For an essayist and fishing enthusiast, popular U of U writing professor Maximilian Werner’s didn’t do badly with Crooked Creek, his first novel. Nominated for the Utah Book Award, it went up against In This Light, a collection of short stories by Melanie Rae Thon, his colleague at the U and one of Utah’s more distinguished living authors. That two such worthy books came along in time to compete with each other speaks to the strength of the local writing community at a time when literature itself is said to be in crisis. Placing Werner’s secular worldview beside Thon’s more spiritual vision also brought his view of life into high relief. It’s no secret that Utah has been a place of insiders and outsiders since its beginnings a century and a half ago, but it’ never been entirely clear who fits in which group. If Crooked Creek shows a diverse immigrant population that began winnowing itself from the beginning, Gravity Hill, Werner’s new memoir, reveals that the fault line cuts deeper, while running in more and different directions, than the simplistic, popular image would have us believe.

To chart so many fractures requires a variety of maps, or in this case, voices. Werner opens, closes, and paces Gravity Hill in the present, when he is a husband, father, and as fully enrolled in those tasks as any conventional family advocate. In those moments, his musings are literate and philosophical: ‘The sound of parenthood is the sigh,’ he reflects while attending a sleepless baby. But the timeline is complex, drawn by the gravity of memory to return in seemingly desultory fashion to those moments that, if not exactly traumatic, are troubling: moments he would as soon forget, but cannot. The voice shifts with the narrator’s age, adopting a conversational tone appropriate to a teenager. At times demotic, soaring, elegiac, street, the shift can be disorienting, as the audible surface of this elegant man-of-letters in his forties suddenly dissolves and the 16-year-old horny, thirsty boy steps forward to continue his story, frequently needing to prove himself by cursing in a rough, but finally harmless way. Rude speech is accompanied by direct description of carnal acts, reproof to anyone who thinks vague, allusive writing is somehow ‘poetic’ when, in reality, it is only vague and allusive.

Any man who writes a memoir must have in mind his background and education, how and perhaps why he came to some place in time. Maximilian Werner’s Gravity Hill offers such a record, tuned to the precise details of adolescence in Utah, though complete with excursions to distant places that variegate his experience. The book is also, in keeping with recent trends in memoir, a potentially universal, possibly inspirational tale of one young man’s descent into self-medication and substance abuse, followed by, if not the secret of his recovery, at least the facts of his survival. But there is something larger here: something that makes this book indispensable for anyone in Utah who is not LDS, and equally so for anyone who is. Gravity Hill may well be the first book to recollect in tranquility, without an agenda, the ongoing encounter between two peoples who still refer to each other by incidentally disparaging names: Mormons and Gentiles. Werner tells of living alongside a powerful yet defensive group of people he views neither as angels nor demons, but mostly as his neighbors. This may be the first time two groups who demonize each other in print and speech, though mildly by world standards, will see depicted how they behave together in actual practice.

But first, Max Werner is a boy from a broken home, one of two sons and a daughter being raised by their mother in the suburban towns of Salt Lake, loosely scattered around a basin closed in by rugged mountains and harsh deserts, where secrets are hard to keep and the great western ethic, the right to be left alone, long ago succumbed to the fundamentalist practice of minding one another’s business. Culture, as he discovers when he encounters ways different from his own, doesn’t change people, nor really form them. What culture does is preserve the enduring—if not just intractable—values of a group. What recent immigrants to Utah like Werner find themselves facing is not a community created by revelation. In fact, as he points out, the Saints’ command of theology looks shaky to non-believers, and the LDS Church plays no direct part in Gravity Hill. What young Werner finds instead is a strongly bonded, distinctively rural culture that is conservative in the old-fashioned sense: like common folk the world over, Latter Day Saints are devoted to maintaining the norms and mores that have preserved them far longer than the relatively brief history of their church. Having survived the enclosures of their hereditary lands, migration into the industrial revolution, and captivation in the urban slums of Europe, these pilgrims came to Zion in a desperate gamble to recover their own lost paradise. The last thing they wanted was to share it with the kind of losers they had barely escaped becoming themselves.

