Posts Tagged ‘1984’

Barry Bridgwood, “Hot Dogs” (1983)

Sunday, February 17th, 2013

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Last week I bought a painting by the American artist Barry Bridgwood. Hot Dogs is the title he gave to the enigmatic work.

Bridgwood was born in Massachusetts in 1957. He attended the Art Institute of Boston (1978-81) and the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1981-83. Fresh from art school he joined the creative ferment of the short-lived East Village art scene of the early 1980s. From the vantage point of today, critics find it difficult if not impossible to reduce to an easy formulation the polymorphous art spawned by that time and place. As one who was there explains: “The East Village didn’t have a style per se, it was more of an explosion of artists trying to get their work out.” I see no reason to disagree, and so for now choose to defer generalizations in favor of an immediate appreciation of the artists’ works themselves, including this one:

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[Hot Dogs, 1983, oil on canvas with integrated strip frame, 20 3/4 x 25 inches, signed and dated verso, and inscribed “New Math Gallery”]

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Hot Dogs was shown at one of the initial exhibits — and possibly the very first show — at one of the East Village’s pioneer store-front galleries, New Math Gallery. When in 1983 Nina Seigenfeld decided to open the gallery (with co-owner Mario Fernandez) she and Bridgwood were still students at SVA. Seigenfeld recently wrote an engaging but all-too-brief history of the gallery, describing the energy of the time and the “camaraderie and sense of community that can never be replaced.” Her article appeared in the Spring 2010 edition of Fine Art Magazine, available online here (page 36). The online site of Artists Space includes a photo of the first location of New Math Gallery; two years later the gallery moved to a larger space on Avenue A between 12th and 13th Streets, which it occupied only a short time until the co-owners decided to shut it down in 1986).

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What attracted me to Bridgwood’s Hot Dogs? At first blush it was the unplaceable color of the work, at least as it appeared in the auction’s online catalog entry:

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Now that the painting is hanging on a wall in my home I can report the color in the illustration was false. It is not mustard, not orange, not salmon, notred, and so the intrigue of its “actual” color remains powerful. This mercurial chroma also confounds my digital camera’s optics. I’ve been photographing the painting at various times and vantage points, and the camera simply cannot decide what the object’s definitive color is.

Then there is the subject matter of the painting. The incised drawings, which reveal a white ground in some areas and an under-layer of black elsewhere, present a conundrum.

All of the figures you see stay mute and polite within the bounds of the painting’s rectangular field. However, if the viewer is so inclined, this content may be ordered into three horizontal bands. So arranged, the analysis may follow this path:

The top band initiates what appears to be a mathematical equation. Its opening terms include contour line drawings of two recognizable objects. These are a piece of fruit with a stem (most likely an apple) and a hot dog cradled in a bun. The relationship of the two comestibles to each other and to what lies ahead is established via two basic interstitial symbols. One establishes equality (=) and the other spurs multiplication (X). The first line ends with a cliffhanger. That “times” sign is a transitive verb that asks, Times what?

In other words, my defensible assumption is the equation continues on to the next line (the middle band). There, equal symbols appear again, confusingly. The symbol for addition (+) shows up, in black and white flavors. There too are two parentheses. The usual function of parentheses in a long mathematical formula is to organize and clarify complex relationships among terms. But at this point in our scanning of the painting, exactly what is being organized is becoming ever more elusive.

Then on to the the bottom band. It may or may not be a continuation of the conversation. How do we know whether it belongs in the formula? Certainly the tone is different. Gone are the carnal suggestions of the objects met in the top line, their roundness hinting of succulence. Such temptations are abandoned, replaced with straight lines that form three geometric constructions. We see: a rectangle with an internal “X” large enough to touch its four corners; an outline of another rectangle, this one empty but with a broken top segment suggesting openness; and finally a classic cube tilted to show three of its implied six surfaces. The viewer may wish to reconsider whether the middle band is meant as connective tissue between top and bottom bands. Certainly the stability of the relationship is nowhere near certain.

An extraneous piece of the puzzle is this: The work’s title promises hot dogs (plural) yet there is only one weiner to be seen. Does the painting offer a mechanical formula to create more? Is this a blueprint for a duplicating machine whose first test run involves processing a simple frankfurter?

