the philosophy of anarchy, certainly among those who fear any challenge to the status quo. But many self-styled anarchists may not have investigated the background to this philosophy and its many conflicting beliefs.
Wikipedia describes Anarchism as “generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be immoral or, alternatively, as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations…. Anarchists advocate stateless societies based on non-hierarchical voluntary associations.”
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French philosopher who declared that “property is theft” is often called the founder of modern anarchist theory. Proudhon favoured workers’ associations or co-operatives, and considered that social revolution could be achieved in a peaceful manner. Though Proudhon’s arguments against entitlement to land and capital make sense, his anti-state position may not be as relevant today when corporations are more powerful than governments.
At the other end of the anarchy spectrum is the the egoist form of individualist anarchism, which supports the individual doing exactly what he pleases – taking no notice of God, state, or moral rules. Max Stirner was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and individualist anarchism. Some adherents to this school of thought have found self-expression in crime and violence. Individualist anarchists also gave rise to the modern movement of anarcho-capitalism with absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state.
Illegalism is another outgrowth of individualist anarchism. Illegalists usually do not seek a moral basis for their actions, recognizing only the reality of “might” rather than “right”. For the most part, illegal acts are done simply to satisfy personal desires, not for some greater ideal. This seems to be the philosophical home of many self-defined anarchists. Framed as personal direct action against exploiters & the system, this is the rationale for spray-painting graffiti on public buildings & destroying installations in the public realm, from bus shelters & public toilets to my sculptures. Though there is a huge differences between creating guerrilla art and destroying public art, the motivation is similar and the line between the two is blurred.
I have used layers of graffiti as a background for War of All, shown above, because the issue of graffiti sums up so many social contradictions. Graffiti artists and groups excluded from the political mainstream argue that they use graffiti as a tool to spread their point of view. They point out that they do not have the money – or sometimes the desire – to buy advertising to get their message across, and that the ruling class or establishment control the mainstream press and other avenues of expression, systematically excluding radical/alternative points of view.
While graffiti on public or private property can be looked at as a political act or an expression of creativity, most of it is garbage – the equivalent of dumping McDonald’s wrappers on the sidewalk. And the co-opting of graffiti by commercial culture is a widespread message that using the public realm to express your individual ego (whether a creative or destructive urge) is very cool & cutting edge. So the five drunk guys who come across one of my sculptures downtown in the wee hours think it is hip to break it apart. Do they figure that because my piece was accepted by the municipality for the site, this makes the artwork part of the system and therefore fair game? Probably they don’t think at all.
Another work from the Running Man series on the sub-theme of anarchy & graffiti is called Do Not Go Quietly.
Do Not Go Quietly, 2000, wood, board, lacquer, oil and acrylic paints, 36” x 48” The title references the Dylan Thomas poem, with the line, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” and hints at resisting arrest. It again tries to capture the anger & rebelliousness that expresses itself most often in tagging & other vandalism. The wooden figures are absences in that they act under cover of darkness and have no recognizable goals or objectives.
I’m all in favour of goals & objectives. I don’t buy the party line that art should not address political or moral issues and artists shouldn’t flog ideas. Having opinions or otherwise expressing values is didactic and not hip. We must eschew meta-narratives and accept the flotsam & jetsam of cultural tides. The contemporary artist should be a blank canvas on which the viewer projects their own ideas, and points of view are outdated.
But no matter how unfashionable, I like to express ideas in my work. To the right is a piece called Conversion about the transformation of ecological into economic wealth, in this case the logging of trees to be transformed into investment portfolios. I’ve used graffiti as a background to indicate that the destruction of forests (habitat for many species) for the economic benefit of the human species is also vandalism.
The level of logging carried out in the province of British Columbia where I live is ecologically, socially & economically unsustainable. Trees are a vital part of watershed ecosystems and if too many are removed the system breaks down. Trees are being cut faster than they can grow so inevitably large numbers of loggers will be out of work & logging towns abandoned. The logging companies will take out as many trees as they can before they are all gone, then simply re-invest elsewhere, leaving BC economically depressed.
Another indicator species of unsustainable human activity are fish. In Fishery, I have again used the graffiti motif, except this time, the tags are those of corporate logos.
Fishery, 2001, wood, board, chain, acrylic and lacquer paints , 4’ h x 6 ‘ w Big business gets to splash its tags in multi-million dollar advertisements in all media while the less powerful use graffiti. All economic wealth originates from the earth and its bounty of water, air, plants, animals and minerals. real wealth is in the health of these resources, not in the consumer items that the destruction of these resources buys.
Anarchy and Protest
Some believe that the real problem is restrictions on our freedom and that without them society would be a better place. For instance, at the Occupy Vancouver rally & march there were speakers, such as the raw milk lobby (a surprisingly vocal and well organized group) who argued that “no one should be able to tell me what I can put into my body”. This is the voice of freedom from authority, one aspect of the anarchist persuasion, which presents itself as an alternative to the current system.
