INDIUM

You see this guy?  Know him?  He’s the clerk at One-Stop, the only service station in Valier.  When I bought gas yesterday I had a long conversation with him.  It was about the exotic trace element called “palladium”.

He knew that palladium is often recovered from meteorites like the giant one in the Siberian wilderness (one of dozens in Siberia) and the one that created the Gulf of Mexico.  He explained that there is a plan to mine the Yucatan asteroid.  They would proceed by using underwater jets to wash the palladium out into the sea, just as they used to blast gold out of the hills around Helena.  The result would be a huge ring that could be seen from outer space.   And then he went on to discuss the Stillwater palladium mine in Montana near Billings.  The only other mine for this material on this continent is in Canada.  Russia holds the big cards.  My friend understands the political and economic implications.

“Exploration of the Stillwater Complex by the Johns-Manville Corporation has led to the discovery and delineation of an approximately stratigraphic zone rich in platinum and palladium comparable to the Merensky Reef. This zone, here called the J-M reef, is generally 1 to 3 m thick and has been traced for 40 km, essentially its maximum possible length within the outcrop area of the intrusion.”

Palladium

Palladium is in the catalytic converter of my little pickiup and in the one-dollar-each monitoring strips for blood glucose, which is why they cost so much.  It’s pretty stuff. The politics of the mining, reclamation, uses, and new discovery of ore is the material of a hundred spy novels.  So, using your detective skills, what in the first paragraphs of this post is bogus?  

It’s the photo.  The man in the image is Charlie Koontz, who plays FBI Agent Daniel Krumitz in CSI: Cyber.   But he looks almost exactly like the clerk at the service station, who is a high-quantum Blackfeet Indian just as informed and intelligent as Krumitz.  I don’t know about the actor, Koontz.  All three of them break stereotypes: that Indians are dumb and uninformed, and that fat people are neither smart, dynamic nor energetic people.   (CSI shows are science-based and good about ignoring stereotypes.)

This is all great stuff and I would keep on along these lines except that I made a mistake.  It’s not palladium that I was asking about — it’s indium.  So now I have to go back and see what my informant knows about “indium.”  Yes, there really is such an element and, no, it is not named for Indians.  It is named for the “indigo line” in its atomic spectrum.  The atomic spectrum is “the spectrum of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation emitted or absorbed during transitions of electrons between energy levels within an atom. Each element has a characteristic spectrum by which it can be recognized.”

Indium

“Indium is a chemical element with symbol In and atomic number 49. It is a post-transition metallic element that is rare in Earth's crust. The metal is very soft, malleable and easily fusible, with a melting point higher than sodium, but lower than lithium or tin.”

“Indium tin oxide is one of the most widely used transparent conducting oxides because of its two main properties, its electrical conductivity and optical transparency, as well as the ease with which it can be deposited as a thin film.”   This is what makes touch-screens work.

Electrical and transparent.

The color indigo is the dye for blue jeans.  And so now you see how connected the world is, weaving in and out of vocabularies and chemical reactions.  And how useful Wikipedia can be when it’s not assassinating people’s reputations by telling false facts about them.

My first plan in writing this post was to complete it with a photo of the real clerk and the genealogical facts of his family.  He’s proud of them and knows a lot.  Like me, he’s chosen to live a low-pay life that gives him time to learn.  This is not only against stereotypes about Indians, it is against the stereotypes about fat people.  He values his privacy.  As far as I know, he has no intention of writing a book.  Hooray.

We are now just about a month from the big money-making Russell Auction in Great Falls, which is actually a sort of city-wide frenzy of auction stereotypes about Charlie Russell, the artist; about Western art; about Indians; and all the Manifest Destiny dizziness that hides the holocaust of the continent when the indigenous people were killed by microbes, war and starvation.  Colonized.  

https://www.cmrussell.org/2016-catalog/TheRussellCatalogue2016.html#p=1

This is the link for the art that is for sale in a month and is now hanging in the CMR Museum in Great Falls.  Many artists complete their year’s income at this auction, which the attendees fancy is something like Sotheby’s. They feel they are characters in a movie, all dressed up and spending money to demonstrate status.  And that status derives from the exploitation of a people and their land, which then subsequently splits into contempt for their down-and-out status, while constructing a fantasy of nobility and supernatural relationship to nature.

