Hello to the 15,000,

I was driving back from LA on Highway 5. Stormy clouds threatened over the Castaic Reservoir and seemed at bursting point above the Grapevine but as I rolled over the crest, with the whole of the Central Valley spreading out in lacy green, tumescent yellow, dour brown, sienna, umber… swarthy colors laced with the woven smells of earth, growing fields, everything growing, plants stridently defying gravity, taunting human husbandry and taking issue with agriculture to grow with a power which can be guided but not understood, the lowering storm clouds turned cumulus and I was amazed by the earth in its protean work, shifting shape and aspect, winds blowing up circling dust devils, irrigation canals following form but chaotic beneath the surface as processions of motor cars streamed parallel along the black stretched streak of tarmac, contained within lanes but inside each cab, people off the tracks with random thoughts, flitting glimpses and glances, desires, dreaming, ranting, half thinking and half raging, strapped into their air conditioned seats largely unaware of the crazy- coherent and completely chaotic quilt of the world stretching off across this growing carpet of fecund marshes, flowering bushes, crops of every sort and function flung across the flat plain once a deep inland sea long since evaporated into a balmy sky now turned to fog, to clouds, to rain, to mist, to mystery and I felt dizzy with the spread and the arc and the wide, spacious, mysterious energy and material scope of the world and the aching distances out there beyond us.

It was all dazzling and immense compared to the small, dualistic, quarreling hive life humans have created in cities like the one I had just left and the one I was headed for. There in our civic catacombs we huddle together. Why? Security? Expediency? In our scrambling for advantage, which we want to call virtue, what are we doing and where do we come from that we end up packed together in honeycombs of concrete and steel?

They say that we are made from the chemistry of stars run through the grinding mechanisms of the lust to live. We are a brilliant accident, largely incomprehensible and, in the grand scheme unimportant when compared with a universe filled with vast plains more furious and fatal than the one I was now speeding past with its rest stops and gas stations and restaurants and fruit stands and immense warehouses out on the prairie, distribution centers with no names, making sure that the goods get to the goods- getters, and all of us part of the insect parade of human existence, minds churning, a thought and its opposite, a desire next to a craving, an abhorrence wed to an obsession, and the flat, humming, constantly shifting pattern of the electric processors in our heads, millions of wheels turning without meaning, reason or purpose, minds mostly throbbing with misunderstood impulse and unacknowledged potential. Beings in automobiles with billions of firing synapses, teeming nerve ends and wayward neurons roaring along that ribbon of highway, enmeshed in the black widow spider’s web, temporarily whole and almost safe, in the million throated, toothy grin of a largely disastrous universe.

And I thought: What does any of this have to do with what artists do today, to say nothing of what politicians profess, what moralists proclaim in the midst of our national life, our political motor mouthing, our cultural, institutional bickering and careerist striving? I’d say, almost nothing.

Although our scientists reach out beyond atmospheres, braving looming annihilations to court encounters with the cosmos, empowered with virtually god- like technologies, the artists of today create with the tail ends and trappings of our detritus and lowest imaginings a… well, to take an historical tack, a bicycle wheel and a stool, a urinal, a slug of wood, a plastic bag filled with stones, an American flag slapped ham-fisted to canvas, an immense bow and arrow, an afterthought plunked down on an otherwise unprepossessing embarcadero, pointing downwards, symbolizing our surrender to irony and failure, a Venice Biennale of nifty notions and hollow magician’s hocus pocus where you can wander in an old bone yard of cluttered and clever what nots and gelded gee-gaws including the insipid light bulbs slapped up in posthumous honor of the US entry, Felix Gonzalez- Torres, all in rooms which once might have been galleries devoted to loves, reckonings, impulses, celebrations, horrors, cries, halloos of disgust, honest reports from heart, mind and other fire- seeking sensors the ancients considered souls, and finally, the outcomes of visionaries emerging from lifetimes dedicated to seeking moments of honest, terrific, terrible, or tender and all too temporary… approximate and hesitant… truth.

