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The Ordinary Truth, a novel by Jana Richman

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In a tense moment near the climax of The Ordinary Truth, a woman in her seventies wades across a rocky creek in a remote forest in the dark of night. As she feels her way, her senses heightened by danger, she conjures for readers the feeling of finding their way in the dark by the touch of their toes. They discover they can remember a tactile experience they consciously overlooked when it happened, preferring instead to navigate by sight. It’s a bravura scene, first for the contrast between her life-threatening struggle to cross a few feet of shallow water, and the ease with which her eager dog happily runs back and forth across the same distance. How did humans ever become so alienated from the natural world in which other animals remain so fully imbedded? At the same time, more subtly yet even more profoundly, the reader’s response proves that we can learn something and know it without conscious awareness, yet be capable of discovering its indelible trace—of ‘remembering’ it—later. This is important, because the very credibility of the story four narrators, from three generations of a single Nevada ranching family, are telling us hinges on just such a recovery into consciousness of an apparently lost memory.

The title of Jena Richman’s novel echoes that of another, very different book. Yet what concerns her here is not all that different from Al Gore’s motives for writing An Inconvenient Truth. Where Richman’s novel is thin on statistics with which to build an argument, her narrative account of the impact of climate change on those that live in the worst affected areas—human and animal alike—is an emotional prophecy of what lies in store for all of us. If twentieth century literature began with James Joyce arguing that art must transfix the viewer aesthetically and not evoke action, twenty-first century arts, literature included, have taken the opposite approach, seeking to galvanize opinions and modify behaviors. Both Richman and her publisher, Torrey House Press, vocally equate their literary and environmental concerns. Furthermore, in remarks made outside their books, both have argued that their concern for local issues, like drought in the west, should not be seen as parochial; if they don’t quite quote the writer’s advice, to ‘write what you know,’ they implicitly invoke the artist’s right to use local experiences to make universal points.

The Ordinary Truth tells the story of life in Eastern Nevada’s Spring Valley, where a handful of local ranchers live a good life of hard work, and have more in common with their peers across the line in south-west Utah than either has with the majority population dwelling in distant, crowded cities. Yet it opens not on the Baxter Ranch, its primary scene, but 300 miles away, on the 22nd floor of an office building in Las Vegas. The first narrator to introduce herself is Kate, prodigal daughter who left the ranch to attend college, studied natural resources, and now works for the Nevada Water Authority, charged with allocating too little water among too many thirsty citizens. The conflicts she faces are intractable, the justifications labyrinthine, the consequences life and death. Kate’s response is to flee, at least in her mind:

I’ll be sitting in my corner office–like I’m doing now–tinted glass from floor to ceiling, watching the sun drop behind the boxy horizon of Las Vegas skyscrapers and anticipating the neon dawn of evening, when for no good reason an image of my father will appear. A cloud, a shadow, a reflection, and there he is relaxed forward in the saddle atop Moots, his palomino gelding, arms crossed over the horn, looking amused to find himself surrounded by glass and steel. Moots stands lazily, his long-lashed lids drooping over soft brown eyes, one leg bent back so my father tilts slightly to the right. Dad holds an easy smile and seems as if he has something to tell me.

Kate is a forty-six year-old woman who, on first encounter, reveals she has never gotten over her first two loves: her father and horses. Both will prove central to the unfolding story, as will the wisdom and courage of Richman’s decision to tackle such clichés head-on. Understanding the conflict that underlies The Ordinary Truth will require getting beneath not only what readers may think they know about the dichotomies of modern life, but getting past the self-serving myths propagated by those who live it without curiosity or understanding. The alternative to Kate’s predicament is introduced by Leona, her mother’s brother’s wife:

Sometimes, when a spring day turns unexpectedly warm and the house feels like an unrinsed plastic milk jug lying in the sun, I set a lawn chair in the fine dirt under the budding cottonwoods on the west side a the working pens and ponder the perplexities a life.

‘Ona,’ as she is known, is a font of such colorfully metaphoric speech. An outsider who married in, she stands apart as the only modest member in a family of free spirits. She has also been in the best place to witness the consuming drama—a violent death and its consequences—that is constantly invoked but never addressed by the entire Jorgensen clan. Her husband, Nate, doesn’t get to tell his story, since all the narrators are women, but he’d probably say that anything he might add would already be covered by his wife and by Kate’s mother, his sister Nell:

A deeply rutted lane leans to the crick that flows between the alfalfa fields and the foot a the Snake Mountains. I caused the ruts by bringing the tractor up from the lower field in a rainstorm. I make a mental note to come out and grade the lane, but I’ll probably never get it done. I’m low on follow-through these days.

Nell’s no-nonsense way of taking things on herself exemplifies the way character can become fate. While Kate’s position with the water authority focuses their conflict, Nell’s iron will drives it. Their mother-daughter struggle is another timeless cliché, spilling over onto Cassie, Kate’s daughter, Nell’s grand-daughter, and the one narrator necessarily more concerned with the present and future than with the past. The bond between grandparents and grandchildren—so often easier than that between parents and children—has drawn Cassie deep into the chasm dividing Nell and Kate. Still in school, barely in her twenties, she combines a twenty-first century, post-Earth Day sense of urgency about her environmentally-threatened future with a fierce, idealistic determination to salvage what she can of her troubled family. She has a plan for doing this, and while it doesn’t work out as intended, her efforts broaden the scope of the novel before finally bringing about a resolution she could never have imagined.

In a sense, the rift that lies buried in the Jorgensen family’s history is an old-fashioned, literary symbol for something far more fragile that lies buried under their land: an ancient aquifer, a layer of spongy rock that has accumulated thousands of years of sparse local rainfall, into which distant populations have decided to drill. In the novel, and in real life, their plan to use this water in ways present supply cannot support awaits only completion of a 300-mile pipeline, already under construction. The politicians’ view this water as a resource that does no one any good where it is, and can give them a few years relief before a hoped-for, permanent solution comes along . . . or they leave office and someone else inherits the problem.

The error in the city-dweller’s thinking is clear to the ranchers of Omer Springs, who however lack the political means to resist. They owe their vulnerability to their own misjudgment, having been seduced away from supporting the liberal politicians who brought other agricultural regions the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Grand Coulee Dam, railroads, highways, price supports, free water, and so on. Listening to the ranchers of Spring Valley happily mock ‘the Liberals,’ older readers may recall how so many westerners traded their votes for the bait-and-switch promises of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a consortium of corporate-scale ranches, farms, and mines that spoke of wanting the same things the families wanted, but turned out to want it all for themselves.

Meanwhile, Kate’s idealistic hope that the pipeline will help, not hurt the situation, is mocked by the man in the next office, Matt, whom she’s known since both were graduate students in geology. She’s watched his idealism wither in the face of adult responsibility, his insight that ‘the growth of greed and gluttony skids to a halt when the water stops flowing’ gradually replaced by the despair of a bedrock recognition of human venality and self-serving thoughtlessness. ‘Most people,’ he characteristically observes, ‘hold tight to the belief that the origin of water is the faucet.’ Perhaps the only significant character in the book who is not fooling himself is Skinny, the Navajo hired hand who, in the book’s penultimate paragraph, packs his possessions into his truck and discreetly takes off. Nell’s comment, ‘Going home,’ almost aches with ambiguity.

