Titus O.

I wanted to follow up on the heels of my KC visit with my impressions of the new addition to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. As I mentioned earlier, going to college across the street had me in the museum weekly, if not daily. I even worked stints in the restaurant, and briefly as a preparator. If I had to name a single favorite painting on earth, in might be The Nelson’s Caravaggio, a brooding adolescent “John the Baptist”, which I remember being one of only three of his works in the US (“Card Sharps” is at the Kimbell), and I’d say it’s the best of them. As a brooding adolescent myself I used to feel compelled to go and commune with him, sometimes for an hour or more (and sometimes with my best friend at the time, fellow student David Quadrini, who dug it equally). Something, maybe a kind of healing or initiation, was transmitted.

I revisited these galleries and many other old favorites, and I was amazed at how moving it was to see these old teachers – the giant Kwan Yin (seen everywhere now in posters and on book covers); the de Kooning ‘Woman’ I color-averaged inch by inch for a color theory class; an El Greco-esque baroque crucifix that I copied for a sculpture elective, leading me to switch departments; and forgotten faves, like obscure Dirck Van Baburen’s “Crowning with Thorns.” But first I visited the new Bloch building, designed by Steven Holl.

From the outside, it’s a total triumph. A series of white boxes, it runs alongside the old museum, down a sloping hill adjacent to the expansive park-like green in front of the 1933 original’s massive sandstone, art-deco-meets-Byzantium-in-the-heartland façade. Many of these rectangles are half buried in berms of earth heaped up around them. At night, the boxes themselves illuminate from within the walls, glowing white amidst the trees and hills. Stunning.

Walking inside, you experience the same cathedral-like vaulted spaces that are the standard now in new museums, once again reinforcing the case that they’re supplanting some role once occupied by religious structures (alluding to an ongoing conundrum I contemplate daily – can art fulfill that kind of need? I have serious doubts.) I can’t think of an exception in a recent museum, though I’m sure there must be some somewhere. So the overall impression was grand; but the friend I was with, who lives there, pointed out that a lot of the details looked shirked – giant windows covered with greasy smudges, metal rail joints that didn’t meet, cheap-looking moldings at the floor, that kind of thing.

You descend through the galleries, those boxes seen from the exterior, a series of essentially wall-less high-ceilinged giant rooms. I was familiar with most of the art from its previous locations, and I can honestly say on the whole most of it looks worse for the move. First, why was the art hung at, like, a 72” center? As many are probably aware, the standard is usually between 56” and 60”. Everything was noticeably higher. In many cases it ruined the body’s relationship to the art; like, for instance, with a dark, medium-sized late Rothko. He was an artist who had very specific ideas on how his art should be displayed (those in Houston, and who saw Declaring Space recently at the Modern, have witnessed it done right.) Not only was this one overly lit, but it felt totally unhinged from the floor, floating lost up the wall like a trophy, some mule deer or cheetah head. This felt true for many familiar old friends, periodically breaking my heart.

Much like the new Denver Art Museum building (my experience described here), the art seemed really crowded. Combined with the strange heights, and the fact that you come upon each room from above seeing all the pieces at once, as in so many new museums the individual pieces are immediately reduced to a series of goo-gaws and do-dads. Everything cancels everything else out. No one stops to look at art anyway – making things worse, this building feels like a airport concourse to just be run on a people-mover right through. Again, the spaces on their own are great, full of natural light, airy, and sculpturally grand, like walking around inside a giant Judd. Many new museums have this kind of spatial novelty going for them. But the art often just looks like shit.

As in the building itself, that mixed light that on its own is so pleasant, on the art is confusing and unforgiving. The objects are given no space of their own, and just seem like decorative accents. I always bring up the Fort Worth Modern, because it seems increasingly to be literally exceptional, in that it makes nearly everything housed in it look better, even than it maybe should (I still wonder if my conversion on Sean Scully isn’t largely due to Ando’s building).