Young Max arrives on the scene with troubles of his own. His original family was not only broken, but the shards were twisted in ways that makes them difficult to see clearly. What connected his parents remains a mystery: his early memories find them already estranged, and most of his connection with his father occurs while shuttling back and forth between his mother’s domain in Utah and his father’s haunts in New York. Visiting his father brings him to Fire Island, revealed in some of the book’s most evocative and compelling passages: scenes too brief to satisfy the curious, but too suggestive for more cautious readers. Returning to his high school years in Salt Lake, he reveals himself to have been, like so many talented but poorly-directed youth, an indifferent student. The contrast between him and the future missionaries he encounter daily is at its strongest here: Werner and his friends fecklessly adrift, the young saints certain and self-confident. This is surely not where Gravity Hill will make trouble between Werner and his neighbors. What may cause offense is his insistence that adolescence, though a moveable feast, is none the less inescapable: that those assured young men and women on their way to elaborate weddings and large families are, beneath a cosmetic projection, just as much its creatures as are his friends. The desperate desire of returning missionaries to get married, an endlessly celebrated source of ribald humor in their community, may be disguised, but is no different in his eyes from the ceaseless cruising for sexual opportunities among their unchurched peers. Consider Faux, caught in conflict between her church and her peers, including an eager suitor Max considers hopeless:

Faux had reassessed and reasserted her commitment to all things Mormon. All her life she had been a tough crack to nut, and by God she would be so again. Thus there would be no more spreading of legs and she would surround herself with her own kind: the beautiful and visibly uncomplicated Mormon boys and girls. Of course Sport was not privy to any of this knowledge, and even if he were it would not have stopped him because it has never stopped anyone. He was a bee at work in the cherry blossoms.

If sexuality is the engine that drives Werner’s peers no matter their social standing, cars offer them a hazardous, demonstrably life-threatening independence. What cars don’t provide is that staple of earlier generations, the mobile bedroom. Among his friends, a room is never that hard to borrow. The draw for the rootless is Gravity Hill, a favorite spot to take a date or just to hang out. Here, in their four-wheel parlors, beneath the luminous State Capitol, yet on the edge of wilderness, they drink and talk—or more often, drink and sit silent—connect and separate again, and try to create the community that failed them in their home lives. The title refers to a section of road where an optical illusion makes a coasting car seem to accelerate uphill. Here Gravity Hill becomes a sublime metaphor, one that Werner sets up but does not belabor, for the way young adult men and women appear to be accelerating as they reach for marriage, families of their own, careers, and an apotheosis of accomplishment. The truth, of course, visible from some topographically objective vantage point, is that their primes are already past. Most, in reality, are actually rolling down into depths where they will be caught as if by gravity, trapped for the duration of life. Nor is there any reason to believe that, despite the superficial differences, the fate of the faithful will ultimately be any different.

When the warmish wind died we would look up again and gaze to the south, as if we expected to see something other than the black shapes of the rising mountains. We could see Bay and Brody silhouetted against the northern sky and their bodies were stiff and serious. Bay’s arms were folded. I think everyone knew they wouldn’t last. It wasn’t just them, though. We all had potential, but we lost most of it to the drugs and booze and to the resulting mistakes, which made me feel like I was always in the hole. Add that to the normal difficulty of interacting with other humans, and how any of us got and stayed together with anyone could be counted as one of life’s mysteries.

And yet some of them, as Maximilian Werner proves here, will come together and make it work. The flip side of young Werner’s insistence that his LDS classmates are just as addled by the onset of sex and mature society is his tacit admission that they had the right answer all along: sex within a union isn’t just necessary for successful reproduction; it provides the best template for living as well. Utah confounds outsiders, who don’t expect to find pre-Civil War values still practiced by politicians, financiers, civic leaders, intellectuals, teachers, editors, publishers, and writers of serious literature. But surely some of them will be just as bewildered to find the lost, intoxicated teen-ager they wrote off now representing them in a bid for earthly eternity. Gravity Hill argues no one has a patent on the truth, not insiders any more than the excluded, and nothing is what it looks like on TV. Werner promises no external help. He sees the lie that no one is ever tested beyond endurance for what it is. If the view is bleak, it’s one well-rooted in observable, and closely-observed, matters of fact.

On the left, the cover art for Gravity Hill, ‘Natural History,’ was painted for the book by Bradford Overton, copyright 2012. On the right, the author.