In fact, it is the primary characteristic of all the major characters in The Ordinary Truth that they can spout wisdom and insight and proffer good advice to each other, and do so on almost every page, yet they cannot seem to see their own predicaments nearly so clearly or follow their own sage advice. Whether that annoys you or breaks your heart will depend on whether you view humanity as the victims, or the perpetrators, of their fate.

The Ordinary Truth, trade paperback ISBN: 978-1937226-06-0, published November 2012 by Torrey House Press, $16.95, 302 pages.

Michael Frayn’s novel, Skios, like all this writer’s works, transcends the humor that has made him so popular to deliver a scalpel-sharp vision of the human condition

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From the Renaissance on, the theme of history has been expansion: the Age of Exploration carrying adventurers and map-makers to every corner of the globe; the Reformation replacing a monolithic church with religious diversity; philosophy yielding to ideology; capitalism finding the price of everything while liberating us from obligation to its value. This expansion seemed on course to go on forever, like the post-Big Bang universe. But lately, one thing has begun to shrink. That would be us. Now every day brings news of scientific breakthroughs that diminish nature’s only witness. Our senses don’t reliably inform us, nor do we wait on them as we thought we did for the wherewithal to make choices. How could we ever really know each other, when we don’t know ourselves?

Michael Frayn is the poet laureate of this collapse. Or perhaps its ‘clown prince.’ A number of literary authors have taken on themes like the mind’s preference for a good story instead of reason, and how those stories are undermined by narrative unreliability. But no one else handles the impact of technology on the scaffolding of knowledge and the human desire for certainly with Frayn’s scathing humor. Most of us like to laugh; all of us need to. Some prefer to laugh at things falling about, while others require the witty insight that eviscerates appearances. Frayne offers it all in generous helpings.

Those who enjoy stage farce—mistaken doors and misplaced assignations—may remember Frayn from Noises Off, the best-known of his fifteen stage plays and the masterpiece and template of these juggling acts, in which any number of characters, plots, and subplots are kept suspended in chaotic misadventures. Those who prefer an art-historical context, whether Donna Leon’s Venice or Steve Martin’s Soho, might recall Headlong, one of Frayn’s ten novels, where he unspools a solution to one of the most exquisite mysteries in all art. It’s a mark of his skill that Frayn, almost alone among writers, is at the top of his class both on stage and between pages. In Skios, he’s merged his genres and their antithetical strengths. Readers watch the action play out before them as if on stage, but are privy to the characters’ intentions, confusion, and false certainties. More, we are granted insight into alternative possibilities: roads not taken that branch out even beyond the spaghetti bowl of conflicting motives and snarled misunderstandings.

Skios is a Greek island (not a collection of Swiss sports enthusiasts) to which the Fred Toppler Foundation invites intellectuals, culturati, magnates, and their various accompanists. It’s a stew that turns even the most hardened professional amateur on some level. The guest of honor at the Foundation’s annual gathering has gone astray, lost like checked luggage, and been replaced by someone hoping to escape his life’s consequences and start over. But old consequences trail him, and new ones defeat all efforts to sort out the confusion. Frayn’s x-ray vision lights the way down to the level of actual luggage, passports, and the indispensables we take for granted. But nothing can be taken for granted in Skios, amid an ensemble of faked ruins concealing a greater, un-ruined truth that could easily be lost to the foibles of those who set themselves up as its defenders.

In This Light is nominated for the Utah Book Award

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The cover of In This Light, Melanie Rae Thon's short story collection

In This Light, University of Utah English Professor and award-winning author Melanie Rae Thon’s most recent story collection, brings together works from a quarter century of her writing, thus becoming in effect a cross section of her artistic development. It begins with two of her early stories, which are accessible if almost too transparently structured. Four from her second collection show her in transition toward what emerges in three recent stories. Here the expository clarity of her early work disappears beneath what may strike readers as either an encompassing, spiritual vision, or an awesome rush of discursive language meant to conceal the impossibility of finding comfort in this world.

The opening story, Iona Moon, presents the author at her most accessible. Taking place during a few weeks either side of the end of high school—as nearly universal a transition as exists today—it follows the title character as she moves between two boys: the lying one who beds (or back seats) her before he abandons her, and the honest one who refuses to do either. Like all Thon’s stories, it’s rich in details of period and locale. From her mother Hannah, Iona has learned to treasure a farmer’s pre-dawn tasks, done ‘In the lightless peace God made before he made the day.’ Willy objects that her soiled shoes make his car smell like a barnyard, but then Willy has already learned to accept what he cannot change. His father, named after Andrew Johnson, the president who gave up what Abraham Lincoln had sacrificed so much for, wanted to be an attorney, but became a dentist out of necessity: one who argues like a lawyer, augmented by Biblical blacks and whites. Willy’s mother trained as a cosmetologist, but in tiny, claustrophobic White Falls also works for the undertaker, salvaging the ruined beauty of teenage children killed by the cars they thought would liberate them. Only Jay, the wealthy boy and so the least worthy of the three, may escape the slow death of high school aspirations. But if he is blessed by circumstances, we can be certain he will waste this advantage. All this is less schematic than it sounds, but by the end, Iona has glimpsed how the dignity of the tasks she cherishes will turn to unwelcome drudgery once the pattern sets and there are no more options. In a story full of rich language, one line is repeated: Hannah’s ‘I think I’ve got to have some pleasure,’ comes back to Iona, an apparition that threatens to break her heart.

From the beginning, Thon has avoided the narrow story, so like an obstacle course, in which the hero threads a narrative path among colorful characters, letting behavior reveal what it can about them. Instead, she tells us what we need to know, in stories that are intricately woven, dense with tangential inferences, like sparks that fly off to shed brief, revealing light on each person or predicament. Perhaps their foremost quality is resonance: the sympathetic vibration of one thing to another within the story, and beyond it, between them and us. From story to story, the number and richness of these centrifugal glimpses increases, gradually compressing events at the core beneath a mantle of emotional and spiritual significance, until in Tu B’Shvat, the apotheosis-like concluding story, a single event—the unexplained death by drowning of a young woman at a community exercise pool in Salt Lake City—becomes the catalyst that illuminates not only the dead woman’s family and her connection to the Holocaust, but the penetration, by hers and the narrator’s families, of a new world that continues to challenge and, ultimately, exalt them. Revelations tumble forth. Thon foregrounds two types of humanity: the mass of worthy, yet disenfranchised figures who suffer, and the sensitive few who come alive in the act of perceiving the inner lives of the voiceless, extending those lives by acts of memory. Eventually, the difference between remembering the dead and keeping them alive is lost, and what matters becomes a mystical property that moves between bodies like the breath they share, like the shadow of one falling on another.