Novelty is a precious commodity these days, and I’d say greatly overrated quality in new signature buildings like this, as cities are driven to dot their skylines and art districts with a brand name mind-blower that is hoped will single-handedly reinvent the city’s image and make for stunning fodder on postcards, calendars, and tourist brochures. Maybe it even works sometimes. But more often than not it’s the art that suffers. I don’t understand what happens in the architect’s studio – where are the curators, artists, and historians saying, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but these spaces are limited to a few specific types of art, and will make most others suffer cruelly?’ Why doesn’t this seem to be happening?

The better examples leave the spectacle in the lobbies and certain galleries, and let most of the museum be a more or less traditional series of human-scaled rooms; examples that come to mind include the Modern, the Kimbell, SFMoMA, MCA Chicago, and others. The Bloch addition is so stunning, everyone is so bowled over, that I’ve not read anyone mention that the art happens to look terrible. There are exceptions. The Nelson has some wonderful Noguchi’s, and when I went looking, I found them given an entire glass walled atrium to themselves, very much the Zen garden heart of the new building. It almost redeemed the whole mess. I also really enjoyed a selection of contemporary art from Africa, by some artists using different lenses through which to filter trends that otherwise might seem tired or rote, but struck me here as surprisingly fresh. And in Kansas City, of all places.

Maybe in time, I’ll forget how things used to look, and just roll with the new building. It’s much sexier than the old one. And what’s more important anyway, some dated old easel paintings or a new traffic-stopping museum building? I’m sure most would say the sexy building, glowing on the hill.

Dallas’ Central Trak launched this past week. It’s the latest incarnation of the UTD-sponsored effort formerly known as the UTD/South Side Artist Residency, which was my entrée to the Big D three years ago. It limped along without funding, was pretty disastrously mismanaged, and ignominiously collapsed after only two years. The need for such a program here in town remained however, so new partnerships were forged, and most importantly, some money was rustled up. A search was conducted for a director – in my continual hunt for a decent art-related paycheck without having to move away, and since I was teaching at UTD anyway, I was encouraged to join the cast of thousands who applied. Dr. Rick Brettell, the primary impetus behind both programs, had once asked me if I’d think about taking the helm at South Side. It was too far gone at that point to even be seriously considered, and his asking was I’m sure an act of pure desperation. I wasn’t called back this time, which was totally fine. Really, why would they? I’m just an “under-represented” artist and lapsed Zen monk with a somewhat unfocused blog…

Word on the street was that the final, quite promising-sounding shortlist included a Mexican curator, and a woman from Boston, if memory serves. Then, last summer, I heard from insiders that there was an “exciting late development,” which soon turned out to be Charissa Terranova. She jumped ship at SMU (to their chagrin), enticed over to UTD with a tenure-track gig to include the residency directorship and a class or two. Sweet deal. So, a few months pass, and I guess there was an invite-only opening gala last Thursday. It’s all started off with a bang, apparently.

Ted Setina is a UNT grad who’s been kicking around Dallas the last few years, and who’s shown at Road Agent. Yet another casualty of exactly the kind of problems that sank UTD/South Side, he had applied in 2005 and been promised a stint there into 2006. As the date closed in, he tried ineffectually to get any confirmation that he was indeed going to be able to move in. As it turned out, he got bumped by another artist, without explanation or notice. The whole thing shuttered before he got satisfaction.

Cut to 2008 – he applies again, is accepted again, and moves in not two weeks before the opening. He’s told – rather, given the opportunity – to get a piece together for open studios that night. The theme and title of the Terranova curated show in the gallery is “False Space and Time of the Apartment” which I’m told is a line from JG Ballard – another one of those names that equate to insta-cred on the pseudo-intellectual street. It would be funny to tally how many times he gets name-dropped in your average CAA conference. In a weird crossover, my stoner friends back in the day loved him. I seem to remember one of those RE/Search books on him and Burroughs that lived next to the bong. Don’t bogart that copy of Crash, dude.

Anyhoo, Setina, who has flirted with a kind of neo-conceptual practice before, in relation to the theme had what I think’s an inspired notion. He got a dj, and locked himself in his new studio with a group of willing individuals for the length of the opening. No one was to enter or leave, and the dj was to play so loud as to preclude frivolity or pleasure of any kind. A kind of sensory-overload endurance tank (in other words, your typical bar in the West End). They were all to be prisoners for those two or three hours, hidden from the event outside, yet intruding upon and engaging it.

