“In my best moments I think ‘Life has passed me by’ and I am content.”
The outside world didn’t clutter Agnes Martin’s mind. When she died at ninety-two it was said that she hadn’t read a newspaper for fifty years - her vision was focussed solely on her art.
“To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.”
Giving up the things you do not like is always easier when your life is insulated by money, but that kind of insulation didn’t come until Martin was in her late forties. Born in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912, her father died when she was two, leaving her mother with five children to bring up. In such difficult circumstances, Agnes didn’t have the opportunity to develop her artistic interests, but she was fully aware of the beauty that surrounded her, which inspired her belief she had the talent to paint it.
When she was twenty-four, Agnes traveled to New York, where her visits to the museums and galleries convinced her to be an artist. It took time, for twenty years Martin worked as a teacher, painted every day and burnt her pictures every night, until she was ready. She moved to New Mexico, where food and rent were cheap. Her decision was to paint until her savings ran out, then to starve. She was lucky, the legendary art dealer, Betty Parsons, whose gallery had been the focus for the Abstract Expressionist movement, saw her work in New Mexico in 1957. It led to Martin’s first major show in 1958. It was the start of her successful career that lasted until her death in 2004.
Martin’s work was spiritual and she once described her paintings as being “not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.”
“When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.”
This rare interview with Agnes Martin was recorded at her studio in Taos, New Mexico, by Chuck Smith and Sono Kuwayama, in November 1997, and is quite a revealing and inspirational film.
Glad to see that Senator Bernie Sanders isn’t out on a limb by himself this time. The new legislation he’s introduced to shore up Social Security by making the wealthy pay their fair share has co-sponsors Dan Akaka (D-HI), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Al Franken (D-MN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). Surprise, surprise, Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is also on board. No surprise, of course, that no Senate Republicans have signed on in support. Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon’s 4th district, will be introducing the same bill in the House
The gist of Bernie’s legislation is to strengthen Social Security by applying the payroll tax that most Americans already pay to those with annual incomes above $250,000. Right now the payroll tax cuts off at $106,800. This simple, painless change by itself would keep Social Security solvent for another 75 years, about as long as Social Security has already existed. and although right-wing crackpots and extremists like Rick Perry may call it a Ponzi Scheme and predatory Wall Street shills like Mitt Romney may want to privatize it and turn it over to Wall Street, the vast majority of Americans see it as the most successful government program in our nation’s history and understand, despite Republican lies—that started 76 years ago—that it hasn’t contributed one dime to the federal deficit. It has a $2.5 trillion surplus, and it can pay out every nickel owed to every eligible American for at least the next 25 years, according to the Social Security Administration. Before Social Security came into being something like half the senior citizens in the country lived in poverty. Now they have a much better chance of ending their lives in dignity and without eating cat food. In fact, less than 10% of the elderly live in poverty and more than 53 million Americans receive retirement or disability benefits.
“Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation’s history. For 76 years, through good times and bad, Social Security has paid out every benefit owed to every eligible American,” Sanders said. “The most effective way to strengthen Social Security for the next 75 years is to eliminate the cap on the payroll tax on income above $250,000. Right now, someone who earns $106,800 pays the same amount of money into Social Security as a billionaire. That makes no sense. The Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act will ensure the long-term solvency of Social Security without cutting benefits or raising taxes on the middle class.”
Wednesday on MSNBC, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual report on poverty as “a horror show.”
The report found that 46.2 million Americans were living in poverty, the highest amount since the Census began recording the statistic 52 years ago.
“The middle class is collapsing and we have now by far the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth,” Sanders said.
“We need aggressive action on the part of the president and the Congress, and if the Republicans continue to say ‘no, no, no to jobs,’ the president has got to continue going around the country,” he added, “because I think the overwhelming majority of the people want a jobs program, they want to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, they do not want to give any more tax breaks to the wealthy and large corporations.”
I’m not going to go into the whole song and dance about how Playboy provided a forum for some of the most progressive thinkers and artists on the planet including Lenny Bruce, Robert Anton Wilson, Paul Krassner, Timothy Leary, Joan Baez, R. Buckminster Fuller, Jane Fonda, Muhammad Ali and many more. I’m not gonna tell you how I bought the magazine to read the interviews and fine fiction from writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Gabriel García Márquez, Joseph Heller, Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. No, I’m not gonna tell you all about that because it won’t make any difference in anyone’s opinion of Playboy magazine. You’ve got your opinion, I’ve got mine.