Readers content to read modern stories written in the confident manner of Jane Austen or Mark Twain may want to stop reading now. Or we could talk about subjective, technical flaws not everyone objects to. Thon recounts dreams, a device never all that convincing, but one further discredited in the age of Cognitive Science. If she doesn’t actually use the second person, she comes close in her characters’ tendency to address the reader. She sometimes stretches her faith that aesthetics can justify even the most wasted life, until the surface of the story becomes translucent, her implied lessons showing through like the silhouette behind a screen. Her enthusiasts might counter that such cavils pale beside the sure-footed way Thon navigates stories far beyond her experience, transporting readers into the presence of, and even inside, strange beings who turn out to be more like us than seemed possible. Those who enjoy stories that spell out moral truths will appreciate Punishment, set before the civil war though told long after, in which Selina is saved from what befell her Irish maid—becoming her widowed father’s concubine—when Selina’s father chooses one of his slaves instead. Selina’s subsequently blighted life can be seen as the price of her deliverance, symbolic of the impact of sin on slave and master alike.

These are traditionally-structured stories of characters and the incidents that befall them. Beneath lie vast swaths of research. Write what you know was supposed to be the writer’s rule, but who ever knew enough? The vivid, convincing details of the lives of Thon’s cast of characters—Indians, commercial travelers, alcohol and drug abusers, sexual predators, thieves, drivers, doctors and nurses, hitchhikers, mothers, fathers, children becoming adults, corpses—come from sources the author tracked-down, and are brought to life by skillful refashioning and eloquence. She’s like the rare painter who works from well-learned facts of anatomy and perspective. Unlike in life, here events are never without meaning and significance. In Father Lover Deadman Dreamer, a father and son go hunting, but the man accidentally kills his own son, then in despair shoots but fails to kill himself. Ada, who calls herself a born liar like her mother, recalls the story again and again, an absurd event become meaningful as a gauge to measure herself against.

In this kind of fiction, events are compressed until lives of quiet desperation become full of drama, danger, loss. Especially loss. In such a book, if there is a beautiful child who makes one want to live, it is that child who will die. If a woman opens her home to forty wild children, living without families in the woods, she will go to jail for the crimes she commits in order to feed them. But we could argue all day whether such mechanisms enrich reading or spoil it. What seems more important, more decisive, is whether such literature really works for us today, or if we’re just using it to pass the time while we wait for the books—or is it the readers?—we need. For many of us now, the omniscient narrator no longer carries authority. The recent turn to the first person reflects inability to believe any more in the omniscient voice that knows everything. But while Thon tells stories in the first person, her stories don’t remain in their tellers’ possession. They slide up and down a scale of being as easily as the living trade identities with the dead. This book might only be possible in the US, where the majority of potential readers profess a belief in some version of a deity. Such readers might be moved, shaken to their cores, terrified, and finally elevated by In This Light. Humanists, on the other hand, and those acquainted with world literature, are as likely to be disappointed by coming so close to the reality of human nature, with its strengths and weaknesses so adroitly balanced, only to find the same answers that have already failed to satisfy.
Melanie Rae Thon’s In This Light, published by Gray Wolf Press, is a finalist for the 2011 Utah Book Award for Fiction. Winners of the Utah Book Award will be announced Friday, October 5th.

Portrait of Melanie Rae Thon, the author of In This Light

Melanie Rae Thon photo credit Andi Olsen

Sandy Brunvand and Al Denyer at Kayo Gallery

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Familiarity with the technical processes that bring art works into being is a mark of sophistication, and some artists consider their methods as equal to subject matter in importance. Others know better, preferring the viewer ignore the smocked figure behind the curtain in order to focus on the thing visual images do best, which is bypass cognition and seemingly enter the flesh directly, evoking physical and emotional responses akin to those experienced in the direct presence of the thing depicted: humor, pathos, terror, awe—the sublime and the beautiful. Our modern emphasis on technique begins with Jackson Pollock, who has the distinction of having dethroned an ideal of art that had stood forever in favor of a new model that, when the novelty finally wore off, his own paintings prove to have been without basis in fact. His emphasis on the action of the artist, the flinging of paint in intentional accidents, seemed to prove what a century of artists had come to argue: that visual illusions and the sense of the presence of remote things were not actually necessary. This notion was so exciting to the audience sixty years ago that they failed to notice how many of the missing elements they were projecting into the work: space, perspective, hidden connections between discreet parts of the the image, rhythm, meaning. A drip painting turned out to represent a new subject, yes, but it relied on the same built-in impulses in the viewer that had served Van Eyck.

Sandy Brunvand and Al Denyer are familiar figures in Salt Lake. Each works in an artistic niche, a specialized corner of an art spectrum that, since the Renaissance, has seen few overall masters. Brunvand, a founder of Saltgrass Press, favors a graphic approach in which print is a raw material, rather than a final product. How marks are made is important to her, but she never forgets that in themselves marks are trivial; it is the many subtle ways they can signify that makes them interesting. Delicately drawn ink portraits, parts printed on rice paper, and common metal staples are punctuated by filigrees of sewn lines and dog hair. Although she works primarily in black and white, textures of marks and various kinds of paper combine to produce a subtle palette. She often draws on natural images, such as the living as well as dried plants she finds while walking in the hills. What begins with nature viewed up close becomes a cerebral landscape, composed not so much of vistas as symbolic echoes that play on the page like music in the mind.

Sandy Brunvand's hands are seen drawing in a close up left; Sandy Brunvand and Al Denyer stand together in the gallery during their show

Left: Sandy Brunvand’s hands as she works on one of her drawings. Right: Sandy (L) with a wall of her recent works behind, stands with her fellow artist, Al Denyer (R)

In many ways, Al Denyer mints the flip side of Brunvand’s coin. Instead of lines slicing a void to separate objects from space, Denyer’s dense gestures build presence by accretion, forming areas where perceptible marks disappear in favor of textures. Small differences, such as those between black graphite and black charcoal, become the syntax of a language made up of thousands of iterations. But where Brunvand wants us to be aware of the muscular gesture made by pen or pencil, Denyer deliberately loses these in a slowly evolving maelstrom of patterned signs. Her landscapes commence somewhere far beyond what we can see with the naked eye, in a remote corner of earth further estranged by being seen as if from a satellite in space. Yet they are instantly recognizable, or—more accurately—immediately mistakable for something infinitely mundane and familiar, like the pattern of veins and aureolas on a leaf, the lines on a relief map, the crazing on a glazed porcelain plate or an old oil painting. Most unnerving of all, they reflect—art as mirror—the intricate cellular structure of the very neural network of the brain at that moment contemplating them.

A drawing by Al Denyer of the Arctic as it might look from a satellite

Arctic VI, a colored pencil drawing by Al Denyer, reveals among other things the similarity of the earth’s surface, pleated by gargantuan forces, to a carelessly thrown blanket.

Brunvand and Denyer have much in common: two women, close in age, who enrich their vocational experience by teaching at the U of U. But it is their differences, one guesses, that allowed them to overcome a competitive environment and become friends who eventually chose to exhibit together. Looking back at their recent exhibits, it’s clear that each has been cultivating her personal garden. Yet another way of putting it is that each of them has arrived at a personal method and style that together create a voice: a distinct and unmistakeable visual character, in which guise she presents a body of works that have as much resonance with each other as they do with their sources in the natural world. In an era where artists are expected to break the mold each time out, what hangs on the walls at Kayo may not look like breakthroughs, but they are the latest, if not the last, cumulative additions to a process whereby an artist’s works gradually change their nature as they modify first how we see them, and then how we see everything else.