Someone I know attended that night (the Thursday night preview), and not knowing anything about it told me later it was easily the most interesting thing there – this pregnant question mark punctuating an otherwise canned evening. He said that it was obviously too loud for a real party to be happening in there, and without knowing if there was really anything to get, he totally got it. Is there someone in there? What are they doing? How can they stand it? Being/Nothingness. Commentary on contemporary social interaction. A sort of faux-teenage rebellious, Duchampian dance party; Schrödinger’s Rave…

Terranova was informed ahead of time what was happening (locked door, noise etc), without exactly revealing the mystery. During the opening she chose to just unlock his door without permission, actually ushering attendees uninvited into the artist’s studio. The seal was broken. Setina felt the piece was over, fucked; or was it? He called an audible, turning over all of his furniture and making the place look like the aftermath of a massive party. Everyone left, except the DJ, who continued the deafening spinning. Nice. Let a local art legend begin.

Later that night, in full parental drill sergeant mode, Terranova supposedly dressed down Setina in front of two dozen wine swilling stragglers, shouting that he was immature and telling him to “grow up”. Nice way to treat one of your resident guest artists in front of Dallas’ invited art world who’s who. Follow up attempts at rapprochement were rebuffed. It seems to me that she missed the point; which maybe makes the piece even better. It’s hard to create a stir anymore. I’m jealous.

Other sources are reporting that some other residents, a whole two weeks in, are disgruntled and already drafting complaints about their experience so far. There’s always a learning curve. I sincerely hope things keep getting worked out. But you got to massage those artist egos. It’s probably something on par with herding cats.

Now, I found out about all this only after the public event for the hoi polloi on Saturday. I wanted to go to show my support, but had to be cajoled by my wife due to a premonition that I should stay home (or at And/Or, who btw had another great opening). Yet more proof you have to listen to intuition.

In a truly spectacular irony, there was a dj in the courtyard outside the building, playing obnoxious pumping club music way too loud, complete with spinning disco ball casting primary colored spotlights all around. Feeling pretty well trapped myself, I shouted to someone next to me “Whoops, forgot my glow sticks!” which I thought was clever till 5 people came out and shouted the same thing at me. So goes a cliche. Aerosol party in a can: whoo hoo.

I did get to catch up with a number of my former UTD colleagues and students, one of whom has a studio in the building and wanted to show me his new work. As we talked, an unconvincingly smiling Terranova walked up, and without greeting or preamble, butts in a bit too loudly to say “I’m glad you’re moving to Chicago, Titus, so you can just get out of Dallas and go be bitter somewhere else.” Ahem. Well, then…socially at a bit of a loss (I just wanted to see the kid’s art and move along, fer chrissakes), I tried to laugh it off in that discomfited way one does (”heh heh, yeah, bitter ol’ me, heh…”), but she just kept stepping in closer and closer, inexplicably repeating the same thing two more times with increasing venom, I guess in case I missed that she wasn’t kidding around (which is all especially weird, ‘cuz I’m actually not bitter at all. Lick me. I dare ya. Sweet as candy.)

Almost speechlessly creepified, I managed to get out “Charming as always, Charissa,” and walk away. She dismissively yelled after me across the full gallery, “Why don’t you just go blog about it?” Well, that is my little thing. Seriously though; is this how the director of a visible new art center chooses to roll on the big night? Is this public outreach, building bridges in the community? Me, I’m just a loose cannon with more opinions than sense, beholden to no one; except of course to you, dear readers.

Terranova is no doubt an asset to Dallas in some ways, and she certainly keeps herself visible. Careful attentiveness to human interactions, with a welcoming sense of intellectual openness doesn’t strike me as exactly her leadership style. I don’t really see a need for her to going throwing her new-found weight around like this, in any case. But hey Dallas, she’s yours for now. Bon chance and the blessings of the buddhas to all.