Playboy and its creator Hugh Hefner have been polarizing people for the past half century. I happen to like Hefner and his magazine, though the nude spreads have rarely featured much that floated my boat. My taste in women rarely coincided with the picture perfect All-American, mostly white, women of Playboy. I was also never into the “Playboy philosophy” when it came to stuff like cars, fashion and cocktail culture. I never wore an ascot or cufflinks and I wouldn’t know the difference between a Cuban cigar and a dog turd or good champagne from Everclear and 7-Up.
What I dug about about Playboy is that it introduced my young Catholic-corrupted brain to the idea that sex could be fun and intelligence could be sexy. In retrospect, the nudity objectified women, but at the time, for me, it opened up a world in which women’s bodies were wondrous and beautiful. I may be one of the only teenage boys of the Sixties that didn’t use Playboy as jerk-off fodder. I gazed upon the full-bodied Playmates during breaks in reading the genuinely mind-opening interviews with some of my counter-culture heroes. There literally was nowhere else to get some of the insights that Playboy published (I wasn’t reading Evergreen or Paris Review yet). Between bouts of being battered mentally and physically at school by malevolent Nuns, it was liberating to come home, lock my bedroom door, and read about psychedelics, beatnik culture and the pleasures of the flesh in a girlie magazine. And the nudes did steer my thinking away from perceiving the human body as a vessel of sin and shame toward an appreciation of it as something delightful and fulfilling.
Here’s an interview with Hefner from the mid-1970s that was conducted for City University of New York TV show Day At Night hosted by James Day. I like Hefner’s belief in the liberating power of a healthy sex life. And I bet the Bunnies did too. I can’t recall any of Playboy’s models ever complaining about their jobs and several books have been written about and by them.
As we once again enter an era of prudishness, over-zealous political correctness and sexual repression, some of what Hefner has to say sounds as relevant as it did 40 years ago. While the bunny costumes may seem silly and dated, the truth is always hip.
Born in London in 1922, Hamilton was determined to become an artist an early age, he quit school at 15, and studied art at night before entering the Royal Academy at 16. His studies were cut short by the outbreak of the Second World War, during which he worked as a draughtsman with engineers and scientists at EMI. After the war returned to the Royal Academy, but was expelled for “not profiting from the instruction”. He then attended the Slade College of Art for 2 years, from which he started working at the ICA, where he produced posters, leaflets and exhibit work.
In 1951, Hamilton curated his first exhibition, Growth and Form. This was followed in 1955 with the seminal Man, Machine and Motion, which examined human interaction with machine and environment, and how “the need to cope with technology provokes great art.”
It was at this time Hamilton met with Eduardo Paolozzi, who was already working on the collages which are now best associated with Pop Art. Hamilton joined Paolozzi in the loose grouping of artists known as the Independent Group, who gathered around the ICA.
In 1956, the Independent Group mounted This Is Tomorrow, an exhibition that is now seen as one of the most influential of the past sixty years - its resonance is still with us today. This was the show that announced Pop Art to the world - long before Warhol, who was then window dressing. As described by the Daily Telegraph:
This Is Tomorrow, a quasi-anthropological, partly ironic exhibition embracing the imagery of the embryonic mass media. In Hamilton’s words, the idea was to examine “our new visual environment — cinema, the jukebox, Marilyn Monroe, and comics — all these games with sound, optical illusion and imagery”.
His own small, dense, prophetic work Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? not only introduced the word “pop” into art (emblazoned on the muscleman’s phallic lollipop) but also anticipated many of the key images of the genre: the television; the Warner Bros billboard; the comic poster (Lichtenstein); the packaged ham (Rosenquist); the Motel bed (Oldenburg); and the Ford logo — Hamilton’s obsession with car design and engineering culminated in Hommage à Chrysler (1957). This was Pop Art, but not populist art. Hamilton called it “a new landscape of secondary, filtered material” – sophisticated art to be devoured by a mass audience.
The exhibition’s success gained him a teaching post at the Royal College of Art, where he influenced David Hockney and Peter Blake. He produced works such as Hers Is A Lush Situation (1958), in which automotive and female design are commingled; Pin-up (1961), with its mixed idioms, classical, modern, vulgar; and the sketchy, painterly collage-like rapture of $he (1962) – it was, he suggested, “a sieved reflection of the adman’s paraphrase of the consumer’s dream”.