Two of Sandy Brunvand's drawings

The evolution of Sandy Brunvand’s drawings can be glimpsed in this side-by-side comparison of two out of what must be very many

In her statement, Sandy Brunvand cites the influence of conceptual artist Mel Bochner. She wants the viewer to be aware of her state of mind, and she takes the trouble to describe the importance of mark-making to the works shown here. It’s not just that without the marks, there would be no drawing: she wants us to envision her making a mark by a series of movements, then making another, and another, and to see how the momentum of these actions generates a force beyond her conscious control. Yet the result is anything but mechanical. The marks include lively, dancing smudges, and while the results are abstract cartoons, images arise from them. Like Jackson Pollock’s swirling nets of paint, her fields of marks critique, and ultimately undercut, Bochner’s theory. He asserted that the gallery wall is a proper subject matter for art, but apparently mistook the viewer’s attention for the artist’s; otherwise, his comment makes no sense. Meanwhile, just as my reference to Brunvand’s ‘field’ of marks lends them metaphorical weight, so our minds write visual metaphors over the two-dimensional grid before our eyes, turning them into ‘fields’ of vision, even if we’re not told what they signify precisely. Some of the dots appear in pairs, and depending on the distance from which they are viewed—their placement in the gallery permits a wide range—long, thin objects emerge into the foreground, their isolation suggested by the apparent shadows they cast behind. Viewed up close, these objects dematerialize and are replaced by a suggestion of individual particles moving in unique, yet similar patterns as though in response to larger forces, leaving trails like histories. Allusions to landscape supplied by the viewer’s imagination, but not prevented by the artist, spring to life. A path rises to meet a fence, a wave laps the rim of a vessel, a hill rises to meet a cloud. It’s not hard to imagine an artist committed to abstraction tearing her hair at such uninvited readings, but it’s also about time we admit that sophisticated viewers—and in this context every viewer is sophisticated—are acquainted with ironies like ambiguous marks that ‘say’ several things to us at once. Nor is it trivial that examining Brunvand’s visual playgrounds provoke muscular sensations that might also be caused by watching dancers. A surprisingly cheerful person who approaches her daily hikes as enthusiastically as her canine companion, her art works are upbeat souvenirs she eagerly shares.

A panorama of the gallery, with works by both artists visible

The Kayo Gallery space, with Sandy Brunvand’s work on the left and Al Denyer’s on the right.

Few artworks surpass Al Denyer’s at suggesting alternate readings. Skirting the line between drawing and painting, evenly balanced between scientific illustration and sensuous, textured fact, they stimulate curiosity even as their maker passively discourages speculation about her working method. She offers no statement, nor list of materials, nor accounting of techniques. Even their titles, names of geographic locales, are vague. ‘Yukon’ could as easily refer to a potato viewed under a microscope as a satellite image of permafrost. Even seen up close, it’s impossible to tell whether she works from light to dark or dark to light. Where these differ from previous works is the subtlety of tonality, achieving a palette so delicate as to be lost in photographs. Although they suggest—or permit the imagination to project into them—textures ranging from crushed fabrics to dried liquids, the artistic tradition that they seem most close to are Persian carpets, which are often displayed on walls. One sees the large pattern first, with its symmetry and rupture, with balance playing against animation. Closer, one begins to make out individual devices, which depending on the source may be specific objects or hieratic symbols. Stems and borders connecting the parts sprout their own ornaments. Finally, the individual tufts of wool or silk come into focus, like the texture of whatever underlies Denyer’s paint. No matter what it suggests, the pattern is stamped immediately and clearly on eye and mind.

A painting by Al Denyer of the crazed surface of the Arctic, as if seen from a satellite

Arctic 1, an oil painting on canvas, by Al Denyer. All photos are courtesy of the artists.

Conventional landscapes create an illusion of perspective, which means placing the viewer in a particular orientation with a dictated point-of-view. Denyer’s mandala-like images of the earth dis-orient the viewer, inviting contemplation without designation a center of attention or subordinating visual elements. Even a topographic feel for gravity and flow can’t privilege the eye’s movement uphill or down. Although common enough experiences in the real world, among their few precedents in art are . . . those drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. But where his squiggles expand confidently across the canvas, hers pucker, concentrating and conserving their energy. Artworks don’t require morals, and despite their aesthetic power, these works speak a subtle rhetoric befitting the reticent woman who made them. Nothing is as new, unique, special, or unprecedented as we’d like to think. And beauty doesn’t arise in a departure from averages. It’s all in how the norms are fulfilled.

Twelve Rooms of the Nile: book review

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Cover of the novel under discussion

Twelve Rooms of the NIle, a novel by Enid Shomer

Some literary critics resisted the relatively recent introduction of historical characters into fiction, while others cited such auspicious precedents as Napoleon’s appearance in War and Peace in its defense. The fictional purists lost the battle, and a trickle of novels like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, in which Harry Houdini and Emma Goldman appeared beside completely made-up characters, became a flood in the era of Post-modernism. Eventually, literary figures old enough to be out of copyright were lifted too, so that the lives of beloved characters—suspended by their creators so that readers could imagine their own endings to the story—were spelled out for an audience that had lost its power to dream. In time, everyone from Elizabeth Bennet to Abraham Lincoln was busy fighting vampires, werewolves, or zombies. The perfectly-timed rise of the Internet, like the earlier invention of the camera, lowered the bar to the point where even books still in copyright became raw material for lesser writers to re-imagine, a trend that climaxed in the 50 Shades Trilogy, wherein the thinly disguised Twilight novels have their missing erotic dimension restored.

Such Mannerist characteristics as parody and rapid progress through genres have historically indicated the end of an era, a time when less ripe examples of the trend struggle for attention. That may explain the relative lack of attention for a far more interesting venture, Enid Shomer’s Twelve Rooms of the Nile. Based on a handful of Victorian journals and such surviving records as early Baedeker’s and similar primitive travel guidebooks, this novel imagines what might have happened during simultaneous forays among the antiquities lining the Nile River that were actually undertaken in 1850 by Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. Where books that hijack fictional characters can change their stories any way they want, these events, early in two of the better-known 19th century lives, face far tighter strictures. The dates and itineraries of both are known, as are some events and details, but while nothing documents their encounter, neither does the record prohibit their having shared an adventure. The challenge for Shomer was to craft a story that fits the known facts and, instead of reconfiguring what these two remarkable figures subsequently achieved, sheds light on how they became who we know them to have been.

At first glance, Nightingale, the virginal icon of feminine service, and Flaubert, one of the most notorious libertines in a place noted for sexual indulgence, are an unlikely pair, and to her credit Shomer pulls no punches in presenting them. Flaubert, recently under the influence of a shallow spirituality, has spent years writing a book about St. Anthony that his friends consider so bad he should burn it, not rewrite it. His response has been to throw himself into sensuality as if there were no tomorrow. Nightingale, convinced of God’s plan for her, has declined to marry and spends her considerable energy seeking something that looks enough like a calling. Even their encounter, on a choked road, points up their differences: when a pair of intoxicated Frenchmen open fire on birds from a busy road, terrifying their fellow travelers, the quintessential English maiden censures them. Thus their story begins.