Artworks can make visible the success of their makers, but to understand the struggles that produced them, and so the triumph they represented, something more is needed. Paul Cézanne was an artist who mastered his chops long before he was accepted by the gatekeepers, and the stories of his masterworks, and the fates that befell them, often prove powerfully moving. His ‘Portrait of the painter Achilles Emperaire,’ an image that, once seen, stays in the mind, expressed an abiding affection for a friend and fellow-worker, but its resemblance—possibly accidental, perhaps not—to a political scandal of the day consigned it to rejection and obscurity until long after both men were dead. Alex Danchev tells this story and many more in ‘Cézanne, A Life,’ a book that adroitly balances exhaustive documentation with narrative vitality and deeply-felt sympathy.

Cezanne’s portrait of his close friend, the painter Achille Emperaire, was completed in 1868

History tells us more about Paul Cézanne than it does about Shakespeare, the person whose significance as artist is so often invoked when discussing the ground-breaking painter. Yet in the years since Cézanne’s death just over a century ago, interest in the art maker has become as suspect as the virtue of beauty—an irrelevant and problematic distraction that shouldn’t be allowed to color responses to the works themselves. Still, the effort goes on to sort through the legends that grew up in the vacuum of hard evidence for either man. Alex Danchev has seemingly tracked down not only every qualified fact about his subject, but freshly translated every letter written by or to the artist, including some that were never sent. He’s also catalogued comments by relevant artists, critics, poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and even politicians. While it’s not true that the mundane events of Cézanne’s life get lost in all this data, the narrative thread often pops up unexpectedly from amid long summaries of sometimes contemporary, sometimes anachronistic observations and comments. In such moments, life events resemble so many painted under-painted highlights, or the notorious ‘empty’ spots Cézanne left open to let paper or canvas show through. This resemblance, between the writing and the art it presents, brings readers closer to the painter as art maker than seemed possible for the reclusive and famously irascible Cézanne.

Among the works Cezanne is best known for are many still-life paintings. Objects in them often appear in other paintings, as Cezanne reused his materials and subjects.

The ideal approach to Cézanne is through his painting, but few in his audience have the skills to do so directly. Instead, we know him through the decidedly partisan account that makes up recent art history, according to which modern painting evolved through a single line, discernible only in hindsight. Thus a brief decade of impressionism broke the stranglehold of academic art, followed by a post-impressionist reaction that was led by Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne, among others. Yet Cézanne, who never met Van Gogh and was deeply offended by Gauguin, found his closest friend, ally, and influence in Pissarro. As this book shows, they all considered themselves at one time to be impressionists, and differed as much as anyone in their opinions of each other. Of course history is more art than science, and historians use many tools to blend and smooth the welter of irreconcilable data they confront—just as most painters do to unify the surface of their canvas. As biographer, Danchev moves in the other direction—from the general era to the specific individual—and restores details the historian must omit to make events fit the desired shape. His previous biography, of George Braque, was called a junk house of notes by one reviewer, and at times he seems to have done too well the task of giving the notoriously self-mystifying Cézanne back the thickets and brambles of his strange life. Yet as Danchev’s somewhat desultory campaign demolishes one myth after another about his character and how he painted, there gradually emerges a far more approachable figure, more convincingly depicted. Once-inexplicable mysteries give up at least some of their secrets. The woman who was his model, companion, the mother of his son, and eventually his wife emerges from the disparaging image created by her natural enemies and begins to display the positive, even intriguing traits he saw in her. The fate of his friendship with Emile Zola similarly shrugs off decades of misinterpretation, jealousy on more than one part yielding to the authentic, heart-breaking consequences on love of life’s accidents.

Among the unusual subjects Cezanne favored in his still-life works were human skulls.

In the end, Cézanne became convinced he came too soon, that he belonged not in his generation, but more properly among the young painters who made the pilgrimage to meet him in the last decade of his life. But he was wrong. In his artistic project, which he could never put in words, and which Danchev pursues through its influence on some of the great minds of the subsequent century, he anticipated aesthetic and scientific discoveries still working their way through human understanding, and others still being made. He overthrew the primacy of drawing before the application of color, undermined the five hundred-year tradition of linear perspective, and brought to the fore the equivalence of painting to any other form of direct perception:

Typically, Cézanne is not daubing, but LOOKING. In (poet Rainer Maria) Rilke’s parlance, he is stamping the visible into himself . . . . as the photographs show, he was always intensely present, his eyes glued to a tree trunk or a lump of earth, as he put it. (338)