In 1962, Hamilton’s wife, Terry, was tragically killed in a automobile accident. Hamilton quit Britain for the USA, where he became close friends with Marcel Duchamp. The friendship led to Hamilton curating a retrospective of Duchamp’s work at the Tate Gallery, London.
The association with Pop Art, led Hamilton to be hailed the “Father of Pop Art” a title he loathed. The association continued in the mid-sixties after he returned to England, and produced two of his most famous works Swingeing London 67, a portrait of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser under arrest, which became one of the defining images of the 1960s. The following year Hamilton designed the cover for the Beatles White Album, which became his best known work.
The sixties also saw Hamilton influence another, younger generation of artists and musicians, most famously one of his pupils, Bryan Ferry and his band Roxy Music.
In the the 1970s, Hamilton had retrospectives at the Tate (1970) and the Guggenheim in New York (1973), both exhibitions subsequently toured Europe.
I saw one retrospective of his work during this decade at the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, which mixed his famous line drawings for James Joyce’s Ulysses, with his Pop Art, and silk screens. It was highly impressive, but more because of the intelligence on display, rather than any shared emotion inspired by the work. This may explain why Hamilton never really made the cross-over from critical acclaim to populist success.
The seventies saw Hamilton produce some of his most political work:
Hamilton had always been politically engaged, vociferously supporting the CND. In the 1980s he began a “Northern Ireland” trilogy: The Citizen (1981-83) depicted a “dirty protest” prisoner in the Maze; The Subject (1988-89), a self-righteous Orangeman; and The State (1993), a British soldier on patrol. Inevitably such politicised subject matter attracted criticism, though many considered the works merely naive oversimplifications.
Despite his advancing years, Hamilton continued to reinvent himself. In the 1980s he began working with computers: “I initially ventured into working with computers because I didn’t want to get left behind. I was approaching old age and aware of it, and I thought ‘I’m going to keep up with this’ and found out that I was ahead of everybody.” He designed two computers, the OHIO and the Diab DS-101, and increasingly used digital devices to manipulate images and create a dialogue between technique, technology and aesthetics.
The attraction of computers, he claimed, was that “you have the possibility of perfection. I’m after beauty — of composition, colour and tone.” It did not seem ironic that a man in his eighth decade was exploring technology with greater vivacity than almost any other artist: throughout his long career, Hamilton’s work anticipated almost every interpretative cultural theory, from Marshall McLuhan to the “Young British Artists”, and provided the most thorough engagement with mass media and technology this side of the Atlantic. Damien Hirst referred to Hamilton as “the greatest”.
Hamilton was appointed Companion of Honour in 2000; in 2006 he received the Max Beckmann Prize for Painting. A major retrospective of his work is due to travel to tour America and Europe from 2013.
Richard Hamilton married Terry O’Reilly in 1947; they had a son and a daughter. Rita Donagh, whom he married in 1991, survives him with the son of his first marriage.
Bonus clip, Richard Hamilton on Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, after the jump…
Ironic that a man not known much for speaking should have given one of the greatest speeches in history. Here’s Charlie Chaplin’s moving oration from The Great Dictator set to contemporary imagery.
I’m sorry but I don’t want to be an Emperor – that’s not my business – I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.
We all want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls – has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little: More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say “Do not despair”.
The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress: the hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people, will return to the people and so long as men die [now] liberty will never perish…
Soldiers – don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you – who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.
Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate – only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers – don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty.
In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written ” the kingdom of God is within man ” – not one man, nor a group of men – but in all men – in you, the people.
You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let’s use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfill their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.
Charles Hugh Smith, author of Survival+ and An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times discusses why the Great Recession is here to stay, the structural unemployment that will affect many people and the future of the US economy. Plus, investing your money and time in your own life and in your own community and not getting burned by a publicly traded company you’ve never personally visited. Charles Hugh Smith blogs daily at Of Two Minds.com.