Equally elusive is the question of the quality (the success or failure) of the work. The art that emerged from the East Village in the early 1980’s attracted its share of haters, and this remains true today. Detractors dogtail even (or maybe especially) the artists who went on to rise furthest from its midst — Jeff Koons (childish fixations!), Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat (all that scribbling and doodling on blank slates!). Is it possible the painting now in my custody deserves the same obliquey — lazy and puerile! — and I’m just too blind to realize it? In time will my judgment change? Who knows.

Right now I’m enjoying the sight of Bridgwood’s playful handling of the enamel paint-smeared canvas that he treats as his very own schoolroom chalk board, a proprietary surface to mark with personally meaningful signs and symbols. The syntax of those signs and symbols — and the ultimate message of the painting — I will wait to decipher.

I’m reminded of the young instructor who points to figures upon a blackboard in a watercolor done a century ago by Winslow Homer titled Blackboard (1877). Do you see, there in the bottom row, a large “X” whose four limbs touch the corners of an imprisoning rectangle?

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Where is the teacher who will help the eager, interpreting viewer to decode the formulas of here and now?

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Update 1 (02-19-2013): During my Facebook conversation with the painter, begun yesterday, Barry Bridgwood told me, “I did a lot of ‘math’ in my early 80’s paintings.” I must follow up on that remark.

Update 2 (02-20-2013): The artist generously replied to my questions about his math paintings. Highlights:

I feel the math draws the viewer into it and makes the mind think and ask questions! like a magnet! … I started to put algebra/math in my paintings as a type of a further abstraction element … Although by the mid 80’s, 1984 on, I was making mostly the computer generated work, I did keep making paintings with algebra in them … My 1st show at New Math was mainly algebra type paintings … In 1990 I had a show at Laurie Rubin Gallery in Soho that had both the computer silk screen work and “math” paintings … Many of the “math” painting sold very well, many collectors have them … There where 2 in a New York Group show in September called “Crossing Houston” at Smart Clothes Gallery on Stanton Street in the Lower East Side, an “80’s NY/East Village” show … The math paintings have started showing up in shows and the auction! It’s great to see them again! … Also, putting algebra in paintings can make them look smart. I was in a group show at Harvard University some years back called “Smart Art” !

Bridgwood’s Facebook page contains this photo, from the 2012 exhibit, “Crossing Houston,” at Paul Bridgewater’s Smart Clothes Gallery, showing two other 1980’s paintings with one of his small “computer paintings” from 1992 in between:

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Update 3 (02/26/2013): During a Facebook conversation today, Nina Seigenfeld Velazquez writes, “I think Hot Dogs might have been in our very 1st show at New Math.”

Update 4 (04/27/2013): I came across two other paintings from Bridgwood’s series of “math paintings.”

One was painted the year following Hot Dogs and features a reused frame as an integral part of the work (Untitled, 1984, enamel on board, 24 x 36″ with integrated frame). It is reproduced on page 321 of the March/April/May 1986 edition of the German art publication, Kunstforum International, in an article entitled “Tropical Codes” by Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo. Bridgwood is one of 24 New York Scene artists profiled by the authors — a group engaged in “new conceptual work [that] entails, for the most part, a post-Simulation model involving the collapse of abstraction and appropriation into a hybrid form–a new cultural sandwich for informed mouths.”

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Describing the signs infusing Bridgwood’s art of this period, Collins and Milazzo observe:

“The image (usually mathematical symbols and various fruit) is primitively scratched into the pictorial surface, constructing an unnatural painterly (hot) system of austere (cold) signs, extreme in their transparent, scientific, but, ultimately, fictional transmission of signic energy across a slow, opaque, nebulous surface.”

The second painting I recently located belongs to the collection of the Fisher Landau Center for Art, in Long Island City, New York (Untitled, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40″, property of Emily Fisher Landau, New York).

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No, General, I won’t fund your culture war

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Yesterday’s mail brought a fundraising letter from Lt. Gen. Josiah Bunting, III, a man of great distinction.  Bunting asks for money on behalf of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a component of which, the Lehrman American Studies Center, he serves as President.  The letter bothers me for four reasons.