Ah, but our author sees these two young, talented persons more accurately than the iconic images that have come down to us. Just how they might appeal to each other, and what each brings to the table that the other is lacking to be great, and why their collision has remained secret, are the business of this story, ornamented with a meticulous reconstruction of Egypt at the dawn of its rediscovery, just as the Rosetta Stone was enabling the lost culture of the ancients to finally be understood. Clearly, Enid Shomer has written Twelve Rooms of the Nile as another kind of Rosetta Stone, to enable reconstruction of two remarkable persons who, no less than the civilization of Egypt, have been lost to us through a century of admiration for what they achieved.

The Face of Utah Sculpture

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In an interview he gave Jennifer Napier Pierce prior to the opening of The Face Of Utah Sculpture, an annual exhibition he founded and curates, Dan Cummings explained why he considers this such an important opportunity for artists like him. ‘Sculptors’ he said, ‘don’t much get single shows.’ It’s true. Sculptors are typically invited to take part in two-person shows, where their work complements the work of a painter. To be seen clearly, paintings require empty rooms; sculpture insures the resulting space is not wasted. Thus the celebrated judgment of Barnett Newman: ‘A sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to get a look at a painting.’ But there is good reason as well why we, as audience, should see what Cummings has brought to the Cultural Celebration Center. Far from the display of challenging aesthetic statements that makes up many modern art shows, this one is immediately accessible and, in place of consternation, is more likely to generate feelings of pleasure, fun, and even exhilaration.

A carved and painted gourd suggests a tangle of rope

In Rope, Marilyn Sunderland cuts away the thin material, paradoxically making it appear more substantial.

Anyone who thinks artists work best in garrets, away from interference by the public, can learn something from the example of Marilyn Sunderland. A few years ago, her painted gourds brought to mind folk arts. Although she selected the gourd as a painter selects a grade and shape of canvas, the final product resembled classroom design practice: fit the image to the 3D shape. Interaction with her peers and the public has opened up her approach, literally: in The Rope she cuts away the negative space between coils of illusionistic cordage carved in bas relief, revealing the solid-looking gourd to be a thin, hollow skin. Paradoxically, the more she reduces the solid-looking ellipsoid to a surface of lace, the more solid the representation appears. The gourd’s shape disappears, demonstrating the dimensional alchemy underlying all visual art. Rope connects thematically with Looking At An Object I’ll Never Understand, one of Cummings’ fused and carved glass pieces, in which a black-and-white checkerboard resembles water into which stones are thrown, the surface roiling into ornaments suggesting a computer animation of a mathematical equation. Another glass artist, Andrew Kosorok, uses the translucence of flat glass to model the dimensions of space, demonstrating the notion shared among the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions that spirit first creates, and then infuses, everything.

A black and white checkerboard, made of squares of glass, is carved into an ornamental relief

Dan Cummings Looking At An Object represents some of the perils of doing just that.

It sometimes seems the three dimensions of sculpture impose more limits on an artist than do the two of painting, but contrasting representations of the human form argue that the range of possibilities in sculpture is as wide as the artist’s vision. Julie Lucus opens up the torso in Nevermore, where her signature mosaic tiles suggest the stone walls of a prison or a fortress, a suggestion underscored by the presence of barred windows behind the occupant, who dwells close to the heart. Emily de la Cruz Ellis takes an opposing view in Don’t Look Back in Anger. Obdurate and opaque, her sandstone blocks lie silent on the floor, denying entry and suggesting John Donne was wrong: everyone is an island, no one can be known. But Brian Christensen’s Blue Note gets it right. Our own knowledge and experience allow us to decipher the features of his standing female figure, who proffers us the crystal she holds in her hand as though it were the key to her sorrow. The ruined piano mechanism that frames her and carves out her space, stopping our eyes from straying, suggests another kind of passageway: the evocative art of music, tinted with aural color the way her skin carries the shifting hints of pigment. Like sounds, appearances can carry something essential between us. There are conduits by which we can know and—sculpture being supremely tactile—touch one another.

Roughly squared blocks of limestone suggest a human body lying on the floor

Emily de la Crus Ellis urges viewers: Don’t Look Back in Anger

No survey of 3-D art could be complete without a few examples of trompe-l’oeil, in which the sculptor displays his skill by fooling our eyes. In effect, such illusions argue that touch remains more reliable than its more popular, more glamorous, and more successful long-distance version: vision. Relegated long ago to the status of stunt, trompe-l’oeil made a comeback when Jasper Johns rendered mundane beer cans in painted bronze, those transformative and supposedly ennobling materials. Perfectly illusionistic tours de force followed, including leather goods made of clay and a motorcycle carved from wood. Darwin Dower also chose wood, but a more homely and more challenging array of subjects. Restoration: A Divine Calling reveals what a desktop was before the computer undertook to steal its identity and displace so many once-familiar things. Among the objects and materials it ‘restores’ are leather bindings, printed paper pages, spectacles, a candle, and the compound paraphernalia of handwriting: a feather quill, an inkstand with cover, a blotter, and a bit of foolscap displaying a fine hand. There can be a fine line between pleasure and frustration, and as the eye wanders along the ragged edges of well-worn paper pages, the mind crosses back and forth between the imaginary pleasure of turning over those pages and the frustration of knowing it to be impossible.

A typical desktop of two hundred years ago is actually carved entirely from wood

A classic composition on a desktop, each part of which was carved from wood and painted by artist Darwin Dower

In the same way, the limit of art is also what makes it indispensable. Only in our imaginations can we go where these works take us, or make us want to take ourselves. Not every one of the 70 works by 40 artists assembled here will succeed for everyone, but each is a potential launching pad for a trip into real things and their imaginary connections. Instead of selecting a narrow range of objects meant to prove a point, The Face of Utah Sculpture assumes that if it includes the wide range of competent work, viewers can sort them out. You don’t have to like them all, but if Andrea Heidienger’s cast-paper cityscape is not to your liking, perhaps Randy Chamberlain’s bronze bald eagle in the form of a scythe will do. But take a second look at the things you first want to dismiss: therein lies the key to personal growth.

A melancholy bronze face conveys a woman's mood

A close-up detail of Brian Christensen’s Blue Note, in which unheard music and an untold personal history become known to us by the alchemy of an installation

Drawing Together

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For some time now I’ve been thinking about something that, in the privacy of my mind, I call ‘the Utah School.’ This assortment of local artists—their precise number varies—display common concerns and make similar choices in their works: sufficiently so that a curious critic might look for some shared influence beyond the obvious. Unlike the Cubists, but like the Impressionists and Fauves, these artists have in no way unilaterally identified themselves as sharing particular tastes or strategies. They remain so far a phenomenon that primarily exists only in a critic’s eyes. So when rumors of collaboration between two of the primary candidates for Utah School membership—Cassandra Barney and Brian Kershisnik—reached my ears, they pricked up. On the one hand, this could be the first signs of something emerging. On the other hand, it could be just two artists who know each other’s work and are looking for a new outlet; art, after all, is also a business. I felt I needed to get over to the Kayo Gallery’s new space (next door to their old digs near the corner of East Second and Broadway), where Drawing Together, twenty-five of their collaborative, mixed-media drawings, is on display through August 11. The title alone is provocative: it could be a literal description of what took place, or it could be a gentle pun. Either way, it opens possibilities for the future.