I don’t always agree with Noam Chomsky. I think he’s too reflexively anti-American (to the detriment to his works being more widely read), that he’s been getting a lil’ cranky as he gets older (as we all do) and sometimes he veers a little too far into conspiracy theory territory for my tastes. Still, when he’s on it, Chomsky can zero in on a complex confluence of events and trends and elucidate them like few other observers of national and world politics can. He recently took on the topic of American decline on the pages of al-Akhbar:
The post-Golden Age economy is enacting a nightmare envisaged by the classical economists, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Both recognized that if British merchants and manufacturers invested abroad and relied on imports, they would profit, but England would suffer. Both hoped that these consequences would be averted by home bias, a preference to do business in the home country and see it grow and develop. Ricardo hoped that thanks to home bias, most men of property would “be satisfied with the low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations.
In the past 30 years, the “masters of mankind,” as Smith called them, have abandoned any sentimental concern for the welfare of their own society, concentrating instead on short-term gain and huge bonuses, the country be damned—as long as the powerful nanny state remains intact to serve their interests.
A graphic illustration appeared on the front page of the New York Times on August 4. Two major stories appear side by side. One discusses how Republicans fervently oppose any deal “that involves increased revenues”—a euphemism for taxes on the rich. The other is headlined “Even Marked Up, Luxury Goods Fly Off Shelves.” The pretext for cutting taxes on the rich and corporations to ridiculous lows is that they will invest in creating jobs—which they cannot do now as their pockets are bulging with record profits.
The developing picture is aptly described in a brochure for investors produced by banking giant Citigroup. The bank’s analysts describe a global society that is dividing into two blocs: the plutonomy and the rest. In such a world, growth is powered by the wealthy few, and largely consumed by them. Then there are the ‘non-rich,’ the vast majority, now sometimes called the global precariat, the workforce living a precarious existence. In the US, they are subject to “growing worker insecurity,” the basis for a healthy economy, as Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan explained to Congress while lauding his performance in economic management. This is the real shift of power in global society.
The Citigroup analysts advise investors to focus on the very rich, where the action is. Their “Plutonomy Stock Basket,” as they call it, far outperformed the world index of developed markets since 1985, when the Reagan-Thatcher economic programs of enriching the very wealthy were really taking off.
Before the 2007 crash for which the new post-Golden Age financial institutions were largely responsible, these institutions had gained startling economic power, more than tripling their share of corporate profits. After the crash, a number of economists began to inquire into their function in purely economic terms. Nobel laureate in economics Robert Solow concludes that their general impact is probably negative: “the successes probably add little or nothing to the efficiency of the real economy, while the disasters transfer wealth from taxpayers to financiers.”
By shredding the remnants of political democracy, they lay the basis for carrying the lethal process forward—as long as their victims are willing to suffer in silence.
Alexey Titarenko has photographed Saint Petersburg since he was 8-years-old. In fact, he says, he has dedicated his whole life to the city. Titarenko sees his photographs as reflecting the history of his city, and Russia, over the past 20 years.
“Through the prism of my native city, I attempt to show events that occurred not only here, but throughout the country - the changes, the catastrophies, and the human tragedies, which have swept this city and the people of this land.”
In the 1990s, Titarenko was working on a series of photographs about totalitarianism, centered on the signs and statues that were crumbling around him as Soviet communism failed. Poverty spread as rationing was introduced.
“Food was rationed. To obtain food in exchange for the ration tickets, people would run from one store to another, with a desperate air, and their eyes full of sorrow. I’d place my camera at the subway entrance and take photographs.
“The activity around the station, which was located in a shopping district, overlapped with the sensations I felt when I listened to certain musical compositions, Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony in particular, the movement entitled “At the Shop”.
“The mass of people flowing around the subway station formed a sort of human tide, giving me a sensation of unrealness, of phantasmagoria, These people were like shadows, one would meet in the Underworld. I decided to express that feeling in my work, to convey my personal expressions. I had to find a visual metaphor that would enable the viewer to share my feelings as acutely as possible. That is what prompted me to try a long exposure process.”
Titarenko’s pictures were haunting, disturbing, like malevolent ghosts crowding the frame. He called the series City of Shadows,
A new documentary by the Quay Brothers which focuses on the The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the fascinating Mütter Museum will have its premier on September 22 in Philadelphia.
Through the Weeping Glass: On the Consolations of Life Everlasting (Limbos & Afterbreezes in the Mütter Museum) is a documentary on the collections of books, instruments, and medical anomalies at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Mütter Museum. This short film (running time: 31 minutes) is the first made by the internationally recognized Quay Brothers in the United States.
Learn more about the Mutter Museum by visiting their website.
The Quay Brothers discuss the making of their new film:
