I don't understand

why men in robes and funny collars who get up in public and say such silly things as "I oppose birth control" get any more of a hearing than anyone else irrationally proclaiming that they don't want somebody else to do/have/say something that they are entirely free to do/have/say. I mean, I start to foam at the mouth when people talk loudly on the phone in public space. I don't think anybody should make more than 500K/year for anything, ever. I think that state universities should not pay for college sports. Why doesn't the newspaper put my objections on the front page? Why does some guy's opinion of what goes on in women's uteruses deserve column inches??? Seriously, can somebody explain?

where else?

*okay it just occurred to me why this deserves column inches: it is crazy and people need to know that this sort of insanity is happening so we can be prepared when they take away the pill. Uh, carry on.

Then and Now

Sunday was a marathon theater day: the Russian production of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia at the Russian Academic Youth Theater. That's 9 hours of romanticism, revolution, and intense(ly ridiculous) love triangles, people! And not to brag, but even after a serious week of dacha-ing and watching the entire first season of Workout the night before (what? shut up!), this gote did not once fall asleep.

In point of fact, though, the production was really good - fast paced, spare but expressive set design, scene changes done using a mini-cast of singing, dancing, marching, saluting, silent history-making commoners who transformed themselves and the stage with the turn of historical tides (peasants in the 1830s, workers and seamen in the 1840s, later young revolutionaries in the 1860s). The translation was good, too. Not surprisingly, it all sounds really good (if not better?) in Russian. And it was strangely appropriate that the Russian actors actually had real Russian accents when they spoke English in character, the way the historical figures would have (but as far as I remember, the American actors didn't).

There were two moments of extended applause (aside from the long standing ovation at the end):
1) in response to a line from Hertzen about his jealous lover getting angry at him for being unfaithful in her dream (those crazy women!)
2) and for a line from Turgenev to a young nihilist about the practicality of Pushkin over a manual on treating hemorrhoids (great Pushkin makes you forget your earthly ailments; the manual just reminds you of them. Get it? Life is cold, brutish, and short - read your Pushkin!).

Anyway, on a slightly different note. I was reading a book on the train home when I heard what I thought was gunfire further down the car. People scattered, as one might expect, and three (Turkish? Central Asian?) guys dressed in going-out clothes rushed toward a (white Russian) guy dressed in shorts and a tshirt and holding a beer bottle above his head. Instead of getting into a fight right in the middle of the car, though, and while everyone else was running to the other end of the car, an older couple went toward the guy with the bottle (who looked pretty wild-eyed and about to snap) and proceeded to physically isolate him from the others and talk him down through the next five stops.

From what one of the women who was sitting nearby told me, the three guys had been "acting obnoxiously," laughing at the shorts guy or something, and he just snapped and tried to break the bottle against the metal pole (but couldn't). What do you expect, she wanted to know, if he's got some inner hatred "for them" already? The "so-called national question."

More than the sudden threat of violence, I was really surprised by the old dude's immediate action in handling the situation. The way he didn't just run to the other side of the car, but used his grandfatherly skills in making the angry racist guy calm down by standing in front of him (physically blocking the other three), patting him on the back, putting his arms around him, saying soothing things, and shaking his fist at the three would-be bottle victims. (What was that about fathers and sons, Tom?) Of course, I'm also disturbed by the way the story is being told (how were they "taunting" him, exactly? being dressed a certain way? laughing amonst themselves? being non-white?). And as impressed and relieved as I was to avoid witnessing more violence, such a response does not convey how totally unacceptable the guy's reaction was in the first place. Perhaps that's a bit too much to ask though, given the circumstances.

Braggy-Braggy

This post is just to say that, while MasterGote may never experience the pains of childbirth, running a marathon, or occupying the highest tax bracket, riding an off-brand, $125, 17kg behemoth of a mountain bike with a loose saddle through snow, mud, sand, and occasional stretches of asphalt for 74km can now be checked off the list of the quite painful (but potentially awesome) things to do in life. Sore bottom, sunburn, and multiple bruises notwithstanding, it was one of the funnest things I've done so far in Russia. The people were absolutely lovely for letting a bum like me join in on their ride, considering I've never "ridden" longer than from Brooklyn to Queens and back and didn't even know the right way to change gears for going uphill (wha? there's a way to go up a hill without standing on the pedals???). Anyway, here are some pictures and here are some more braggy-braggy stats about the ride (in Russian). People back in the BK, start training...