At the core of the Cézannian revolution is a decisive shift in the emphasis of observation, from the description of the thing apprehended to the process of apprehension itself. Cézanne insisted that he painted things as they are, for what they are, as he saw them. The issue is what he saw—how he saw. ‘He never wanted to let the logic of the painting take precedence over the continuity of perception,’ argued (artist and critic) John Berger: ‘after each brushstroke he had to re-establish his innocence as perceiver.’ But perceptual innocence was a chimera. Cézanne’s late painting testifies to his recognition that fanatic attentiveness did not yield any greater clarity or immediacy. On the contrary, long fixation led to perceptual disintegration. The harder he looked, the more he became aware of dispersion, dissolution, destabilization . . . doubt. After 1900, as (Lawrence) Gowing noted, ‘separable physical objects in Cézanne’s work increasingly merge into the flux of color.’ (339)

Cezanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire dozens of times.

And of course what a painter discovered at the dawn of the twentieth century must also be true for a biographer working at the dawn of the twenty-first. Credit, then, to Alex Danchev, in whose manageably-sized tome (373 pages, plus a wealth of illustrations in color and b&w and, for those so inclined, excellent notes and sources) Paul Cézanne does not disintegrate, but like the subjects of his paintings, becomes more solid, more real, and his image more expressive of nature. Until today, no one knows for sure how Cézanne was able to capture fragmentary reality without losing its materiality in the process. No words can describe or explain it, but ‘Cézanne, A Life’ does show how it’s done.

Cezanne’s last studio, a place of pilgrimage for his fellow artists while he lived, and for art lovers ever since.

It’s a cliche that most of us take for granted: light is the medium that enables us to see. In the dark we must grope; with light we can touch a thing, so to speak, from a distance. But light doesn’t always permit sight; in fact, often light prevents us from seeing. Take glare, for example. When the source of light is at a certain angle to the eye, glare near an object can effectively render it invisible. Or dapple, the glinting of light reflected off moving water that dazzles eye and mind. And speaking of water, what about when air bubbles or particles cause water to fill with light, until seeing through it becomes impossible? One way of thinking about Thea Schrack’s paintings, currently at the Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, is that in them she shows how light can simultaneously reveal the world and prevent seeing it clearly.

'Time Rushing By III' Encaustic photograph by Thea Schrack. Click to see more of her work.

Schrack works primarily as a photographer, evidently producing commercial images in addition to regular exhibitions and special projects, such as capturing how the Czech Republic looked just after the expulsion of the Communist regime. Yet while recording all those surfaces, she may have become dissatisfied with the deceptive way the camera depicts the three-dimensional reality of light, leading her to cover certain photos with encaustic medium, usually a mixture of wax and resin. The prints she treats in this way are large enough to permit viewing them from across the room, at which point they look as their thumbnail copies do here: like conventional, albeit expertly produced pictures of bodies of water. But viewing at a distance is only one option. Most audiences will come up close, and it’s at arm’s length that they begin to show the reality from which we routinely build our notions, as opposed to our actual experiences, of the world around us.

Of course Schrack begins with photographs she has taken deliberately. In the current series, numbered iterations sharing the title ‘Time Rushing By,’ those photographs are all of streams or rivers bordered by trees and lush shrubbery, yet framed to include only moving water, with the presence of foliage outside the frame implied by reflections and shadows on its surface. The translucence of the wax layer, filled with light, reduces the contrast between what lies under the water’s surface, what’s on the surface, and what is reflected from above, so that they can easily become confused. Nor was that information invariably unambiguous to begin with: rather, interaction of moving water with light streaming through presumed openings on the invisible far shore conspire to produce an extravagance of visual information. Lacking cues or patterns with which to generalize the image, we become lost in pure sensation. Only by backing away can we reduce the sheer quantity of detail and begin to superimpose the patterns that normally allow us to ‘see‘ predictable objects. Faced with this challenge in the wild, we might squint to achieve a similar effect.

Of course Thea Schrack’s point isn’t just to teach a lesson in vision. She also wants her audience to see the places she’s photographed—the streams and their courses—more for what they really are: wild places we misjudge when we assume we know them. And she wants to remind us that while rushing water may be a workable allegory of passing time, time is also passing for the river, and for all the environment. Scientists are now all but convinced that water used to flow on Mars, the red desert planet. The events in Schrack’s encaustic photographs—virtually all of them—are rare, perhaps unique in the universe, and so may be the self-aware consciousness that allows us to stop, witness, and contemplate them.