Dates for the onset of Modernism run all the way from 1200 to 1940. Modern visual arts arguably begin to take shape around 1850, contemporary with the invention of photography. The bath water of elaborately hand-made, extreme realism that was thrown out then has been followed since by many babies, including beauty, skill, discernment, and good taste. Another of the victims was collaboration between artists. It’s ironic to hear critics talk about how ‘huge’ today’s artworks are, as if St. Peter’s in Rome hadn’t been the world’s largest building, or Angkor Wat didn’t occupy over 200 acres. If anything, the slow growth in size of today’s art is testimony to the gradual disappearance of the shibboleth against collaboration. But of all the art media, the last ones to permit artists to work together are the most intimate, including of course drawing.

There were some negative comments about what finally showed up on the walls at Kayo: comments focusing on the fact that what’s here are ‘just drawings.’ While it’s true that as finished works of art, drawings are perceived as lesser works than the paintings they may turn into, there are several qualities that make these more compelling. First of all, because of their ‘skeletal’ condition, the contribution of each artist shows up more clearly, and viewers who know them individually can gain insight into how each proceeds from a given stage to a necessary next step. For another, even a professional who views their works regularly can be fooled into seeing more similarity than actually exists. Seeing Barney and Kershisnik in the same frame makes it impossible to overlook their differences. And studying just how they found to work together says something about how their works normally take shape.

Apparently, there was little conversation and no overt planning between the two artists. Rather than hammer out an idea that they then executed, each began by drawing on a blank sheet of paper. At some point, those sheets were exchanged. Sometimes one left a space in the composition for the other to fill. At others, a sketch centered on the page was handed off, possibly for the addition of a background or other details. In any case, differences remain that would almost certainly have been smoothed over during the many hours it takes to take a painting to a finished state.

Among the most popular prints of M.C. Escher is one of two elaborately-rendered, illusionistic hands poised side by side, each holding a stylus with which it is adding the line-drawn, preliminary version of the other’s wrist. Escher’s version takes its cue from the yin-yang figure: both hands are identical but reversed with respect to each other. Barney and Kershisnik, perhaps inevitably, made several drawings on the same theme, but with each drawing the other’s figure. While the idea may seem obvious, a philosopher could have a field day with the possibilities: one artist could draw both, combining a self-portrait and a portrait; each artist could draw a self-portrait; each artist could draw a portrait of the other. Since the subject could be the way I would draw it, or it could be the way I think my collaborator would, the number of possibilities is at least doubled. To me, it appears that the large drawing contains two self portraits; in the smaller one, I think we have Barney by Kershisnik and vice-versa. Anyone else care to venture a guess?

This is one case where familiarity with the artists’ biographies can help see their differences. Cassandra Barney comes from an arts background. During childhood she was regularly exposed to art museums. Her trajectory was from child of artist to an artist in her own right. Her work reveals a trained hand in the way the varying weight of her sinuous line renders three-dimensional information, or the Leonardo-like angles she likes for posing a head. Brian Kershisnik’s background, comparatively speaking, was that of a layman. Although he did turn to the formal study of art in college, his trajectory since has been opposite to the academic tradition that Barney may not actively pursue, but cannot entirely expunge. In other words, while one of the characteristics of the Utah School might be an affinity for Byzantine-style, weightless figures, Barney’s figures rest lightly on the ground, while Kershisnik’s tend to float, as though indifferent to gravity. His line is also far more architectonic than hers.

Once these cues are sorted out, it’s almost irresistible to imaginary narratives of how the final images came about. In point of fact, both these artists seem to enjoy hinting in their artworks that there are stories the images escaped from. In one large drawing, titled ‘Mom Is In a Hole,‘ Dad—a Kershisnik male—and Mom—a Barney woman—both eye an infant, him cautiously and her with rapture. The really interesting thing is that while he sits on a vague ground, she appears to be naked and buried up to her armpits. The remarkable thing is that the parts work so well together, as if a single mind had been in charge from the outset. Furthermore, if the precise visual reasoning is open ended, it’s no more so than might be expected from either artist working alone.

The difference between illustration and art is that, in the latter, the final goal isn’t known until it’s reached. This show might have proved the futility of artist’s collaborating, but in works like this, where the first mark has been followed by another, and another, until the unified, irresistible image appeared to first one, then the other artist, and now to anyone who cares enough to look, there is proof that collaboration, like collage, prepared ground, Exquisite Corpse, or any of a host of other techniques, is a valid way of making art.

Two drawn figures, a man and a woman, each figure seen completing the other

In this untitled multi-media drawing by Brian Kershisnik and Cassandra Barney, he draws her drawing him, and she draws him drawing her.

The End of the Central Utah Art Center— at last?

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The facade of the CUAC during delivery of an exhibit

In better times, the CUAC receives a delivery: an exhibit has been unloaded and moved into the gallery

On July 17, an article in the Salt Lake Tribune by Ben Fulton broke shocking news: the City Of Ephraim has evicted the Central Utah Art Center, effective August 20. Citing the pervasive economic woes that have hit governments on every level in the US, Ephraim authorities were quoted as saying the CUAC has failed to deliver on its agreement to provide local benefits in art presentation and education in exchange for what it claims was about $30,000 per year in free rent and donations. The Center’s board of directors countered with a claim that it was censorship, pointing to the current show and claiming that some of its exhibits, which contain nudity, had drawn unusual interest from the city’s administrators. 36 public comments followed, all but two attacking the city bureaucrats and promising to rally in support of Free Speech. As an arts writer who has written extensively and lectured frequently at the CUAC, I wish the lines were as clearly drawn as those replies suggest. Sadly, the known facts and comments from Ephraim residents all point in a different direction, and my personal experience with all three of the CUAC’s directors lead me to believe that the First Amendment claims are a smokescreen meant to cover up an intransigent attitude on the part of one man: the two-time director of the CUAC, Adam Bateman.

I have personally witnessed arrant abuse of power by authority many times, beginning in the 1960s when a journal I helped write was seized and burned and a literary journal reprinted to change words that one routinely finds in today’s news. I could go on, but the point is that in not one case did the authorities attempt to disguise their motives. The reasons are simple: it’s a lot easier to get public support for standards of ‘decency’ and propriety than it is to explain the complex conflicts that face a bureaucrat trying to do a challenging job. I imagine the Ephraim City Council would have preferred some outrage on the part of the CUAC that would have galvanized the kind of support for them among citizens that the CUAC failed to generate in twenty years of operation. To convince readers of the Tribune that this was a regretful-but-necessary decision based on fiscal and functional priorities would be a last choice, one only made because, alas, it seems to be true.