Which presents me wth the need, and opportunity, to explain that my wife just got a full-ride offer to the MFA program at University of Illinios Chicago, which she’s leaning toward accepting, so we’re going this week to check it out. Cocktails and power lunches for a week straight. I might once again be polishing up my flat vowels and hard consonants, as I possibly rejoin my Midwestern brethren by fall. Nothing’s final yet. But I like Chicago. Such good hot dogs. Go Rex Grossman – you can do it! (I’m practicing…this switching of football loyalties is the toughest part…)

Charissa N. Terranova’s Reponse
written by terranov on April 27, 2008

I am entering this blog because, as the Director of Centraltrak, I, Charissa N. Terranova, PhD, am responsible for setting the record straight and posting a more veritable account of the events that occurred last weekend at Centraltrak: The UT Dallas Artists Residency. It is my responsibility to make certain that the truth is known about the residency.

Please bear in mind that the author of this blog, Titus O’Brien, did not attend the opening on Thursday night. Mr. O’Brien has written about events he neither saw nor experienced. His writing – or reporting – is based largely on hearsay and not empirical evidence or experience.

Also bear in mind that Mr. O’Brien begins his blog with an account of his failure to attain the post of Director of the UTD artists residency. Please bear in mind, thus, that this, his failure to attain the Directorship, is at least in part his motivation for writing a blog entry that is neither constructive nor critical but destructive and divisive.

There seems to be confusion about what constitutes criticism and its distinction from reportage and debased personal attacks. Criticism can be negative or positive, but it always opens new intellectual space. Even if dissecting it builds. Criticism is an intellectual contribution that furthers intellectual discussion and debate. To be “criticized” would have been fine: I welcome criticism. This – Mr. O’Brien’s blog entry about me — is not criticism. Mr. O’Brien’s entry is a personal attack and does nothing to further develop the Texas discourse on the arts. It is parochial and provincial – two things Centraltrak: The UT Dallas Artists residency is not.

Mr. O’Brien: Please refrain from posting blogs full of lies and negativity. Not only are you doing yourself a disservice, but, more importantly, you’re misrepresenting the state of Texas. In your petty entries, you represent the state and more precisely the city of Dallas as ankle-biting, bitter, narrow-minded, and parochial – all qualities many of us are working diligently to erase and move beyond.

When you’re ready to engage in an intelligent, cool-headed, critical discussion about the work in the show, False Space and Time of the Apartment, please contact me. I am open to meeting with you in person to discuss this. I invite you to a public debate at Centraltrak in the gallery to discuss intelligently the work in the show and the state of criticism and art writing in DFW. My schedule is flexible because the semester is ending at UTD. Let’s together on dates for a public discussion of your ideas and positions. Do contact me if you’re interested: terranova@utdallas.edu

For the record, here are the falsehoods Mr. O’Brien presented in his recent blog entries:

From Centraltrak entry:

 “He’s [Ted Setina] told to get a piece together for open studios that night.” I never told Ted this.

“Terranova was informed ahead of time what was happening (locked door, noise etc), without exactly revealing the mystery.” I wasn’t told.

“Terranova dressed down Setina in front of two dozen wine swilling stragglers, shouting that he was immature and telling him to “grow up”.” Not true.

 I never said these things.

“As we talked, a smiling Terranova walked up, butting loudly in to tell me she’s glad I’m moving to Chicago, so that I can just get out of town and be bitter somewhere else.” I told Mr. O’Brien that I was glad that he was moving because maybe he wouldn’t be so bitter in Chicago.

From Conduit Countdown entry:

“Fully enacting the darker side of collaboration, co-curator Charissa Terranova apparently got mad at one of the artists and severed her own connectivity.” Not true again. This absolutely never happened. This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

I just got back from a weekend trip to Kansas City, Missouri. Regular readers and friends of Siros will already be aware of my connection to that lovely burg 500 miles up the I-35. I went to college there, and KCAI was having an alumni weekend. I received a postcard a few weeks back saying that one of my two sculpture prof’s, Jim Leedy, is retiring after 45 years. So I thought I’d take this chance to get out of town, see the old man, some old friends, and some old haunts, take the temperature of a city seemingly on the rise, and check out the new building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art .

