5:25 a.m. - 2023-02-09
lesson 3

Maurice Schmidt was a red-haired Jew, and what a head of hair it was. A wiry, paint-flecked cloud of rust that hovered unpredictably over his long features as he taught. He painted massive canvases in oils, expressionist depictions of Old Testament stories.

More on those later.

I never took one of Mr. Schmidt's classes, so I actually got to know him through his son, who sang for my band. Joshua had the requisite long hair and good looks of an early-nineties front man, and his style was extra “baggy”. Also he loved him some drugs. Really loved him some drugs. At some point he'd moved in with me and my girlfriend and our guitar player on a ranch outside of town, and Maurice thought this was a grand idea. Maybe he considered me a good influence? Or maybe they just wanted the kid out of the house. Regardless, Joshua proceeded to spend the better part of the months that followed smoking weed in his room, listening to The Stone Roses, and fucking a steady parade of townie girls who idolized him. Emerging occasionally to lend his vocal talents to our scarcely-heard and quickly-forgotten demo tape.

Maurice had married his temperamental opposite. Becky was thin and nervous with bags of worry under her big, expressive eyes. (I can imagine how raising Joshua might do this to a person.) She was always kind to me though, and a gracious-if-overattentive hostess who'd greeted me warmly at the door that day, welcoming me in to share Passover Seder with the family.

We observed the holiday more or less by the book. We did the hand-washings and broke the cracker and such. We dipped the parsley in saltwater and blessed everything twice etc. only..no wine. Becky feared the consequences of having Joshua within alcohol proximity, so we toasted with fruit juice. After that we were just folks eatin' a brisket dinner, and the conversation turned secular. Gravitating inevitably towards art.

~ ~ ~

We were far-removed from the “scene”, you see...from the hype and controversy surrounding the resurgent early-90's art market. My only experience of that world was through the glossy pages of what few periodicals they carried at the university library. These felt like missives from another planet, one hard to reconcile with the mundane reality of the studio and my rustic peers in their untucked, clay-spattered denim shirts. I would re-read Artforum like it was a travel-brochure. This was what I might look forward to, this was why I'd abandoned my engineering studies for a fine arts degree...

I also loved the esoteric density of the writing. Mostly because it mirrored the philosophy texts I was already engrossed in. But also because I was a young man, and an egoist; and a lot of art-criticism is, frankly, masturbatory. (An observation, not an indictment...I still enjoy both.)

So anyway, that's where my head was when Maurice asked an innocent-enough question about some pieces of mine he'd seen outside the welding-shop. And that's why I proceeded to give him an unsolicited earful of theories on the “future of art”. Working myself into a revolutionary fervor over my desire to “immerse the spectator within the work”, and to “engage multiple senses”. A rant I recall concluding with a grandiose statement along the lines of, “...I want to make art that confronts the viewer on its own terms, art liberated from the tyranny of the frame”.

Maurice didn't pause to set down knife and fork, nor did he look up from his brisket. He just said, in his understated way, “Maybe the frame is the point”.

Maybe the frame is the point.

The implications were lost on me at the time, but the words found a home in my head. Surfacing occasionally to be turned over like a bit of river rock, like a koan. It took some twenty years before I began to get it. And while it feels almost-disrespectful to embellish on the brut disposition of the phrase, we set a precedent with the two previous “lessons”. One whereupon I state my conclusion, awkwardly, in italics:

Context is a social contract that informs culture.

~ ~ ~

Years after sharing that Seder with the Schmidts, it occurred to me why I was initially drawn to installation art. Because even as a child I'd imagined myself one day “immersing the spectator within the work”, only this ambition was hatched not in museums but in theme parks. I wanted to design dark-rides and haunted houses; log-flumes and runaway mine-trains, an escapist aesthetic I appreciate to this day, along with a hundred other aesthetic predilections beyond the purview of “fine art”. Modern architecture, primitive pottery...goth kitsch and well-executed men's room graffiti. It's a matter of context.