1.  Who’s there?

The unsolicited letter is written in a manner that’s sure to annoy more than a few recipients, and I wonder why ISI didn’t assign someone with the right skills to edit it, if only to sand down its grating style.  Given Bunting’s long career as a writer, scholar, and educator, it’s hard for me to believe that he drafted, edited and finalized the document.  Which is to say that when, in the paragraphs that follow, I indicate that “Bunting writes …” or “According to Bunting …”,  I sincerely hope I’m wrong and that the text I’m citing is not in fact conveying his voice, his temperament and his knowledge, but instead is content furnished by ISI and anonymous staffers. 

2.  The familiarity ploy

Before the letter launches into histrionic mode (more about that, below), Bunting warmly addresses me as “Dear Friend,” and soon thereafter as “My friend.”  Now, I swear I don’t know him from Adam, yet he says he knows me.   An ersatz friendly tone is often found in charity fundraising letters, of course, following a template pushed by consultants.  But Bunting says I (along with thousands of others who received the same letter) deserve a bear hug for good reason:

Your name has been given to me as a steadfast supporter of the preservation of America’s founding principles; a steward of freedom who cares deeply about the future of our nation.

Is he channelling Eddie Haskell or what?  And yet, unctuousness aside, who am I to quibble with this glowing description of me?  But, on the matter of familiarity, wouldn’t it be nicer, I’m thinking, to receive an unsolicited letter that displays honesty and humility?  And for a model I turn to an uneducated fourteen year old named Huckleberry Finn, who, in his own overture to readers, in his very first words, confesses:

You don’t know about me . . . 

So, anyway, I decided to dig deeper into the letter.  And that’s when I came upon a creepy come-on, as I’ll describe next. 

3.  Questionable command of English

Here is the third sentence of the letter:

As a true American patriot, I know you are concerned about the direction of America’s colleges and universities.

Well.  One thing I am a true believer in is English grammar and clear writing (while, Lord knows, I mess up all the time).  A rule students learn in high school and are expected to obey in college and beyond is that a modifier (“a true American patriot”) should be placed as close as possible to the word it modifies (“you”).  Although there are colloquial exceptions to the rule (in spoken English), the rule should be followed if there is a risk of confusion due to the presence of more than one noun/pronoun the modifier could be describing (here, both “you” and “I” are candidates).  Bunting himself is half a century removed from his undergraduate degree in English, but rules are rules, and clear writing is timeless.  If ISI truly intends to flatter the reader, or even if it’s just a ploy, the drafter should consider this formulation:

As a true American patriot, you are undoubtedly concerned about the direction of America’s colleges and universities.  

The thought I resist is that the Lt. General is trumpeting his honorable military service and combining it with a boast of uncanny power to discern like-mindedness in others:

I, as a true American patriot, know you too are concerned about the direction of America’s colleges and universities.

In its original state the letter gives the impression of being either a slap-dash effort or a crude stage for chauvinism — a terrible irony in a letter requesting money to support improving higher education. 

On to page two, where this plea pops up:

But, who’s going to climb a hill for others if their hearts are bitter towards their own culture?

Something is not right.  The word “who” can be singular or plural.  In this sentence it appears to be plural, referring to persons (plural) who possess hearts (plural).  But the word “who’s” is a contraction of “who is,” a misplaced singular.  The sentence needs not an “is” but the plural verb “are.”  Or, in the alternative, the simultaneously singular- and plural-fitting verb “will” will do the trick, as in the sentence, “But, who will climb a hill for others …”  Yet another possible reading of the sentence is that the author meant for the cited “hearts” to belong to the “others” for whom the single hill-climber is making a sacrifice.  But this makes no sense in the context of Bunting’s argument, which is that young persons must be inculcated with unquestioned love of country (we must “nurture the next generation of patriots”), for if we do not, we will fail to produce  citizens able to meet the demands of inevitable wars.  Then again, the letter’s expository prose is so muddy at times that the reader may be unavoidably flummoxed.  

In the first of his two post-scripts on page four, Bunting proudly informs us ISI’s charter says the organization’s headquarters “cannot be in the nation’s capitol.”  Well, of course not.  The word “capitol” (with an “O”) always refers to a building.  Watch the cute video, here, on this point.  The building housing our nation’s legislative branch is the U.S. Capitol.  It was Thomas Jefferson who insisted the legislative building be called “the Capitol.”  