There were some workshops, and a sculpture symposium, hosted as part of the weekend schedule. The three panelists on the latter were all KCAI sculpture alums, one each from three different decades, all having studied with the dynamic duo of Leedy and longtime dept. chair Dale Eldred: Ming Fay (’67), Valerie Eickmeier (’79), and Shawn Brixey (’85). There was supposed to be some theme around McCluhan’s notion of the “global village”, but luckily everyone just ignored that and gave standard artist talks.

Fay began with a brief autobio, showing pictures from his childhood in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and even the ship that he sailed to the states on at age 18. He came to study art, and eventually landed in KC, lured there after a meeting with Eldred and ceramics legend/longtime KCAI ceramics professor Ken Ferguson. He’s a wonderful artist, and an engaging human being. I was somewhat dismayed to note that there were only 2 or 3 students present for these talks. It should have been mandatory, and would have been “back in the day.” Maybe this is part of why the sculpture department is currently a complete disaster, full of aimless messy piles of clueless, crafty, rusted junk. Dale, who used to roll through the department early mornings tossing anything that looked like clutter in the dumpster (including student projects), is surely rolling in his grave.

Eickmeier is dean at the Herron School of Art , University of Indiana/Purdue. After running through some images of her poetic if fairly traditional sculptures, she mainly concentrated on her recent, few-years effort to get a spectacular new arts complex built for the college.

Next up was Shawn Brixey. He began with some great stories about studying with and working for Eldred, who was tragically killed in a studio accident in 1993. He was a larger than life figure, a powerhouse whose brashness and apparent arrogance was more than offset by his humor, talent, generous spirit, and unmistakable gifts as an educator. His legacy is legendary, and his students are a virtual who’s who of sculpture of the last 40 years. I admire him more every year, as it grows ever more apparent how rare it is to pull off what he did as teacher, administrator, artist, and human. I know there are legions who feel this way, and miss him like I do.

Brixey is a natural heir to Eldred, a whirlwind of energy intent on marrying science and art, and totally committed to teaching. Maybe unconciously modeling himself on Eldred, I occasionally had to shake my head, astonished at the assertions of his own singular unprecedented brilliance peppering his speech. However, like his mentor, he seems to have the goods to back it up, and he dazzled the crowd with discussions of his projects and the ideas fueling them. Completely bypassing the gallery racket, he independently raises millions of dollars and spends years developing some new scientific apparatus and technique in the service of art, poetics, and beauty, rather than the more typical war, industry, and commerce. It was inspiring, and at times confounding – as all good art should be. I walk away still digesting the possibilities, the ramifications, the grandness of his vision.

The alumni gathering coincided with “First Friday,” a tradition there that goes back well before my time in KC, with all the galleries in town opening on the first Friday of the month. Let me say first that I think Kansas City is one of the most attractive cities in the country, designed with broad sinuous tree-lined boulevards snaking through limestone hills, and curious livable little neighborhoods scattered throughout town. Around every bend there is another sandstone art deco marvel, and as the tourist board likes to proclaim, there are “more fountains than Rome!”

I was reminded how stunningly friendly people are there, maybe a social extension of the warm earth energy that seems to emanate out of the ground itself, nurturing and supporting the city and community. There is a certain soulfulness, that drew me there in the first place and occasionally since, manifest in its musical and creative history and the open faces of many of its denizens. Conversely, there is also a lot of crime – I was held up at gunpoint twice living there, and personally knew many who were robbed, raped, and worse. The Art Institute ‘hood, with it’s run down mansions and slew of beautiful naïve fearlessly stoned art students, was just like shooting fish in a barrel for the city’s creeps and criminals.

That soulful nourishing vibe also has its traps. I think a lot of people go to school there and never get out. This is an absolute boon for the city, as many more or less abandon art and instead open the best restaurants, organic co-ops, French bakeries, coffeeshops, health food cafes, lingerie boutiques, become contractors, what have you. Many of them also open hole-in-the-wall art galleries, and First Friday gave me a chance to peek into many.