Help A Brother Out

Dear readers, please take this poll and help out my friend, Buster. I know you're just looking for more stuff to procrastinate with: here's your chance. (In case you're interested, I got an 8).

I Hate You, Martin Kippenberger

For making stuff like this:

Now I'm going to the big birch wood, my pills will soon start doing me good, 1990

Ingredients: 29 birch trees (rolls of cardboard and plastic and black-and-white offset prints), metal stands, and wooden pills. Installed at MoMA. (via)

What is going on here? We have trees made of art materials and pills made of wood. We have the maudlin romantic symbols of melancholy and the practical modern-day solution to one's existential crisis, if swollen and a bit hard to swallow. I think Holland Cotter hits the nail on the head in his NYT review when he asks, quite seriously, is this "a sendup or a nostalgic sigh?"

Most critics, Cotter included, tend to weave together Kippenberger's personal afflictions/ insurgencies with questions of "history" or "culture," our quote-unquote Modern Condition:

Right from the start he understood that as an artist he was appearing on the scene at the end of a drama rather than at the beginning. By the time he arrived, the defining impulses of late-20th-century art — Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Neo-Expressionism — were old. So were the political ideologies like Socialism and Communism, and the utopianism of the 1960s, which, for better and worse, had shaped the world he knew.

Seemingly all that remained were leftover styles and ideas; bit parts and walk-ons. Kippenberger didn’t buy this. He knew that there are no small parts, only timid actors, and that with the right spices scraps make a great meal. In other words, he knew he had to take what was there, including the diminished role of the artist, and make something different, and large, and loud from it, and he did.

Of course, the review is also called, "Live Hard, Create Compulsively, Die Young." So, I throw the question back to you, HC: was that a sendup or a nostalgic sigh?

A more personal and nuanced (though still unabashedly sympathetic) view of Kippenberger's life is here, in the online version of Ronald Jones's article in Artforum. Jones similarly mixes the personal and the historical:

As much as art history fantasizes Kippenberger as the spunky art-world sophomore, his position is too phenomenally complex to leave it at that. He appeared to us when powerful enclaves of contemporary German culture were sponsoring a full-scale excavation of Expressionism. It is an understatement to say that Martin was at odds with all that. ... From the Paris Bar in Berlin to New York's Odeon, to the Anchor, he carried on, untamed - like the neo-Expressionists he held in contempt - but these passages were performances Martin always kept in quotes. He never mistook having fun [for] ideology. True, he possesses an entertaining appreciation of his culture; but more significant, he recognized what it was about to become. He enjoyed a second sight in this way, a formidable perception that modern nationalism was at last giving way to the dominion of the next culture, a culture staggering in its unity. We never really talked about this seriously (it required a sobriety he would rarely permit), but it was on his mind, and I can say that he did more than casually ponder it. Simply said, his pessimistic insight into what the culture would bring forth was one of his most remarkable gifts. (Emphasis added to highlight strange contradiction, which we could explore if I could figure out the even stranger grammar. My best guess is in the square brackets.)

And perhaps this is the right approach, after all. (If we ignore, for a moment, the looming, hovering, mouthbreathing - stop reading my goddamned blog post over my shoulder!!! - question of "the myth of the tragic male hero, whose life is over before it really began because his/our over-aggressive fathers ruined it for the rest of us by acting like such f-ing a-holes." Yea, let's hold on to that one for a minute.)

How could I say that this is the right approach? Well, because art is not a truth-and-reconciliation commission. It can speak to history, it can become part of history, but it never really drew a clear line between the artist as a guy with a drug problem and larger questions, which one guy can never really address or rectify on his own. What I'm saying is, art history has a problem with biography, because art has a problem with biography. It has one foot in the piddling, pitiable messes of lived experience

On the right: Yuri Leiderman, Silent Pity (Dinner Is Served), 1988

and the other in the quicksand into which we are all sinking and which will continue long after we have left this mortal coil. In questions of history, so to speak. Call it a problem with boundaries. Call it competence. Call it the question of painting. But it's been around for at least two centuries, and it doesn't seem to be going away.

So, why do I hate Martin Kippenberger? I suppose because he makes such a great story out of it. And he makes it so easy to tell - so productive! so compulsive! so witty! so tragic! Look how he plays with materials - the pills made of wood, the trees made of art's raw materials. A spoonful of sarcasm really does make the medicine go down. And all that.

Martin Kippenberger, The Happy End of Kafka's "Amerika," 1994; installation at MoMA

A nice story it all makes. But let's not forget that it's not just a story, at least not while we're still around.