Kathleen Peterson, popular multi-media painter and founder of the CUAC

Kathleen Peterson, whose energy, imagination, and skill led to the creation of the CUAC from an abandoned building and a community’s desire for art.

Prior to 2005, under the direction of its founder, the popular painter Kathleen Peterson, the CUAC’s mezzanine was reserved for a permanent display of local arts and crafts: I recall painted saw blades being among the merchandise. Downstairs housed rotating exhibitions by well-known artists. Those shows continued under Peterson’s successor—this was the first place I ever saw Brian Kershisnik, Lee Udall Bennion, and many other Utah artists—but Mr. Bateman clearly had another, ambitious but entirely commendable priority, which was bringing what are often styled ‘contemporary’ artists in from out of state. I remember individuals from New York, California, and the Pacific Northwest. It was during this phase, while I was teaching writing and art history at Snow College, that I began writing about CUAC exhibits, encouraged by Bateman, and it was he who introduced me to 15 Bytes and its director, Shawn Rossiter.

From the outset, there were problems with Bateman’s directorial style. His prodigious energies were divided between his own career as an artist and his desire to remake the CUAC as a node on the International Art scene. The disconnect from the Ephraim community began then, often showing up in trivial-seeming but important signs, like the gallery being closed on days when it was posted to be open. Adam Bateman is a powerful, charismatic figure, but he tended to use his personal force bluntly, dividing the arts community into those who supported him and those he had offended. Unfortunately, as time passed the former were increasingly located in Salt Lake, Los Angeles, and Reykjavik, while the latter came to include much of the Snow College faculty and Ephraim’s indigenous art audience.

The salvation of the CUAC arguably came with Bateman’s departure for Park City and his replacement by Jared Latimer. Like Bateman, Latimer is himself an artist as well as a curator. But unlike Bateman’s ambitious sculptures (made from tons of books and sections of modern irrigation equipment), Latimer’s projects didn’t interfere with his operation of the Center. More importantly, his diplomatic approach to public relations and his creative approach to fundraising brought on what was unarguably the golden age of the CUAC. During his years, Utah-wide juried shows produced glossy catalogs, local school programs culminated in exhibitions of student work in the gallery, and openings with pizza and soda for all became well-attended Friday-night events. It was Latimer who secured the grant from the Warhol Foundation that put Ephraim on the radar of distant artists and organizations. The refurbishing of the gallery and the long-overdue completion of the second gallery occurred during this time. Bateman was still part of these changes, having remained on the CUAC board of directors. But there is no arguing that Latimer was not only the face of the board with which the the public dealt, but was also the source of the meticulous research that supported its fundraising program. Of course his virtues and the success of his efforts could not stay secret long, and he, like Bateman, was hired away by a more prestigious art venue.

A shower of light falls into an atrium space in the gallery at CUAC

A shower of light forms part of an installation by Laurel Hunter and Lisa Carroll at the CUAC. Remnants of its industrial past made the CUAC a good foil for installation artists to work with . . . and against.

Latimer’s departure left a vacancy, and Bateman—whose departure to Park City had ended abruptly—stepped in to fill it. At this point the story becomes murky, with publicly verifiable facts unavailable and different sides emerging from meetings with very different versions of what took place. The board of directors at CUAC have chosen to stand together behind the accusation that they are being censored, though no verifiable evidence supports their version. While there is a written comment by City Manager Regan Bolli that ‘no one appreciated’ the work on display, it’s naive to think that government employees don’t routinely hold their noses and vote for things they don’t ‘appreciate,’ but which are supported by others. Meanwhile, sources in Ephraim describe a city bureaucracy in which no one has seen a raise in almost a decade and some employees have taken cuts. They say that when Adam Bateman approached them this year, his request wasn’t just for the customary support of the city, but for an increase. They also say that when he was challenged on the question of the Center’s relevance to the residents of Ephraim and its original mandate, his non-responsive reply argued that the unsophisticated audience in Ephraim didn’t deserve what the CUAC is offering.

I hope it’s clear what’s wrong with this picture. But consider this, too. One of the more vehement emails sent to the Tribune suggested that Ephraim City must have preferred another tenant, and urged readers to watch to see who moves into this valuable commercial property. Would it could be so. Over the last decade, many properties along Ephraim’s primary street (Highway 89) have stood empty, while the businesses that have opened have often shut again. So far as culture is concerned things are mixed: the movie theaters both survive on G and PG-rated features, while an upscale Italian restaurant failed. One of the most attractive properties, an LDS bishop’s office resembling a Craftsman-style bungalow, was used for a while as a bank’s loan office, but again sits empty. The building that houses the CUAC particularly challenges a potential tenant. Necessarily unmodifiable due to its historical status, its single room, with a mezzanine surrounding an atrium-like central space, isn’t appropriate for the scale or type of business that is likely in Ephraim. The minor refurbishing that took place recently was only grudgingly agreed to by its defenders. It is likely that an art gallery was the best solution to the civic dilemma posed by this large, prominently located, charming, and irreplaceable structure. And it’s sad that after the city and the surrounding community made a heroic effort to save this treasure from the immigrant past from demolition, their efforts fell victim to forces determined to hijack what they created for very different purposes.

The truth is that Ephraim wants what the CUAC was supposed to provide, but has little interest in what it primarily delivers. Few who do have that interest make the long journey there. Openings are often attended by a handful of enthusiasts, and whole days go by without a visitor, other than Snow College’s art majors. If there is an audience for recent art by little-known international artists, it’s in Salt Lake City or Park City, where UMOCA and the Kimball, among other venues, do a lively business. What supports the CUAC most is the unspoken understanding that there is not enough art in the US and that any effort to produce more must be encouraged. While I am among those in line to sign that pledge, I have not drunk the kool-aid and I will not. Scarce resources need to be allocated, not used for self-indulgence or to inflate individual resumes. Faith in a small town that has built a dynamic arts center, and the resources that make it possible, should be carefully fostered by sensitive management. This has not happened in Ephraim. Instead, the divisive attitudes and behaviors that have become endemic across the US have found another place to batten themselves. I wish the CUAC all success, having enjoyed what they brought to my community, and I can only hope the people of Ephraim can restore the lively resource that used to be the CUAC.

For a reasoned overview of opinion on this matter, see Whitney Kimball’s blog, Art Fag City. For a not-so-reasoned opinion, see the replies below.

Seventeen artists in three galleries

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Gallery group shows recall double bills at the movies: if the contrast between artists contributes to a better understanding of each other’s works, or resonances enrich a common sense of purpose, the group show serves artists and audience alike. For the arts writer, though, they present a challenge. Right now, for some reason, group shows abound, and with five or more artists in one place, what the jargon of our times calls ‘triage’ assumes undue influence.

Reminiscing: the invitation for February samples all seven artists in Phillips Gallery’s exhibition

At the Phillips Gallery, Reminiscing channels the presence of seven successful Utah artists who have passed from the scene, leaving significant bodies of work as their legacies. Lee Deffebach, Irwin Greenberg, Waldo Midgley, Moishe Smith, Doug Snow, Harry Taylor, and Francis Zimbeaux may no longer be household names, but a couple of rooms lined with their works stand as a ringing challenge to today’s artists, as well as a useful barrier against complacency in community standards. For me, Irwin Greenberg came as a complete revelation, and I anticipate spending many pleasurable-if-futile hours alternately pondering and marveling at how his brush was able to seamlessly render both precise architectural detail and smoky urban atmosphere at the same time.