Kansas City suffers from problems peculiarly inverse of Dallas’; our circus-mirror Bizarro reflection. They have the school Dallas needs to matter, drawing talent and keeping it around, with the community to foster a real scene. They have the grass roots energy, so fitful and dispersed here, and a sense of churning excitement about the place. These nights of gallery openings draw thousands of people into the burgeoning Crossroads district , everybody wandering around and having a big ol’ street party scattered for miles around. DJ’s were spinning music on the street; a pimped-out car with bumping bass was serving espresso out of the trunk; there was a line out the door of the artisanal chocolate shop for $6 cups of hot chocolate (worth every penny); and the gourmet pizza joint was packed. Gangs of pegged jean, shaggy-bearded, asymmetrically hair-styled youths cruised around on vintage ten-speeds with most gears and the brakes removed (the new fad.) And last but not least, there were galleries piled on galleries, mostly full of negligible backwards regional hoo-ha.

If Dallas has all these sharp white walled galleries opening, importing talent in hopes of capturing the attention of bourgeois sometime collectors, resident artists often just seem to be biding their time till they break through and can move to a coast. Kansas City on the other hand has militias of artists just trying to keep the art school party rolling as long as possible, seemingly with nary a glance beyond the city line. The galleries tend to be in amazing old structures, and to also be dilapidated artist run labors of love. I talked to some really cool hip kids who’ve started a great little space, and who graduated recently with art history degrees. A brief chat about the work in their own show revealed that they had never heard of Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, Takashi Murakami, or Joseph Cornell. Ironically, in the museum across from the school, affectionately just called the Nelson, the next day I saw works up currently by each of those very artists. Leedy said in one of those panel discussions that the art history program needed to get up to snuff. No shit.

I ran into a couple of my favorite people from my own days there, now married with kid: painter Archie Scott Gobber and designer Laura McGrew. I was psyched to hear that Scotty, who works for the best gallery in KC (stalwart Dolphin), has a show here at Marty Walker in May. In an urban exchange, he can go home afterwards and blog about what’s wrong, and even what’s right, with Dallas.

I’ll talk about the museum next time. There were echoes of my DAM experience in December, as well as thrilling visitations to some old faves in the “old” Nelson…also, there are some exciting public art initiatives in KC worth getting into.

Conduit Gallery is coming on strong. It’s had a particularly solid run of shows lately. Their Design District space is partitioned in three, each separate room usually housing work by a different artist. Last month’s Noah Simblist-curated effort, Collecting & Collectivity, was in my memory the only exception, filling the whole joint with ambitious and edgy videos, installations, paintings, and interactive sculptures. Fully enacting the darker side of collaboration, co-curator Charissa Terranova apparently got mad at one of the artists and severed her own connectivity. In any case, it was a good looking show, and purely a non-profit labor of love for the gallery, as nothing was for sale. I especially enjoyed the collaborative explorations of Otabenga Jones & Associates, Danica Phelps, and Team SHaG.

This month’s offering opened Saturday, with Justin Quinn in the front room, Vincent Falsetta in the back, and French photographer Cedric Delsaux in the project space. Assistant director Danette Dufhilo’s baby, the project room is often a highlight among the plethora of offerings across the ever-expanding Design District (I just heard about yet another gallery opening. Must be pushing two dozen now…) Delsaux is a successful commercial photog, and produces more personal art series as a sideline. This one features Star Wars action figures digitally interjected into pedestrian modern urban scenes. While clever and hilarious, they’re not really my bag – a little too otaku trendy for me – but I respect their utter currency, and was unsurprised to see every male under 30 losing their shizzle over them at the reception. They’re beautifully crafted, and I’m shocked I didn’t see them at one of the photo fairs in Miami this past December. Has he considered light-boxing them, I wonder?

