"THE WIRE" -- IDEALISTIC VOYEURISM

“The Wire” is a highly acclaimed HBO series about cops, longshoremen, teachers, and journalists. Working people, maybe moving up the class ladder. So? It’s not glamorous, there’s not that much sex, it’s written by people who KNOW and step outside the stereotypes, so it doesn’t win the big prizes which always go to the stereotype du jour. I came to love it.

Why? Because it is written by my kind of people. Not that smart or educated in an academic way or any of that stuff, but people who work at the interface between worlds. When I was first making educational materials about animal control, I said animal control is “at the interface between people and animals.” I’ve tried to make the distinction between humane society people, who usually work out of shelters for unwanted animals, and animal control people, who work in the streets, like the other emergency responders and keepers of community order.

The best explanation of the series, what motivated it and how it achieved what it did, is this interview by Terry Gross with Ed Burns:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6524743

Here are quotes from each of the partner originators. David Simon has said that despite its presentation as a crime drama, the show is "really about the American city, and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals. Whether one is a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge or a lawyer, all are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution they are committed to."

When Burns was teaching, he “saw his primary role as instilling caring behavior in his pupils.” He felt his major impact was in giving the children an example of an "adult who's consistent, who's always there, who always comes through with what he said, then that's a new world for them.”

Institutions arise to address needs: governments, hospitals, schools, police, building inspectors, “dog catchers”, and drug networks. Need drives, shapes, and sometimes destroys the institutions. With the institution comes what I call the “interstitials,” the corner boys, the truant officers, the cooks, the snitches, the shelter attendants, all the backstage invisible stuff. What is legal or not, what is evil or not, is negotiable. Simon and Burns saw this.

It’s not different from the discussion in brain theory contexts about how people develop categories in childhood (Burns calls them “certitudes”) about how the world is organized and then work their way through their lives by making adjustments and getting tough. Even the institutions are constantly adjusting -- this is the twenty-first century way of understanding society, VERY different from the Victorian and colonial givens. This is the impact of both science as it perceives forces imperceptible and unaccountable without modern technology, and of our intense media access to so much -- other cultures, other creatures. Also, we begin to understand that we cannot survive if war is the only solution we have and the idiocy of framing everything as war.

“The Wire” is organized around the idea of voyeurism: there is as much surveillance photography as wire-tapping. The chief use of interface people is to gather information and convert it into understanding. So you have pictures of clock faces being sent -- what does it mean? So you have no bodies in spite of inevitable enforcement killings -- what does it mean? Not just “what’s happening,” but “what does it mean?” The killings are rarely sensationalized: people are popped in the head and simply no longer there. What does it mean?

Next come the “what if” questions, like the police chief who tries the “Hamsterdam” experiment of confining drug biz to a certain area. Going back to my animal control experience, Mike -- very much like the Bob Wisdom character -- was always trying something. But, just like the Wisdom character, he was shut down. We were using a hypobaric chamber to kill dogs -- which is inevitable. (A big tank pumps out the air until the dogs don’t have enough oxygen to survive. The guy who invented it crawled in and experienced it as far as unconsciousness and said it was like being drunk. Alcohol chemically prevents oxygen from reaching the brain.) It looks scary and is easily misunderstood as suffocation where airways are closed by force.

So whatever force it is (sentimentalism?) in our society that denies death and suffering, insisted that this form of killing be removed and drugs (medicalization) be substituted. They are very desirable drugs. Mike became aware that someone was stealing and selling drugs. He set a trap, caught the culprit, and reported him to the bosses. He was fired for that, just like Bob Wisdom’s character. This sort of thing happens again and again.

Omar, says Burns, was deliberately defined as the one person who stands against all institutions. The many real stickup artists were less colorful, but just as much voyeurs, information gatherers. Omar was given a shotgun, an Aussie duster, and outsider status as a gay, but Michael K. Williams added an actor’s ability to make objects part of his character, his own scar, and his willingness to open-mouth kiss a guy (not in the script) or rise from a bed naked. Soon he was mythic. Others, like the actors who played Stringer, Chris-and-Snoop, Bubbles, and the four boys whom we see grow before our very eyes, inhabited their parts to the level of realer-than-real.