At Art Access, five women fill two rooms with enough variety to put paid to any idea that women’s art must be less universal than men’s. In the back room, Amber DeBirk’s fused glass boldly makes the case for art that doesn’t just preach environmental responsibility, but practices what it preaches. Too many artists act as though their holy mission to talk the talk somehow exempts them from also walking the walk. Eleanor Scholz’s genius for transposing everyday objects into characters is matched by the courage with which she treats her prescription for antidepressants to the same transformation. In Cihuatl, Mujer, Woman in the front room, Ruby Chacon, Veronica Perez, and Maritza Torres romp with energy and humor through what in earlier hands might have been only the grievances of women. Torres makes brilliant use of those familiar, cardboard-framed red and green 3–D glasses and contrasting colors of paint; instead of feeding left- and right-side perspective to the appropriate eye, she feeds light and dark, causing her images to vibrate rapidly as the brain tries to decide which eye to trust. The result is not unlike the cognitive dissonance we live with in a world where all things are polarized by politics.

Sue Cotter: Casa Artesanias. Above, exterior. Below, opened to show interior.

Through March, Rio Gallery’s Redux demonstrates the kind of results obtainable through public funding of arts on a tiny scale, relative to what we spend on other social priorities. Gary Barton, Jane Catlin, James Charles, Sue Cotter, and Madison Smith each received sufficient funding to allow a brief, precious period of work that didn’t have to pay for itself. All report, and display, positive results. For example, Jane Catlin’s large, colorful, and experimental drawings on both sides of mylar sheets replace the spatial illusion produced by doing this on glass with a softly focused view of nature that feels optically lively and more true to how we actually see, rather than to the freezing influence of the camera.

Sue Cotter’s enchanting bas-reliefs address our current dissatisfaction with the continuing predominance of artistic and literary conventions we no longer trust, exploiting the non-fictional genres of assemblage and memoir in their place. Some model the exteriors of specific examples of indigenous Mexican architecture, which astute viewers can open to reveal an interior tableau in which tiny, meticulously arranged objects gathered during the artist’s travels symbolically recount her experiences, both specifically to her and as universals. Within these dollhouse-like treasure troves, the resemblance of tiny, richly symbolic objects to toys combines with their serious presentation—like the somber way children so often play—to create a universal feeling.

Sue Cotter: Diego Mi Amor takes its name from a painting by Frida Kahlo. Inside, Cotter conjures the passion of the painter for her husband and fellow artist.

Other kinds of hoards appear in other works. Testament of Beauty brings together a variety of specialized languages: sheet music, relief maps, samples lined up for comparison. Like many of Cotter’s pieces, it not only invokes books (journals, guides, directories, encyclopedias), but incorporates one made by the artist, which hangs on a chain from a hook and can be held and opened by the viewer. Others are tucked away for safekeeping here and there. On a nearby pedestal, our current absorption in the quarrel over paper vs. digital books gains perspective from a series of ‘rock books,’ including one in which various personal treasures are filed away in a jar with a string through the lid for safe keeping—like the irreplaceable medieval codices that were chained to a reading desk. One senses that it takes time for these replica worlds to unfold and be discovered, just as it took time to live the life they attempt to recapture. In a less literal way, that could be said of every one one of these seventeen artists.

Sue Cotter’s Testament of Beauty includes this tiny, hand-made book of maps.

Philip Glass Turns 75

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From his early days, Glass toured the world, performing in galleries and alternative spaces with the Philip Glass Ensemble

Throughout history, success has often been linked in the popular imagination with unfair choices: Alexander the Great had to choose a brief life and undying fame or a long life in unending obscurity. Talented women have usually had to choose between art and family. In our era, the choice has been money or respect. Damien Hirst has made more money that any artist ever before, but critics enjoy suggesting that he’ll need it to compensate for history’s amnesia. Perhaps no one has been treated more unfairly than Philip Glass, who turns 75 today. In spite of greater success by any practical measure than any of his contemporaries, Glass appears most often as a footnote in his fellow composer’s stories.

Philip Glass is one of a handful of remarkable composers who were born within a few short years of each other. Among the best known is Lamont Young, who was featured last week on a program broadcast on Classical 89, the BYU radio station. Young is Yin to Glass’s Yang: a composer almost no one has heard of, who has never made money on his music, but whose name is spoken in hushed or ecstatic terms by the few who know him. His insight, that most music spends its time dwelling on what has gone before, or anticipating what is to come, instead of truly inhabiting the sounds of the present moment, owes more than a little to the ‘Be Here Now’ ethos of the 60s. It’s also often cited as the cord that binds together the closest thing America has had to a major musical movement. Their music is often called Minimalism, after the contemporary New York-based plastic art movement, though absolutely no one likes or approves of the name. Glass studied at Julliard and in Paris with Natalie Boulanger, but he developed his ‘minimalist’ chops in India, where he crafted a rhythmically-based, repetitive structure that gradually shifts from chord to chord. Terry Riley also studied in India, with Pandid Pran Nath, which is kind of like having played sessions for Sun Studios with Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl, and Johnny. But the relationship that proves the point is that between Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

While supporting himself with a day job installing dishwashers, Glass became friends with the plainter Chuck Close, who painted the original of this portrait.

When their music was happening but not yet known, these musicians formed their own groups to perform their works, pressing into service electronic organs and other rock instruments. In those days, Steve Reich played in the Philip Glass ensemble. Since then, Glass has written operas that sometimes run five or six hours and are fought over by major world opera companies. He’s written movie scores and collaborated with front rank poets, science fiction novelists, World Music figures, and Rock icons like the Grateful Dead. Steve Reich has written a piece for 18 drummers, another for six pianos, and one for a single voice on a tape loop. Guess which one gets the critics’ respect?

Kevin Dooley’s photo of a Chuck Close portrait of Philip Glass gives a hint of how the composer’s ‘pixillated’ music relates to Close’s own groundbreaking style.

A few years ago, I spoke to flutist Ransom Wilson on the occasion of his performing a piece he commissioned from Steve Reich. While thanking him for adding to the world’s store of whatever one calls this stuff, I told him I thought it was the music of our time. He agreed, and then he added, ‘About damn time, too.’ With Glass, all these idiosyncratic, wonderful composers are passing through their 70s together. Music is a field where long creative lives are possible. The question remains, though: is it their creative lives that are going to waste, or ours as their audience? Anyone who has a capacity to hear new sounds and music that plays by different rules, new rules, should take time in honor of Philip Glass’s birthday to listen to some of his, and his fellow composers, music. Music you don’t care for won’t actually hurt you; music that would get inside and tell you who you are, if only you heard it, is a gift you can give yourself every day.

(This post originally appeared in the blog of the on-line arts magazine, 15 Bytes, to mark Glass’s birthday on January 31)