Justin Quinn came to my attention with just such a project room show two years ago, and I’ve enjoyed his work seeing it on occasion since. The scale, range, and ambition of his text-ual meditations on Moby Dick have continued to evolve, and this body of work is absolutely stellar. I don’t understand each one exactly, but in a visual equivalent to Oulipo’s artificially constrained verbal gymnastics, Quinn counts all the e’s in a passage, page, or chapter of the mother text, and carefully draws each one, in different sizes, media, and values, arranging them in purely abstract compositions. Sinuous and spacious, they are totally contemporary, yet oddly reminiscent of 19^th century city maps, with corresponding docks, curvilinear streets, and undulating topography, or anthropological diagrams of ancient villages. They even retain some mysterious essence of the shapes of whales and waves and sea-life, and an imprint of Melville’s mind. Weird and cool. I could really live with these things. The only clunker – a single page of Twombly cursive e scribbles. While I’m sure those must have been a relief to let fly, they just didn’t fit.

Vincent Falsetta is a 30-year veteran painting prof at UNT, helping make it the only art program in Texas I’d ever heard of before moving here three years ago. I think these paintings rock. Not exactly Greenberg, that, but I find myself struggling to ‘come to terms’ with why these paintings fascinate me so. For one, they precisely resist verbal analysis. I was writing here recently about an artist who I thought didn’t have the first clue what painting is really about. This guy, on the other hand, is obviously a journeyman painter’s painter, with decades in the trenches, and he’s in deep discourse with his forbears. The great thing is, when that happens, if one is diligent, gifted, and maybe a tad lucky, you produce something that also happens to matter.

I keep thinking about a statement by Jonathan Lasker. Wrapping up an essay where he asserts that art’s primary function is the retrieval of meaning from the chaos of senseless media overload, he says simply “I consider painting a moral victory.” It just keeps going around and around in my head, that line; it seems applicable here. I was talking to Falsetta briefly, before we were interrupted by some woman who came up and started blathering on at length about how she “just can’t figure out how you make these things!” I saw his smile freeze, and his eyes glass over. I knew how he felt. I don’t know, and couldn’t care less how he gets these completely even masses of paint squiggles to do such subtle and calculated maneuvers. What I do know is that something in my body/mind snapped to attention when experiencing the solid, taut, all-over surfaces of his canvases. There are no holes, no weak areas, no points of collapse or counterpoint. There is instead a steady electric flow, like a visual electro-magnetic field, that gently but insistently pulls the eye every direction at once.

Most people need a hook of some kind. “How’s it made? Why’s it matter? Ooh, look, art knitted out of dust bunnies! Wow!” Time was when critics gave one for this kind of art’s precedents, saying that pure abstraction was the geo-political moral high ground. Thank god we’ve graduated from that. But in market-mad, deconstructed post-Warholian (post-?) capitalism, artists and dealers are left to just push some trendy shtick or another, hinging so often flimsy product on whatever sales-pitch they can concoct, or from the idea of it being a novel expression of ‘authenticity’, or from the drivel intravenously inserted in a grad school theory class. Maybe this alludes to part of Lasker’s “moral victory.” To see someone take the time and the considerable effort to simply make a picture work, and that’s all – more and more, for me, that’s enough. It the rush for new sensations, it’s certainly fairly rare.

I am experiencing a really peculiar art/book/music mash up at the moment. Over the weekend, I saw the Turner show at the DMA . Meanwhile, I also finished DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow , arguably his greatest novel. And as if to complete a centuries-spanning, Anglophilic hat-trick, I’ve been in a big Roxy Music kick lately, and I just watched volume one of “Roxy Music: The Thrill of It All – A Visual History (1972-1982)”, which covers their TV appearances from 1972-75. It’s all kind of messing with my mind.

In the mid ‘80’s, I was just another alienated kid in the suburban American west. Days were spent trapped in a high school that looked the part of the prison it felt like, and nights meant returning home only to witness an alcoholic father and a withdrawn, depressive mother go through the final empty motions of a failing marriage. Team sports were losing their escapist allure (dudes were getting freaking wrecked on the football field, and I sure wasn’t aiming for the NFL), and I hadn’t yet accepted art school as my eventual redemptive destination. I still held out some notion that a life in medicine was a possibility, though my grades would soon disabuse anyone of that idea.