But the ultimate interface roles were those of the writers. They were the ones who knew they were making a long-form filmed story that was exactly a novel in the sense that a novel is always a moral investigation. They were the ones who knew the material culture of Baltimore and loved it. They made the Edwardian rowhouses that stand solidly together into both symbol and reality as beautiful tombstones of a city destroyed. Maybe someone else will show their renovation and re-inhabitation as a new way of living in the city, old bodies (bottles) for new lives (wines). Or maybe they will be rubble.

What happens to people who do this work of understanding and explaining in images and interactions? What preparation brought them to this? For whom are they writing? I can only conclude that they write for people like me and maybe the Peace Corps and Headstart generations. Idealists who have worked in rat-ridden trenches that challenged their certitudes and abilities. There are a lot of these people -- more than anyone realizes, I think. They are always watching and looking for ways to get the word out to people who have power, or maybe ways of empowering those trapped among the tombstones. On “The Wire” the word is out.

"SUMMER HOURS": Review and Reflection

Never before have I heard of a film being commissioned by a museum unless it was some kind of documentary overview about an artist or collection.  In fact, I didn’t order “Summer Hours” because of that -- didn’t find out until after I looked up the movie on the Internet.  The museum wanted a fictional and calm reflection about the dispersal of art collections, both those created by the artist and those collected over the years.  They got it, very gracefully done.

The issue is a sharp one for me because of my age -- at seventy-one I’m the remaining wife of four women married to Bob Scriver (b. 1914).  His peers in the category of Western artists are now slipping away.  The dispersal of Harry Jackson’s personal collection is scheduled at the next Coeur d’Alene Art Auction.  info@cdaartauction.com  I have special sympathies for Harry, who was like a younger and “classier” version of Bob Scriver, but I’ll save all that for another blog.  

The larger issue is how to think about collections as such.  The set-up in the movie is that a woman, very elegant and thoughtful, has three children.  She has been the guardian of her uncle’s estate.  The uncle was a fine and famous artist, closeted gay and yet a lover of this woman.  She has clear ideas about what should happen to the house and the objects, which include useful household items: a desk and chair, an armoire, art glass vases.  

They are used -- in fact, some of the things in the bottom of the armoire, like cleaning supplies, may constitute mis-use.  Of course, every time a glass vase is used, it is endangered.  The elderly housekeeper has no notion of their value and, in fact, considers them ugly, but finds one useful for the large bouquets cut on the grounds.  The theme of “brokenness” and wear are also presented by an ordinary plastic shopping bog unceremoniously containing fragments of a broken Degas figure, one of the sturdy ballerinas, which the family thinks is irreparable but does not throw out.

The three children are set up to represent three points of view: the daughter now lives in America and is about to marry.  Some of the objects, silver, mean something to her and she takes them.  A set of sketchbooks also matter to her but she wants to sell them at Christies and fancies she knows their value and how to handle it all, because she is an art designer.  She turns out NOT to know.  France blocks the sketch books from being exported from the country because they are classified as national treasures.  Christies is slammed as likely to maximize profit by tearing out the pages of the books, which are meant to stay together and intact.

One brother represents hard-headed practicality and simply wants to convert everything to cash because he will be living in China, has three children to raise, and takes a management point of view, since that’s his occupation.

The other brother, who lives nearby and is what one might call an “ironic economist” -- that is, he is sentimental and protective but not reactionary -- must do the actual business, painful as it is.  His encounters with the lawyers, the museum board, the curators, the housekeeper, are our guides.  

One of the interesting members of the museum board argues against acquiring the Art Moderne desk and chair, even though they’ve been borrowed for exhibit earlier and at that time there was interest in acquiring them permanently.  “Why acquire them only to lock them up where no one sees them and they quietly molder in the dark?” he asks.   (Oh, yes.  Bob Scriver’s work is locked up in warehouses.)  In the end they are accepted and exhibited, but the third brother and his wife ask each other if the sterile presentation is really how such a familiar and useful piece of their lives should be honored.  Shouldn’t someone still be writing at that desk?

The ultimate and sheltering “art” is the great house itself with its hillside grounds full of paths down to a river.  The movie begins with the joyful screaming and scrambling of the grandchildren romping everywhere.  It ends with the same thing except that the children are now young adults and they are bursting with music, beer and pot in a big crowd of friends.  Is a careless house like this a better place for art than a careful and serene museum?  The beautiful things have all been used, taken into memory, made carriers of many happy times.  But I’m reminded of a relevant novel,  “The Bowl Is Already Broken” which seeks to discover who is responsible for dropping a priceless ancient Chinese porcelain bowl, and what the implications might be.  The point is that loss is inevitable.