Their tintinnabulations differ from the hoo- wee- a- hoo- wee of religion in only one respect. While religions claim some distant and arcane and yet objective reality for their crazy salads of superstition and a priori prattle, the Deconstructionists do not. They have their bibles of course, such as Art Forum and tidy little encyclicals in the New York Times or Newsweek, but the miracles of re-purposed and coded signifiers attributed to works on display in galleries and museums are only supposed to give credence and coherence to the work on display which are completely incomprehensible, to say nothing of reprehensible, without them. But to their credit they do not claim that a pound of elephant merde installed on a popsicle stick either proscribes a celestial event horizon, or can in anyway save your soul. Their only claim is that if you’d just disable your confining skepticism for a second, you would see that crap is not a scatological entity, but, in fact, a cathartic one.

Up ahead I pull behind a little, beat up car carrying a ditzy duo of women running dead even with an 18 wheeler in the right lane, thereby creating a traffic jam about five miles long behind me. I lean on the horn to absolutely no response. Finally, the truck driver, slows down so I can pass them on the right. As I go by I see the oblivious narcissism I usually associate with the so- called Art World of the 21st Century or the limp handshake of our cinema, which started as a penny arcade novelty and ended up as a cheap suit entertainment business populated by paste up silicon stars and tipsy charismatics, a Fellini tuba band of dancing agents, managers, board members and captains of industry, profit- freaks who provide the banal, the obvious tricked out to charm the oblivious. The less said about American cinema, Hollywood, Indiewood, and Slaphappyhood, the more we can appreciate it disappearing in the rear view mirror as up ahead the world still unfolds in a true installation, a performance piece with the goods we’d do better to sit back and appreciate if we have nothing to add to. And regardless of what Hollywood does, or I say, there are still Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Abbas Kiarostami, Oshima, Teshigahara, Sally Potter, Liliana Cavani, Hou Shou Hsien, Tsai Ming Liang and Gaspar Noe, et als to show us that the whole cinematic adventure wasn’t a complete waste of time.

I turn on the radio. Knowers of the right and martyrs of the left, proclaim crucial truths about the world. The religionists have all the stations. The liberals have PBS. The atheists can’t even field a short wave radio. Candidates for office exude windy political jargon blown from phantasms of thin air. They don’t seem to care that even if they did understand the hive they live in and hope to lead, they would still be light years away from the certainties they suppose they seek. They mutter and flutter, sanguine exemplars of an agreement with what everyone in Adman’s Land has already signed onto. It’s about what you APPEAR to be and has little to do with what you somehow, maybe, and impossibly might actually BE back there behind the screen where the makeup is applied.

And everyone is so impossibly, damnably earnest you would hardly believe that they could approve of the central truth they transmit, which is that the almost holy values they espouse, always seem to lead directly to their interests, and the necessary achievement of both, while proclaiming only the one, is the hidden dirty secret to all election campaigns, evangelical tent meetings and revolutions naively pursued and tragically won. I hear one side bemoan the loss of innocence and the other the certainty of present evils and no one talks about how a culture which has lost touch with (or possibly never found) its real sources of inspiration, inner and outer mythic delvings, aesthetic sweep and wildness, will be a culture of fearful peanut vendors, fighting the street wars of odd job hooligans, demented religionists, political bag men and dupes who bleed for others, but refuse to know themselves. I speak as if I hate it all and yet… I have to celebrate it as the human comedy. It’s not going to change, it’s heinous and terrible, and amazing and magnificent and also hard to describe.

The problem is that life happens everywhere, at the same time, and all around us. But language is bound to the moment of utterance and can say only one thing at a time. Even with metaphor and symbol, it is a dumb instrument set out to record something profound. Maybe by saying thing after thing one creates a very imperfect rendering of the teeming, contradictory, paradoxical landscape of life as it is lived, or death as it prevails in most of what we can see of the universe. Larger words which might appear to gather more of the world together usually generalize, “indicate” as Method teachers used to say, and don’t have the bite of the living moment and so fail in their different, distanced pomp.