My cooler friends were forming punk bands. I learned to play some bar chords fast, and shouted into a mike or two, but I just couldn’t really get into it. Punk, well, it just wasn’t very…stylish. It already seemed passe. And I just didn’t feel that demonstrably angry. Kept secret from my be-spiked and be-studded pals, I secretly wanted to be…Bryan Ferry. Toward that end, I grew my bangs long, and through them I’d gaze soulfully at the cheerleader across from me in AP English. It didn’t lead to a homecoming date, but then, I was probably more interested in the longing anyway.

I had a cassette tape of Avalon, Roxy’s 1981 swan song which, I happily discovered, happened in practice to be the greatest make-out record of all time. In off hours, it also acted as Calgon for my burgeoning (neo-)romantic soul, taking me away from my mundane travails as I drove around the surrounding teenage wasteland in my shit-brown, two-tone V8 Ford Maverick, transported to an atmospheric, hazy realm of tuxedoed, passionate love lost, with big haired, super model-y babes, on a tide of cascading horns and cooing back-up singers.

From there, I soon worked backward through the entire Roxy catalog, as they devolved from slick spacious art crooning (that through no fault of their own paved the way for schlock-meisters Spandau Ballet and their pathetic ilk,) to configurations much stranger. In that golden age of vinyl (golden mostly because used records were so cheap), big cardboard fold-out Roxy Music album covers sold my testosterone-compromised aesthetic with almost naked women (one a Playmate of the Year; most were Ferry’s lovers) on their fronts; once inside, one found pictures of an alien race of interstellar, gender-bending hipcats, in boas, sequins, matador jackets, platform shoes, and jeweled bug glasses.

Bowie of course stole a significant amount of his shtick from Ferry, early and later, and really, I like early Roxy records now much more than Bowie’s of the same era. Ferry’s output may seem more stylistically limited than Bowie’s, but that’s partly because he was less apt to shamelessly ape whatever trend was appearing on the horizon. Ferry was Ferry, from the get go.

Art school-degreed, he studied with Richard Hamilton at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. This Brit pop art savvy, sharper edged, more style- and fun-loving than its American equivalent, informed everything they did. They knew exactly what they wanted to do and be; namely, to cast themselves as a radical, bright plastic and neon antidote to the drippy, shaggy, denimed “authentics” of the post-hippie scene, a stifling force they detonated in a blast of oboe and synthesizers. On the “…History” disc, you see Roxy’s first filmed performance, at the Royal College of Art in London. They spring up fully realized, an absurd cabaret of the fabulous.

Fellow art school grad Brian Eno had joined, and before moving on to invent ambient music and make U2 pop lords of the universe, he spent two years fiddling with knobs, cranking the feedback loops, and keeping the feathered shoulder-pad/glittery eye-shadow quotient up while Ferry graduated into tuxes and vintage British military uniforms. Their early sound? Marlene Dietrich meets Parliament meets Edith Piaf meets Stockhausen on an episode of Dr Who. Ferry’s admitted musical influences tended more toward great soul and blues shouters of the 50’s and 60’s, but he filtered them through this fixation on an arch English, pre-war Martini swilling demi-monde, that was finding a certain analog in the 70’s Roxy would prophetically help define.

Roxy Music may seem like footnote in the US, but in England they had #1 record after #1 record, and if you look at the timeline, I’d argue that they invented glam rock, and shaped its early form more than any other single act. Their musicianship, erudition, and the singularity of their vision distinguished them from the unlistenable dredge that comprises much of what was later called Glam; usually, that was just barely tolerable pub-rock by guys who donned striped flairs, top hats, and metallic fabric capes in hopes of capitalizing on a fad. I’m talking Slade and Gary Glitter here. Kiss would be your ultimate stateside equivalent.

The records now are still full of surprises. Seeing them in these live performances can help to convince the unbelievers, because when they aren’t lip-synching like every one else on Top of the Pops, they were (and reformed, are) phenomenal live. They aren’t everyone’s bag, no doubt, but I just keep falling in love with them over and over. Ro-xy! Ro-xy! Ro-xy!