And then, embracing the house, the art, the lives of the people, here is this film!  Not much deep and bruising inquiry into private lives.  We never even SEE the uncle, only his representative the niece, so we never really know how he came to acquire the house or even how he became an artist.  Since the most valuable objects are by other artists, we assume he didn’t leave a fortune and we don’t really know what his work was like.  This is quite different from the usual sort of film about art.  It’s cool, philosophical, not a study of fraught genius, but rather a reflection on what to do with what has been gathered together.

Museums become a little more crowded all the time.  Taste changes so the problem of what to discard -- something HAS to be discarded or the museums will become the size of football fields -- becomes highly contentious.  “De-accessioning” is the dodge-ball term for dumping out what the current administration thinks is out of favor.  And the government often finds it politically worth meddling with.

In the end I think that “Summer Hours” encourages us to live in the moment, enjoy what we have without smothering the next generation, drink today’s wine from the most elegant stemware and pass canapés on the loveliest silver trays, but don’t hesitate to jam autumn’s asters unsorted into a capacious art glass vase.  Still, one can’t help respecting and yearning to preserve the goals of that elegant, upright, slender, silver-haired niece who keeps her secrets but is willing to place worthy art where it will be appreciated.

“Summer Hours (French: L'Heure d'été) is a 2008 French drama film directed by Olivier Assayas. It is the second in a series of films produced by Musée d'Orsay, after The Flight of the Red Balloon.”

50 YEARS OF CM RUSSELL AUCTIONS

In the past I’ve gone on my annual cruise through the Great Falls Auction scene in March on the busy days.  This time I hit it on Thursday morning, found parking places and found time and space to talk to people, which is why I went.  The shows were familiar.  In fact, some of them featured the same artworks that were there last year and the year before and . . . who can tell them apart anyway?  

As one woman remarked, and several older men echoed,  this show is about the New West, not the original Western art scene fifty years ago when the auction began.  In the early Sixties when big shot New York art folks came through (they were artists looking for inspiration and recreation -- not even the fly-fishing craze had happened yet) they would stop in at the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, which was meant to be a resource for them.  They sketched the full-mounts of game animals and then Bob would draw a little map of where they might see some in the wild.  Or maybe he’d hire a model or guide for them.  Then he’d ask them,  “Is anyone else doing sculpture like this?”

George Phippen, one of the earliest recognized Cowboy Artists of America, was one of those people.  He and the few dealers (aside from Dick Flood, who was often underfoot) would say,  “Only Ernie Burke and Harry Jackson.”  Today there are hundreds and hundreds, all pretty good artists, some living in the rural West, and all with their laser sights on success, which they define as money.  In terms of art philosophy, they are in the camp of Mamie Russell, not Charlie, which is appropriate since her estate supports the Center for the Study of Western Art, a bastion of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel whose circled wagons include the University of Oklahoma Press and a host of client galleries and museums.  Charlie wanted to paint pictures.  Mamie wanted to make money.

As someone remarked, Western art today is all about the dealers.  To the uninitiated, they are so interchangeable that a number of people told me that so-and-so had died, never figuring out that the person they meant was Paul Masa.  The deceased was “whoever had that big center room when the Ad Club was managing things.”  

I didn’t go by the CM Russell Museum, since the art was about the same everywhere.  In fact, some of the nicer things (and more varied) were at the A. Hooker cafe and art gallery on Central Avenue   http://www.a-hookers-gallery.com/    From the website:  “Since her passing, many in the art world have reflected on the motivation of Arlene Hooker Fay, the person and the artist.  Most agree, that Arlene was strongly inspired by family in particular and humanity in general.  Indeed, she was also recognized for her unabashed sense of humor.  A. Hooker’s Gallery, 925 Central Avenue West, is intended as a tribute not only to her life’s work and her serious side but to the memory of Arlene’s many “hookerisms”, her trademark humor among friends, both new and old.” 