This man is dressed for competitive dancing.

It is a costume.

The art is beautiful.  The tendency to make art “cute” by depicting raggedy little Indian kids playing around a log cabin has disappeared, along with the drunks.  There are pages and pages of advertising along the lines of the slick magazines that market an imitation of the rough and primitive for very rich people who build mountain houses of glass and stone, furnishing them with sofas upholstered in steer hides.  They wouldn't want anyone to think they were effete or elfin.  

I’m not trying to chide them for spending their wealth however they please.  In the Sixties I was part of that world, all dressed up with my turquoise necklace, explaining bronze casting to dudes.  Bob Scriver was “my” artist and raison d’etre.  Brilliant, powerful, and a player on the board of CMR.  His bronzes are rarely auctioned but the reasons are best discussed in another post. 

Subject:  Mountain Crow Horse Shield

Artist:  Kevin Red Star

Our foundry and studio in Browning employed local Indians — Blackfeet, Cree, Metis, and whatever.  Those were the people we knew.  We worked alongside them.  The daughter of David Cree Medicine, Bob’s best foreman and son of Carl who helped build the foundry, asked in an email yesterday if anyone had  a small Scriver bronze she could buy.   If you have one, I'll put you in touch. She will not be able to afford anything at the “big” main auction, but there are small subsidiary ones.

The point is that the reality of Indians will get you only sneering about their every confusion and misstep, and cynicism about the future.  But the fantasies about Indians are worth big bucks.  Few of these paintings will be created by indigenous artists.  They tend to do geometric and symbolic work that shows up in the minor auctions around town at the same time.  The general public is not educated to understand abstraction and they don’t like the political dynamic.  They don’t want to know about where Indium is on the Table of Elements, they want to know how much it’s worth,  and they know that the big moguls who made their money in mining during the 19th century collected Western art.

The final irony is that the West that Charlie depicted was already gone by the time he got here and his family’s wealth came from extractive mining.  Don’t tell anyone.  They’ll walk away.  Which is a shame, because there's no need to choose between myth and reality.  They're both valid.

I buy gas in ten dollar increments and try to get through the month on that.  It's not enough to get to Great Falls.  But at least I buy the gas from a real Indian.

ADVICE FOR THE COWBOY ART AUCTION SEASON

The “Cowboy Art” auction season is beginning with the posting of the CM Russell Auction in Great Falls. The auction itself is on the weekend nearest Russell’s birthday, this year March 20, 21 and 22. The website is www.cmrauction.com. I’ll be participating in the Autograph Party on Saturday from 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM.

The main auction is at the Heritage Inn and occupies many of the rooms that are normally rented overnight. For this event the usual furniture is removed and artists bring set-ups to make the rooms into mini-galleries.

There is a second auction at a different motel, plus a half-dozen additional spin-offs. These smaller events are less predictable and not confined to art. They may include books, Indian artifacts, or cowboy gear. Sometimes they are the work of an artist who is present and sometimes they are of dubious provenance. The actual CMR auction is a collection of art juried by experts and there are reliable protocols, but the smaller entrepreneurs may be floaters from out-of-state. Montana art law is nearly nonexistent.

www.askart.com sent me a tip-link to the Scriver bronzes in the upcoming Ad Club official CMR Auction:
http://www.askart.com/askart/artist.aspx?q=7283028&artist=19479

At the Scriver location on that website are many requests to know “how much this piece is worth,” as though one were able to determine such a thing, esp. in the art world. A piece of art is worth what someone will pay for it at the moment it is for sale. Much depends on the times, the event, the attendance, and who went to the bathroom at just the wrong moment. Putting those variables aside, here are some thoughts to consider when deciding whether to buy a Scriver bronze.