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It’s a large building, to be sure, but it would be the height of arrogance for ISI to think it had a chance of being located inside the nation’s capitol.  In contrast, “capital”  (with an “A” as the final vowel) refers to the District (see Article One, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution) within which the federal government, and many a non-governmental organization, reside.  The same capitol-versus-capital distinction applies at the state level.  With this error, ISI, which sponsors the National Civic Literacy Board, earns a bonus point for irony.

Let me stop there, and express the hope that an intern with serious skills is hired to scrub through the next ISI letter prior to its release.  

4.  The culture war is here for you to join

What galls me is this:  ISI’s presumption that I am on its side.  I’m not speaking of the “side” in favor of improving classical education while strengthening all Americans’ understanding of our country’s long history and our nation’s uniqueness.  On that ground I have my feet firmly planted, thanks to a superb liberal arts education.  As a student of political science and history, and as a current participant in government, my mind and heart are there too.  No, I’m referring to the  letter writer’s assumption that I stand on his “side” in a great cultural war the far right desires to foment. 

The letter is very clear on this point:  the reader will be judged to be either “upholding the principles of the Founders” (values to be defined by . . . the Lt. General?) or found unworthy of  “confidence.”  For now, at least, I’m in Bunting’s good graces; he reports I have been tested and, in his words, “You have proven your dedication to the values upon which this country was built.”  (Should I keep a copy of that certification in my wallet, in case I need it to pass through check-points, come the revolution?)

Presumptuous? Arrogant? Scary undertones of Big Brother?  You betcha!  The  four page letter is chock full of radical right code words, phrases, and bêtes noires.  An ideological slant is never far from the surface, and frequently bursts through.  ISI says the American university system is being poisoned by a toxic culture.  Students are paralyzed by revisionist liberals.  A cadre of apologists (a term the letter neither defines nor assigns to named individuals) have made it their life’s work to disconnect our young people from the values and institutions that sustain a free and humane society.  Moreover, if we do not act, the anti-freedom crowd will gain the upper hand in the fight for our future leaders’ hearts and minds.  The letter closes with a statement that would fit nicely into a ritual session of Two Minutes Hate:

It is our job to expose them and I am counting on Americans like you to help us educate for liberty. 

I am struck by what is absent from the text.  Nowhere in four full pages addressing  American principles does the word democracy (or any of its variants) appear.  It seems Bunting believes the “nation’s heritage” ended before 1800, and so nowhere is there an appreciation of two centuries of subsequent history — a history forged by American people of faith and courage and intelligence equal to (or in the case of religious faith, exceeding) that of the leaders who emerged during the period of armed Revolution.  The letter displays a fetishistic attachment to the Founding Fathers, to the exclusion of our grandly successful, ongoing American experiment.  When describing today’s youth, Bunting casually tosses off calumnies (“their hearts are bitter towards their own culture”).  These are the words of a curmudgeon blind to the actual lives and character of young Americans.  (Say it ain’t so, Joe!)

I believe the study of history, which Bunting says he supports, shows America to be an unfinished nation.  Our nation is still being created.  This idea scares many people, I know.  Many prefer the sclerotic over the dynamic.  But the rest of us — and I believe we are the democratic (small “d”) majority — must steadfastly guard against the baleful consequences that would flow if personal fears prevailed.  That is the true threat to our lives, our liberties, and our happiness.

Whenever I encounter someone arguing that the America they live in today is not the country of their youth, let alone the country as founded over two centuries ago, I’m reminded of W. S. Gilbert’s lines satirizing a particularly sorry fellow:  “The idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own.”   As with us all, time’s fell hand ultimately will sweep them from the scene. 

I am struck by the aging of persons prominantly embracing a Manichean world view.  I’m noticing, for example, how Pat Buchanan is becoming unsteady in his argumentation.  Just this week he asserted, erroneously, that no blacks fought and died in the Vicksburg campaign (video, here; historical facts, here and here).  Sadly, the reason Buchanan denies history is so he can argue white males have a superior claim of ownership of America, de facto (long exclusive possession) if not de jure.  Also this week, in a different forum, Buchanan misquoted the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution in support of a related wacky argument, to the effect that the progeny of the Founding Fathers (white males) are the legitimate inheritors of a nation “created” back in 1787. 

All of which goes to show, some folks way past their college years need remedial education in this nation’s history.