Also on view at Julie Nester Gallery are paintings by Robert Denevan, whose approach contrasts strongly with Schrack’s. Where Schrack’s bodies of water are, at bottom, photographs of real places that we gaze into to see something timeless, Denevan’s horizontal bands of textured color represent no actual thing, but encourage us to find in them suggestions of certain places: specifically, evocations of the littoral—the zone of the planet’s surface where tidal waters border on solid ground, creating a realm that belongs permanently to neither. Before these panoramas we feel we are hovering over water, looking toward a shore that, instead of a dramatic upthrust of enduring rock, looks flat and seems on the verge of disappearing under the relentless erosion of the tides. Estuaries and deltas come to mind, as do marshes and mats of vegetation that sometimes form entire living islands. Either way, it’s important to keep in mind that these are ‘concrete’ images: ones we create in our minds, based on visual hints assembled from astute color applications, rather than abstracted from an actual scene.

'Lakes Panoramic' -- mixed-media on steel by Robin Denevan. Click to see additional works

At this point, it is worthwhile reviewing one of the themes of The Post. Ongoing studies of human vision points to the conclusion that little of what we encounter actually looks like what we believe we see. The sights that form in our minds are at best a compromise between what actually lies before our eyes at a given moment and what we have already experienced, and therefore expect to encounter again. In reality, the process of seeing is almost always far more complex even than that. In the case of landscapes like these, the eye encounters as least three horizontal bands that together cover the range of normal materials: a gas, a solid, and a liquid. Our brains project the sky onto an imaginary dome, envision the land as a receding plane, and give the water both surface and depth. These operations become so habitual that we do them even when the cues are really just horizontal bands of color. Doing this is physiologically pleasant enough that we do it even when we don’t have to. Then, depending on the circumstances, either we credit ourselves with accurate perception or vivid imagination. In reality, neither can be an isolated case of one or the other: perceiving requires imagination and imagining depends of a lifetime’s actual experience. Denevan’s achievement is to make his cues so convincing that we credit him for our share of the work as well as his.

A close-up shows Denevan's paint attaching to the surface as it seems to break apart

Normally, a painter’s technique only matters at the level where it makes an expressive difference. Singer Sargent scrubs paint across a figure in a way that seems haphazard up close, but seen from eight feet away exactly captures the look of light reflected off silk. It’s of some interest in itself, but becomes important in contrast to the drops of white paint that Vermeer uses to suggest how reflections look when they come from a light source behind the subject, rather than behind the viewer. Vermeer’s placing of his subjects between the light source and his easel parallels Schrack’s camera technique, of course, while Denevan images, which have no source in the real world, also have neither explicit nor implicit light sources. Instead, his landscapes glow with what we take for the diffuse light of early morning or late afternoon.

Of course I don’t read minds, and my assertion that Denevan starts with how paint behaves, rather than a specific landscape he wants to depict, is a conclusion based on the look of the finished paintings. A local arts writer recently compared the look of these paintings to the effect of paint-remover on bands of paint. What he actually wrote was that the texture of Denevan’s paint resembles the way paint breaks up during chemical dissolution. Yet while giving a good mental picture of something hard to see except in person, this description suggests a painting process that is almost certainly the reverse of how they are actually made. Modern high performance paints often come in parts that must be accurately mixed during application in order to perform as intended. It appears that Denevan has experimented with alternatives to the rigorous, ‘correct’ application of such paints, bringing them to a far more demanding point where they are on the verge of failing while producing effects far more interesting from his point of view. By capturing paint as its components solidity for the first time, Denevan captures the look of paint decomposing—just as his images suggest the rotating interaction of earth’s elements in the ceaseless erosion and deposition of land by water, setting up the contrast that gives both their meanings to us.

Such processes demands from an artist more skill and more daring than traditional tools and materials, but the luminous and evocative results cannot reasonably be achieved by any more cautious or conventional approach. Long before there was an ‘avant-garde,’ the best artists were always on the edge of what we collectively can do to turn materials into visions. Whether it’s adding a layer of wax to a photograph or deliberately pushing paint to the limits of performance, artists seek new means in order to capture new experiences. The Julie Nester Gallery features such cutting-edge and experimental techniques.

The recent public airing of the unsettling story that Vincent van Gogh may have been murdered by a pair of teenaged punks unleashed speculation about what may have happened on that day 120 years ago, but beyond that to what one of the world’s best-known artists might have done had he lived beyond his brief 37 years, of which he was able to spend less than ten painting. For instance, might the restless painter have journeyed to the Americas, as so many painters did in those years? How could the man who used his brush to analyze the complex landscapes of southern France—so alive with color, contrast, and life—not have been moved to a similar effort when confronted by the earth’s skeleton, laid bare in the desert landscape of the Great Southwest?