Another part of installation art's personal appeal had to do with mixed-media/assemblage's "bad boy" reputation. As a signature element of the Dada movement, it's always had a whiff of the transgressive about it...a middle finger to the establishment, gloved in a joke. And that spirit had endured. Whenever I'd find myself in art history class, eyes glazing over at the prospect of discussing yet-another Medieval altarpiece, I'd flip 600 years ahead in my textbook to check out Meret Oppenheim's furry teacup, or Rauschenberg's “Monogram”. These were punk rock. These spoke to me. That too, of course, had to do with context.

If you break-down an installation piece after it's shown at a museum and reassemble it in a tent at a rave...it's a different work of art. The former might elicit a five page critical “think-piece” in response, the latter a slap on the back and “Dude that's cool how'd you build it?”. Possibly from the same viewer. Likewise, a fur-clad cup and saucer discovered amongst the contents of a junk-peddler's wagon would be viewed as a useless oddity, not an aesthetic mission statement...

~ ~ ~

From the abstruse critical prose of Clement Greenberg to the earthy, insistent genius of Picasso. From elitist gallery curators clutching monogrammed handkerchiefs to the anarchist art-collectives who would plot their ruin...the whole drama is played out in a gossamer kingdom of ideas. But it's a kingdom made of real money, built on a foundation of very-real labor. On the sweat of weavers beholden to Medici bankers and of black-lunged coal miners in the employ of Andrew Mellon. We could open the books on every patron of the arts and draw a line from the “transcendent” artwork their patronage enabled to the less-ethereal commodities that empowered them in-turn. That's human nature: the more fervently we climb each other's backs towards the heavens, the more firmly we plant someone else's feet in the mud...

Aside from its implications as a commercial “package” though, consider the frame's other function: constraint. Whether paintings are hung in a horizontal line, or floor-to-ceiling “salon” style, the frame delineates and separates content: you were just lookin' at a Corot, here's something by Degas...this is obvious. Less obvious perhaps is the gilded border's obverse function: to keep the rest of the world at bay. To focus attention on a self-contained universe of pigment and ideas; to designate this as an object presented for deeper consideration, something to be regarded in a certain (wait for it...) frame of mind.

That moment when a painting connects, when something deep inside of you takes off running and shouts like a Japanese schoolkid on holiday...that feeling germinates before it blooms. And that seed is planted when you walk inside a museum, no? We could delve into the fantastic architectural gestures these institutions have engaged in historically...or maybe I could speak instead about movie theaters? Specifically those built before television made “talkies” a ubiquitous household reality. They're gilded, these old picture palaces, and baroque-as-fuck; built to evoke an extraordinary mindset before the lights even go down. And I could extrapolate by citing churches and courthouses and airports etc. because these physical “frameworks” are blatant and concrete...but the nuances of our critical attenuation, of our “frames of reference”, are as manifold as the contexts we find ourselves in. Pulling into the parking lot of a titty-bar you feel a shift-of-focus. A security guard fastens a wristband as you enter a music festival and you feel another. So too with attending a high-school play, staring at graffiti on a freeway overpass or eavesdropping on drunken regulars in a dive bar. Maybe the frame is the point...

Back to gilded borders though; the one that once separated highbrow from lowbrow art has been well-breached and eroded in the 30 years since my conversation with Maurice. The last time I picked up Artforum, it was 90% glossy advertisements peppered with bone-dry reviews of established-gallery shows. Nowadays I'm more likely to buy one of the upstart “outsider” publications, Juxtapoz or Hi-Fructose, because they provide more photo-documentation of more-relevant art. But while the reviews are erudite and informative and well-edited, they can't help but be hamstrung by the laissez-faire mission of the magazine...the very premise of “inclusion” leaves you, to some extent, critically toothless.

That's an observation, not an indictment. Because the explosion of digital media and the populist dissemination of artwork has rendered many of the old debates moot. The frame is too-distracted now to play tyrant, and quite indifferent to my “liberation”. And the critical edicts handed down by the learned gatekeepers of yore seem quaint and empty as baroque, abandoned, movie-houses. I do have a strange (perverse?) pang of nostalgia for the old conceptual conflicts though. Possibly because it felt like everything was important then. Because arguments that didn't really matter, somehow mattered to me.

(Those puppet-jousts in a gossamer kingdom...those tempests in a fur-lined teacup.)

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