I think there is only one thing… and that is, this moment, the right now in which you are currently reading. And then after that the right now from now on, each moment lived after that. The future hasn’t happened yet and history is a fable produced for the interests of its makers, its minions and its writers. At its best, the past is over and now lives in the realm of the “stories” and “mythologies” apologists everywhere warn we cannot live without. Values are, in spite of the japes of well intentioned idealists, projections into the future, so often the road to fairyland utopias, so unlike the hot frames of what we do in the present, always singular, unique and so unlike our eager projections of green pastures to be. The only right action is the one performed now. And the now is already gone. The only right action is in the energy and understanding garnered in a lightning stroke, an epiphany, maybe of fellow feeling, or love, or anger, joy, despair… an experience which includes both Inferno and Paradiso, a life transforming instance of both balance and daring, the exercise of which is the only use of education I can care about.

This is why real Art is important, because it catches out from the slipstream of possibility and enchantment, and seizes the moment of genuine sight, sound, smell, insight, surmise, inspiration and finally, achievement, the work itself, the inspiring, vibrating, energy producing “work” of art. It produces a moment… and although it is gone, it encourages a string of moments, like pearls on a string, hopefully a necklace of moments devoted to honest witnessing, and telling the deepest truth teller and receiver can possibly hear and, hopefully, bear. This moment of straight insight, of distinct beauty, be it epiphany or blasphemy is the only brief safety available given to combat our contentious self seeking and clannish chauvinism which some want to call patriotism and, the greatest shuck for the greatest buck, community. I think if that one word were shorn of its ideological wool, we would think back everyday and remember how hard the Enlightenment thinkers worked to liberate the individual from the tyranny of the group.

Stories aren’t needed. Attention to what we do is needed. Attention to what we are. Attention to the great sea floor where now a valley spreads out to an horizon growing up green and thriving, savage and striving as natural selection shows it must if we are to survive. As I drive down Highway 5 and see the overwhelming “there” in successive instances of “now” I suggest that we shut down our museums devoted to a post modern re-purposing, our art, music, cinema and music based on de-constructing this or that heinous fiction of our history. This is all just pomp and remonstrance. The real artist doesn’t do anything with the prefix “re” or “de”. The true Artist, as the true Citizen, as the true Worker, as the true Legislator, as the true Human only purposes. Only constructs. Only creates. Only seizes that precious moment so monumentally there and so inevitably gone, to speak a truth, or commit an act of beauty on a day in the ever changing present, maybe driving down a highway built on an ancient sea floor, the car on asphalt built straight as an arrow to the horizon, but at the same time spinning madly around on a dizzy, precarious planet.

ADDENDUM: Societies are not likely to change soon. The trains must run, the sewers must carry away our waste, the buildings house our enterprises, our profit and loss, and ultimately our laughter and our tears because it’s there in our high towers that the spoils are divided. Societies are not built to change but there is one chance. And it may seem irrelevant in the face of the perfidy of our race. But that hope is that the artists stand firm and insist on the truths they perceive. Not the ones they abstract for profit but the truths of the living moment, which they hope to string out into the truths of many moments rightfully perceived and faithfully recorded. I wish I saw more artists doing that. But I don’t. Today’s it’s a carpetbagger’s game and a second rate carnival roughneck’s tawdry trade. If you want to see it in action the Venice Biennale runs from June 10 to November 21. If you don’t, concentrate on the work of real living artists: in the plastic arts Lucien Freud, Jenny Saville, Frank Stella, Kiki Smith: in cinema Hou Hsiao- Hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming Liang, and the one real director to hit the mainstream, Alejandro Inniaritu. His Mexican pals Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron are good too. A pity we don’t have native born talents with original insight and passion who have not succumbed to the predictable styles which court either the predations of profit or the obvious cliches of cheap moralists.