We’ll never know, of course. But the question isn’t a bad starting point for viewing the Redrock Landscapes of Cori Redstone. Redstone has been a fixture on the Utah scene since 2003, during which time she has explored not only the subject matter and techniques of art making, but her capacity as an activist to influence events beyond her studio and the gallery. The depth of her interest in, and commitment to, public affairs, in particular environmental issues, parallels her evident desire to pierce the surface of appearances in her art and explore the connection between how things look and how they behave. A comment frequently heard among more aware members of the local audience is that she is still searching for a mature style, but careful examination of her archive proves otherwise. The visible differences between her treatment of her various subjects—trees and flowers, human figures, urban neighborhoods, and now the desert landscape—are consistent over time and more accurately seen as related to what she finds worth noticing about each.

How Redstone’s aesthetic interests build on those of the Post-Impressionists first became apparent about four years ago, in a series of botanical paintings—garden flowers and trees—that (to use a current idiom) ‘channeled,’ rather than copied, the look of of van Gogh. It’s an odd, rarely noted fact that where the Post-Impressionists are concerned, popular appreciation directly contradicts historical influence. Picasso and his peers worshipped Cezanne’s method of building likenesses from basic forms, while Gauguin’s emotional color cues liberated the Fauves and Expressionists. Seurat had so little impact on his fellow painters that today there isn’t a single major work of his in France, while fans flock to Chicago to stand before what they like to call ‘Sunday in the Park With George.’ And while by any meaningful measure, from name recognition to prices paid at auction, Van Gogh is the most successful painter ever, few artists have tried to further the research his death interrupted.

'Plain Near Auvers,' Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Click to compare 'Castel Vallery Group' by Cori Redstone

There are multiple examples of this process at Charley Hafen Gallery, which thanks to Hafen and his curator, Arrahwanna Thomsen, is quickly emerging as one of the best places in town to get an intimate view of work that would quickly lose its virtue in some of the larger galleries. Redstone is also known for less exotic (if no less telling) landscapes, like her view of the Capitol or the various neighborhood markets she’s captured. Particularly worth pursuing are her views of the environmental movement, including the stunning ‘Grand Palace of Consumerism,’ which brings her Gauguin-inspired sense of bold color together with the Japanese sensibility so essential to late 19th (AND late 20th) century art to produce a literally brilliant caution against the sensory manipulations of Late Capitalism. For those who have had enough of hair-splitting landscapes by artists desperate to find ever more subtle ways to distinguish their craggy mesa from the previous one, or who just want to cleanse their visual palates in order to once again taste the nuances, this painter is highly recommended.

Cori Redstone will be at Charley Hafen until November 14th.

NOTE: This is not a special effect. This is a straight video, and what  you will see is exactly what you would have seen if you had been there.

One of the battles that artists have had to fight, first with themselves and then with their audience, is the whole question of what it means to ‘look like’ something. Ever since artists began to abandon the search to duplicate optical appearances, the argument about ‘realistic’ or ‘representative’ art has only grown sharper. It’s not hard to show that for most viewers, abstract art is actually much easier to interpret accurately . . . yet we constantly hear abstract art works disparaged and ones that use traditional strategies called superior, even when they don’t — can’t — mean anything to the viewer who is evaluating them. One thing we could stand to come to an agreement about is what these qualities actually mean, and why we respond in the many valid ways we do. The answer will not come from philosophy or aesthetics, apparently: they can only come from science.

We all know what memorials for great men look like. Part of what motivates ambitious lives is the hope of that final prize: a statue in a public place, a white marble structure to keep memory alive. But beyond a tombstone, if that, what kind of memorial can the average person, someone whose accomplishments are not celebrated, expect?

There’s a technical term we art historians use: demotic art. From the same root as ‘democracy,’ in the beginning it meant art of the people, as opposed to, say, the art of the church or that encouraged by the wealthier classes. When Dave Hickey talks about the Rolling Stones being among the more important artists of our time, and rock music a characteristic art of our time, I think demotic art is what he has in mind.