Like everyone else, I’m fascinated by the Occupy Vancouver movement and the many similar protests happening around the globe. The stated goals of Occupy Vancouver on its website are:
“to transform the unequal, unfair, and growing disparity in the distribution of power and wealth in our city and around the globe. We challenge corporate greed, corruption, and the collusion between corporate power and government. We oppose systemic inequality, militarization, environmental destruction, and the erosion of civil liberties and human rights. We seek economic security, genuine equality, and the protection of the environment for all.“
There is much discussion in the media on the fact that Occupy Vancouver, like all the other protests, is leaderless and does not provide a plan for achieving their stated goals. The corporate media calls the protesters spoiled children who do not appreciate how good they have it, in other words, how well the capitalist system has served them in Vancouver. But the system has not served the protesters well. Vancouver is considered one of the most expensive cities in North America, ranking ahead of some of the largest cities in the United States. A Chapman University report found that Vancouver is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world, with median house prices more than nine times the median household income. A study by Demographia, which examines international housing affordability, has deemed Vancouver as “impossibly unaffordable.”
Vancouver, Photo by Francis Georgian Steeped as they are in the philosophy of self-interest, ruling elites have little concern for those living in poverty and despair in Vancouver and most other North American cities. The occupiers and their sympathizers understand that in the win/lose world of unrestricted free-enterprise, the creation of poverty is a necessary component of the system. Wealth is systematically removed from less aggressive or advantaged groups, regions and nations in order to concentrate in the hands of a few.
The success of Occupy Vancouver in bringing about change will be hampered by individualistis anarchists who want their personal issues addressed and are not willing to go through the difficult process of aggregating interests and reaching consensus. On marches we chant “The people, united, will never be defeated”, and the challenge is to find union. The 1% and their facilitators are united behind the goal of maintaining the status quo so that they can continue to acquire wealth. They differ only on who gets how much. The 99% not only want their fair share of the pie, they want to prevent & reverse the growing gap between rich & poor, climate change, mass species extinction, pollution of water soil & air, homelessness, inequality, militarization, tyranny, corruption, moral decay, the breakdown of communities and a host of other ills.
Proposed Solutions
The common denominator in all these ills is capitalism and the global economy. In a study titled “Survival of the Richest,” Oxfam International reported that in 2020 and 2021, the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population accumulated nearly two-thirds of all new wealth. In the previous decade, 2010-20, the richest 1% had amassed around half of all new wealth. While billionaires get richer, global poverty and income inequality are increasing, meaning more hunger, starvation, homelessness and declining access to education, health care and other social support systems. The United Nations Development Program reports that human development is decreasing in over 90% of countries.
Oxfam’s suggested solution to this terrible crisis is to raise taxes on the super-rich and big corporations in order to reduce inequality. But as the Workers World site points out, “…simply raising taxes fails to target the root cause of this growing inequality: the exploitation of workers around the world, who produce all the wealth, while the capitalist class gobbles up an ever larger proportion of the wealth that workers create. …The billionaires did not earn this money through their own labor — they stole it through the exploitation of the labor of billions of workers around the globe.” The site goes on to explain that the root cause, “Workers are never compensated for the full value of what they produce…The difference between the value workers add to a product and the lower wages they are paid becomes the profits that make up most of the billionaires’ accumulated wealth.” And capitalists can move factories anywhere in the world, to wherever taxes and wages are lowest and workers most compliant. While offering a succinct critique of capitalism and its deleterious impacts, Workers World does not offer a solution.
According to Wikipedia, “social anarchism envisions the overthrow of capitalism and the state in a social revolution, which would establish a federal society of voluntary associations and local communities, based on a network of mutual aid.”
Certainly it is important to protest against injustice, inequality, ecological degradation and all the other ills that capitalism has produced. The other part of the anarchist agenda is non-participation in the destructive economic system by self-managing our lives through community action and non-hierarchical cooperatives and collectives. Simply opting out of the global consumer culture as much as possible is a low-end anarchist solution. Here are some ways:
- reduce, re-use recycle
- buy second-hand
- trade, barter, swap
- buy nothing but absolute necessities
- buy local – nothing shipped more than 100 miles
- wear no brand logos
- buy from co-ops
- start co-ops
- grow your own
- bike, walk, take transit – don’t buy gas
- to travel don’t fly, take the bus or train
- vacation locally
- bank at a credit union
The anarchists’ vision of a federal society of voluntary associations and local communities may or may not ever become a reality. Meanwhile, we still have a somewhat democratic system in place here in Canada and we must all educate ourselves about political issues and involved ourselves politically if it is to continue.The system isn’t working and most people’s needs are not addressed because the corporate media convince voters not to vote in their own interests, or not to vote at all. Successful political parties are indebted to donors with deep pockets and act to benefit them. But we can still vote for candidates that recognize & oppose the subversion of democracy through corporate power. We can get involved in political parties that represent the 99% & push for strong platforms that limit the power of the 1%.
Conclusion
This post about art & anarchy has described: work I have done on an anarchist theme; the often pointless anarchy in my home town of Vancouver; and some of anarchy’s higher goals. It has suggested, in a limited way, how these might be applied. But it must be accepted that, short of overthrowing capitalism in a revolution, we are not going to seriously impede the onward march of capitalism. For those of us reluctant to engage in the crap shoot of total upheaval, we can only hope that, as Marx predicted, capitalism would bring itself down through its own contradictions.