Arlene was a strikingly beautiful woman who had been confined to a wheelchair by childhood polio.  Its recurrence killed her.  It’s ironic that she had more of Charlie Russell’s spirit than most of the males wandering the scene.  Her maiden name was Hooker, her husband’s name is Tom Fay, and in the Sixties I taught school with him in Browning where the family made many friends and Arlene made many portraits.

The original Ad Club Auction has probably been changed in the fifty years of its run as much by the aging of the participants as by the shift in the whole society: especially an inflow of people who could afford to live in the West.  The responding “New West Lifestyle” hit art hard, emphasizing appearance and luxury, the Ralph Lauren West, the fabulous corten-sheet-metal, log-and-plate-glass homes that are inhabited only part of the year and thus can be situated in places inaccessible in winter.  One buys the hides of buffalo raised for meat.  One commissions a gallery to choose some proper art since one doesn’t have time to learn what it’s all about.  But that boom has about crashed now.  Or maybe it’s gone offshore.

The next impact that changed everything was, of course, the internet.  As soon as auctions go online there is no question that the serious bidders who know their stuff won’t bother to trek to Great Falls in March for an auction.  Look at the merchandise online or get your surrogate gallery to do it for you.  None of the rather boozy bonhomie and maybe trips to the surrounding legendary places.  (Scenery and ghost towns and where’s a really good place to eat?)  Today there is no dealer room that didn’t have an open laptop.  Though quite a few of those people could not bring up this blog because all they do is Google the websites that give you the auction ticker tape prices.  No more depending on the guys who roamed the country with a trunk full of art, trading on their info, and maybe cutting a few sharp deals.  They taught as they went, educating a generation of roadside operators about what was important and why.

I’ve long held -- usually in the face of protests -- that there is a strong connection between political style and Western art.  When the Repubs are in power, the grandiose, bellicose and triumphalist works sell like flapjacks so they can hang behind the desks of the powerful.  When the Dems are in power, the landscape, the animal, minorities and maybe even a little abstraction become the rage.  Watch the White House Oval Office.  Reagan’s Remington bronzes linger on.  I have yet to spot an abstract.

Art as markers are a bourgeois thing.  What I own shows who I am, and I want you to know I’m not just an ordinary person but someone with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, in this case Cowboy Artists of America, the CA mark.  Which is fine.  That’s about buyers and the dealers around them.

But I don’t belong to that tribe.  I’m still part of the untamed, roving, wild and raving sort of artists that don’t care who buys what.  They just want to push their obsessed hearts up against the world in a search for image.  They crave to be imprinted, branded, with passion.  These days the word “passion” is used by “mommie bloggers” who say they have a passion for cupcakes or crochet.  The truly passionate are not often recognized, dead or alive.  You probably won’t find them in an auction.

CMR: NOT JUST A MAN

There are two important functions of a museum: aggregation (the collection of things together) and curation (their interpretation). That’s pretty clear. The problem comes when greed and status are involved. Suddenly the monetary value of the aggregation and the status of the curator begin to put political spin on what most people would suppose to be a rather objective function. In fact, we are used to thinking of museums and historical societies as either governmental (tax-supported, which is more common in Canada or Europe than the US) or non-profit (even when they were originally started with endowments from very rich people). The idea was either that they were part of a cultural heritage that makes the nation stronger or that their purpose was so significant in the eyes of the original founders that they would underwrite them the way they might underwrite a cancer hospital. (We aren’t very used to hospitals being profit-makers on today’s scale either. But in Great Falls and Billings, Montana, health care is a major part of the economy.)

Let’s go back to aggregation. Small towns have often been the locus of personal collections of oddities, like arrowheads or albino animals or pioneer implements. Sometimes the things are there just because they are odd (we never lose our fascination with two-headed calves) and sometimes because they are nostalgic and occasionally because the owner simply had a lot of money, and used it to create an aggregation. They aren’t always in accessible places so after the original collectors, who housed them in a basement or garage or -- in the case of one small town in Saskatchewan -- an abandoned movie house, everything is simply dispersed or maybe there’s an effort to raise money through charging admission.