Every so often, a demotic art form goes viral and begins to sweep the land. Graffiti has been around so long now that it may be hard to believe that it was once such a movement. But it was. Once upon a time, travelers wrote their names in exotic places. Places like the pyramids yield centuries-old names, some of them famous. A few decades ago, graffiti acquired more universal content:

‘God is dead. —Nietzsche,’ appeared on a wall. Later, a scrawled reply:
‘Nietzsche is dead. —God.’

More recently, names have resumed their ancient primacy among graffiti. We’ve all lived through part of the change and growth, though anyone who wasn’t looking for it might have overlooked it. During the Great Depression, Hobos had writing on fences and walls all to themselves, and developed an elaborate code to leave signals for each other—signals that most people didn’t notice because there was no reason to look for messages scrawled in public places. They extended this to writing on boxcars, and for three-quarters of a century their names, usually in chalk, were about the only thing seen written on trains. Then the Graffiti artists of New York started elaborately painting the subway trains, and it spread, and now it’s rare to see a rail car on a siding anywhere in the United States that hasn’t been spray painted.

The residents of Prague and regular visitors got to see this in a different light. The Soviet occupation kept history and free enterprise at bay for almost half a century, so that immediately after the they left the city was devoid not only of graffiti, but of the advertising plastered on the public sphere that is a ubiquitous fact in the ‘free’ world. Then the images of products came, and on their heels painted tags started appearing on architectural gems that had survived largely unchanged from the Renaissance.

But Graffiti is isn’t the only example. In the 90s, someone thought to paint ‘shadows’ of pedestrians on sidewalks in memory of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki whose silhouettes, left by the concrete-bleaching light of the atomic bomb, were all that remained after they were vaporized in August of 1945. I remember reading about these stenciled acts of vandalism, part memorial and part forward-looking protest, and how they were spreading and how exciting it was when they began showing up on my local streets. Flash Mobs are a more recent example, one clearly related to a new form of immortality: the ability of an internet video to say to the world, ‘I was here.’ Show of hands: who’s heard of Flash Mobs or even seen some on YouTube and thought, “That would be cool if it happened here”? Some art fads remain local—probably in several separate locales, while others go around the world.

One viral art movement that I heard about, but never wanted to see in person, is the Ghost Bicycle. Ghost Bikes are real bikes painted white and located as permanently as practical alongside a roadway. Each is a memorial to a cyclist who died nearby, killed while riding, almost always struck by a motor vehicle. Like the atomic bomb shadows, they serve a double purpose: to memorialize the victim and to provide a warning to both drivers and riders, a reminder of what’s at stake.

I heard about Brynn Barton within hours of her death, and I recognized the intersection where she was killed, two blocks from where I’d lived until just three months earlier. Yet every time I passed that corner, where I used to walk almost daily, even though I was always aware of what had happened, I must have unconsciously fixed my gaze ahead. Traffic on East Seventh during rush hour routinely reaches speeds of 60 mph, punctuated by displays of adrenaline-fueled aggression. It’s a cliche to point out that commuters are in such a hurry to get to work or home that they forget there is no guarantee they’ll get there at all. But it’s different if you’re in a car, rather than a bicycle. The driver who killed Brynn Barton was in no danger. Not before the accident. There is no satisfaction whatsoever in knowing that the hit-and-run driver’s peril only began after the accident, or that it will never stop.

I didn’t know Brynn Barton, but I’m pretty sure most of those who did are not interested in what happens to her killer. I get that sense from the unmistakeable evidence she left behind. Her memories in the minds of her friends radiate a feeling that she was simply more alive, put more into living and got more out of it, than the average person. Her visits to foreign countries, not as a tourist but as a citizen, are echoed by the praise her fellow health care providers heap on her name. She was the kind of person whose absence doesn’t seem any less of a loss over time. So I wasn’t surprised when I finally made the effort to look, that someone had placed a white bicycle on her corner.

Brynn’s ghost bicycle isn’t her only monument. Across the street, the city has put up a sign reminding drivers to share the road. It’s a curious avoidance of responsibility for the circumstances that make riding so dangerous here. A decision was made before many of the local streets were laid down to channel traffic away from neighborhoods and onto a few, consequently very busy streets. Quiet, residential streets are kept that way by making them into pockets that have have few inlets or outlets. As a consequence, it’s difficult or impossible to navigate from most places to most other places without using the thoroughfares that everyone else is using. I’m an art critic, not a city planner, but I can see the value of the goal our city set so long ago. But what about those citizens who still want to get around, but would rather not walk or cycle alongside freeway traffic squeezed onto common streets? The Ghost Bicycle doesn’t just recall a lone rider: it also memorializes a life that we might have lived where we didn’t give almost all the space to our cars.