1. What year was it actually created (rather than cast)? Bob’s career falls roughly into three parts:

A. The Fifties when he was making tourist trinkets from hydrocal (very hard plaster) and painting them with lacquer. Hundreds of these were hand-produced in Browning and mostly sold for less than ten dollars. Some of them have been posthumously cast in bronze, since they have the Scriver name on them, but they are not Great Art and their value is mostly as a novelty.

B. From the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies is the period when Bob’s work was at its peak. The sculptures themselves ARE fine work, heart-felt, and often cast in the Bighorn Foundry by Bob, myself, and the Blackfeet crew. Bob liked to work in series, so these works include the Blackfeet series and the rodeo series plus many, many animals. These are the pieces of most value, but they rarely show up at auctions. The people who bought them are reluctant to let them go, and if they do, they usually move quietly through prestige galleries. As Bob’s reputation slowly grows back after damage at the end of his life, these are the bronzes of investment quality.

C. Later in Bob’s life his health prevented him from bronze casting. He began to use small ceramic-shell foundries and cast larger editions. Sometimes he would create a piece at someone’s suggestion and sell them the right to cast (the copyright). Quality control on these castings was much lower, the pieces themselves were smaller, and many copies were made in each edition. They were done quickly in order to pay the bills. Though they are popular favorites, usually story-based, they are generally what travels the auction circuit, around and around, in search of profit.

In addition there are an increasing number of posthumous and black market castings, some with stories about how Bob “gave me the wax.” The ones I have seen have bad patinas, esp. one that Arrowhead used that makes the bronze look like plastic or the ones that are multi-colored: red shirts, blue jeans, and so on. (Arrowhead is no longer in business.)

I’ve seen figures of Ace, Charlie Russell, and a nude of Bob’s second wife, Jeanette, which have probably been recast from the early hydrocal versions that Bob sold at the beginning of the Sixties. The people who are selling them may be assuming that they are out of copyright, which they would have been by old rules, but a new law has been passed that makes them still illegal. However there is no responsible party able or willing to prosecute. Bob’s lawyer was ignorant on the subject (and others).

The advantage of casting a bronze from a hydrocal is that the main way to discover a recasting is by comparing an original with the knock-off, which will be slightly smaller because metal shrinks when it cools. Also, detail may be blurred. A mold from a hydrocal will be indistinguishable unless it is badly done. For a while there was an artist attached to a major institution who would sit and copy with his eyeball the major sculptures of the collection. He usually made the size markedly different, hoping that this would put the copy out of copyright. He’s had to stop.

Since that time, technology is so incredibly resourceful that machinery exists to make a perfect copy of a living human model by using lasers and computers. This factor has been around for a while, but not so technological. Rodin’s Age of Bronze was so beautifully accurate that the sculptor was accused of simply making a mold of his model. Also, SE Asian craftsmen have become very adept at eyeball copies, esp. garden sculptures which may be offered in fiberglas. The only REAL way to detect copies is through provenance, tracing the bronze from casting through all subsequent owners.

Much Western art around Montana has been subsidized by people who make enough money to have an excess to invest. Unfortunately, they rarely have the time and interest to develop their aesthetic or historical faculties, so their interest is not always a good indicator of long-term value. Most of them judge art by how much it reminds them of Charlie Russell’s work. If you are of that inclination, the auction in Great Falls will give you the opportunity to look at a major museum collection, well-presented in that the viewer can see the work arranged to show Charlie’s development as an artist.

If you are planning to bid for art, do your homework, don’t risk more than you can lose, and buy what you really love. Those have always been the rules for a prudent person. Aside from that, the festival atmosphere of the show is often its own reward!