One of my favorite remnants of history now supported as a museum is in North Dakota. Medora was founded in 1883 by French nobleman Marquis de Mores who named the city after his wife Medora von Hoffman. Originally simply the graceful and elegantly appointed ranch house of the Marquis and his wife, who were driven out by meat-packing competitors, it’s something like the Conrad mansion in Kalispell which was emptied by changing times but left intact with furniture. The rather remote ranch home of Alberta Bair is in the category. Such places are heavily curated: the point is preservation rather than aggregation. The Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center is based on the curation of a place, how Lewis & Clark made the change from boats on the Missouri to horses as they continued their journey across the continent. A certain amount of aggregation of authentic equipment or art works are included as well as a point of scholarship, which is a form of curation, explanatory exhibits and talks by guides as well as small events that help people with hands-on experience of one thing or another, like faux parfleches made from brown wrapping paper.

The CM Russell Museum in the same town also organizes such events, especially for kids, who need more than tours to hold their interest. The point of the CMR Museum is aggregation of all things Charlie Russell. By association other artists have been included, though none as the primary focus. The original “seed” for the museum was Charlie’s good librarian friend, Josephine Trigg, who saved small things like letters or the clever little place markers from parties. Charlie’s original house and log cabin studio were there. Someone saw the potential for development and in the last fifty years the place has mushroomed into a major installation. Such a place offers a range of jobs from janitors and security guards to receptionists (originally volunteers), aficionado groups, and a small gift shop.

At the top is the director, who is presumably both an administrator and a curator -- that is, can manage organizational issues like building maintenance and the dynamics of a board of directors, but also is enough of an art expert to mount exhibits worth scholarly attention and to interact with other experts. Nowadays fund-raising is even more important than in the past. Beyond that, the CM Russell Museum has influence clear into Oklahoma where the residue of Nancy Russell’s estate now endows the CMR Center for the Study of Western Art at the University of Oklahoma. The University of Oklahoma Press (along with the University of Nebraska Press) is a major vendor of books about Western subjects.

The Great Falls CMR Museum had the good fortune to attract the attention of the GF Advertising Club, a dynamic group who sponsored an annual art auction on Russell’s birthday. This money-maker, soon imitated by the sincere flattery of other entities, not only attracted a cluster of side-kick auctions all over town, but attracted the interest of people working in the American Southwest on the crosshairs of cowboys and Indians. One example there, the Cowboy Hall of Fame, now called the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, was a major player in the development of Western art because of an alliance with the Cowboy Artists of America, a confederation of buddies who marketed together and gradually became an imprimatur of quality that meant a major uptick in artists' income. This interaction is occasionally challenged -- the motivation for, let's say, "accommodation" becomes a little too strong.

The granddaddy museum of them all, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, sometimes called “the Smithsonian of the West,” is in Cody, Wyoming, where it originally formed out of Buffalo Bill memorabilia, mostly guns, and the patronage of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, from the same family that created the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I hope I am making the point that the aggregation and curation of Western art, artifacts and memorabilia is an international network. (Alberta alone has some remarkable museums, including the Glenbow in Calgary, the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton, Head-Smashed-In in Fort Macleod, and the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.)

Truly qualified directors and curators are hard to find. Individuals shuttle around among institutions, sometimes museums, sometimes publishers, and sometimes academia. Even artists and gallery owners become players. This is not different from other categories of art or natural history museums.

Recently, as the interest of humanitarian millionaires (I mean Billionaires, since millions are small change now) has shifted to international issues (AIDS, starvation, disaster relief) and the big spectacular art museums have been built overseas in Europe or oil country, Western art has changed. Things are leaner. The most nimble of the curator/aggregators have had to mix and match. Take the example of B. Byron Price who is the director of the University of Oklahoma Press (where the editor-in-chief is Charles Rankin who was once the editor of Montana, the Magazine of Western History with its heavy CMR emphasis), also writes books published by the press and/or sponsored by the CM Russell Museum, and is the director of the CMR Center for the Study of Western Art, where staff from the CMR Museum in Great Falls occasionally lecture. Price’s good friend, who previously ran a commercial art gallery, now is the director of the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls.

The Ad Club, which sees itself as local, has decided to change its focus to something else, letting go of the regional network of Western artists who supplied infrastructure for the auction by renting motel rooms and converting them into mini-galleries. The artists are organizing among themselves to maintain this part of the event, but the lucrative auction has moved to the C.M. Russell Museum itself where the director will take on the challenge.

More about this in the future, since my past and, in particular, the career of Bob Scriver is deeply woven into all these institutions even as his estate sits uncurated at the Montana Historical Society.