The elder statesmen who envisioned and built our cities have their large, bronze and stone monuments in the parks. There are always costs connected with their accomplishments, but their monuments don’t speak of guilt, displaying instead the need of the many to believe in their greatness, and in greatness itself. Such display often include text that says We Will Never Forget. But we do, and have to be reminded. On the other hand, we may find that it is the intimate memorial, not the one that calls for ceremony but the one that allows a feeling of direct connection between what we asked to remember and our own lives, that truly matters.

A wren, happy, tail into the wind, Her song trembling the twigs and small branches. ('Elegy for Jane, my student thrown by a horse' by Theodore Roethke. )

It’s pretty clear that summer has given way to fall, and winter can’t be far behind. The students who just recently returned to school will be donning raincoats, galoshes, umbrellas, and once in the classroom will gaze at the windows, watching the eternal race of raindrops to be the first one down the glass. In other news, the art world, which also takes the summer off, has resumed its schedule of exhibitions and social gatherings. Ah, but does anyone want to go out in this weather, slog across town, fighting not only traffic but sudden desert inundations and downtown flash floods, then fight the parking battle only to splash through puddles and arrive dripping at a gallery that will probably be full of dark, dreary canvases—with beige walls awash in brown washes and black splashes? Who needs the imaginative expression of angst when we have so much of the real thing, and not just facing us today or tomorrow, but stretching out ahead for months?

One alternative that always works for me is a visit to Art Access, across the street from the old Rio terminal. The mission of Art Access is to make art accessible to everyone, regardless of physical capacity. Their staff finds whatever is necessary to overcome any limitations that might prevent an individual with a desire for self-expression in art from doing so. It’s angelic work, and the good feelings that come from doing well by doing good infect first the staff, then the audience that frequents the gallery. A splendid example of how this pays off has been on view in the back gallery this month. Its walls are all-but covered with richly-colored pastel drawings by Brian Bean. Art exhibitions usually have a theme: something that ties all the works sharing a space together. Some themes have to do with subject matter, others with content, or influence, or any of the other metrics by which eye, mind, and heart measure art works. Some themes are material, like the use here of pastels. But the true guiding spirit of Brian Bean’s gallery full of drawings is twofold: first, he loves drawing, a fact he makes no bones about and that is immediately obvious. The other is that every drawing was done on a ‘canvas’ that the artist gets for free, and that we all have a lot of experience with. He’s drawn them on brown paper shopping bags.

As anyone who’s ever been to an artist’s supply store knows, good art materials are expensive. Durable canvas or paper and bright colors that won’t fade don’t come cheap. One of the pressures on an artist like Bean is the need to match his ideas and execution to the precious materials he needs in order to be sure his expression lives up to the quality of those ideas and execution. (Did someone say ‘vicious circle?’) So maybe part of the reason these drawings come across so immediately and with such vibrancy and impact is that they were done in the absence of intimidating expectations. As Bean says, he could always get more bags to work on. As for ideas, the terror of the blank page has stopped many would-be artists from proceeding, but here there was always something to respond to, as a quick review will show. Some of the bags had handles, other notches or serrated edges. There were folds, and in the case of several winning ‘series’ of related drawings, logos of the stores they came from. There are some with a name and others with a design. Part of the fun is seeing how the artist used these as the stimulus for free associations that spin off one to the next.

Most people who work hard at what they do appreciate the occasional task that seems almost not to need doing. That’s true here. There is nothing for a critic to do; Brian Bean’s love of making faces, of designing birds whose streamlined postures say ‘flight’ and fish that conjure underwater dragons, and in general of playing with his ability to make marks the way a musician might noodle on an instrument just to see what comes out, is infectious good fun. He takes us back to the roots of art, to the pleasure of seeing round objects on flat surfaces and exaggerating to tell the truth that makes doodling and cartooning eternally popular, but that too often gets lost in the labyrinth of art as competitive activity. Brian Bean competes only with himself here, and it’s pretty obvious that no matter how it turns out, he wins. And so do we.

No mere half-dozen images can begin to convey the wealth of Brian Bean's visual imagination, but the selection here might convey a clue. All images copyright 2011 by Brian Bean.