Still Life

"I have concluded from the melancholy nature of my subsequent development that the artifacts hung up on a child's wall can have a permanent effect on his life."

So begins the essay on the role the Art played in my formation, an evolution spanning Southern California, France, the groovy Sixties, Africa. "Still Life" will reveal the malefic influence of "the original Joe Vogel," plumb the mysteries of “Ten Nights in a Barrel,” revel in the salvation of Dutch realism -- and picture this, so much more!

If you didn't grow up in a family of visual artists or art collectors, the prints and paintings that adorned the walls of your house were probably reproductions of the Beautiful (landscapes! Impressionist paintings! photographs from that amazing trip to South America!). What effect might this art which you took in consciously or not every day have upon whatever taste you developed as you became your own person?  Welcome to the Philipson Museum of Eclectic and Accidental Art! 

Host Info
Hosted by Dr. Robert Philipson
Robert is a former professor of African-American studies with a passion for jazz and art. A published author and Harlem Renaissance historian, he has produced multiple films about the intersectionality of race, music, and sexuality.

Music 

“What I’ll Do” - Chet Baker

“Vincent” - Daniel Champagne 

“Lute Music - Netherlands: Courante” - Konrad Ragossnig 

“Magnetic Rag” - Scott Joplin

"Pictures at an Exhibition" - Khatia Buniatishvili-Mussorgsky

“Pictures at an Exhibition” The Piano Guys

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Transcript

I have concluded from the melancholy nature of my subsequent development that the artifacts hung on a child's wall have a permanent effect on his life. Even the color of the paint can have unforeseen psychic repercussions. My room, for example, was done up in bright yellow, a hue guaranteed to induce an optimistic outlook or early suicide.

The pictures that were hung there. With neither my opinion consulted nor consent given, pushed me subtly in one direction or the other, contributing significantly to the schizophrenia of my later years. Worst of all were the pictures which seemed to stimulate both pleasure and paranoia. One of a teddy bear facing a globe come particularly, almost obsessively to mind depending on my mood.

The teddy bear seemed either innocuous or sinister. The globe simply a deli colored ball or a maleic instrument. Sometimes a plain brown teddy bear stared glassy at a pulsating, or sometimes a barely disguised demon conjured the destruction of an incensed world. It was all very confusing, and as adults never seemed to see the things I did.

I had no help from that quarter. My parents were unaware of the damage they were doing to their children's psyches, and naturally as children, we could only experience the thing as immediately real. The pictures were there. They were not to be questioned, nor even remarked upon. Every once in a while something would mysteriously appear or vanish.

I grew up with a padlocked filing cabinet in my room. My father's addition to the decor. The first wall hanging that reflected what personality I had, discounting the bulletin board, displaying my meager achievements was a framed map of the Paris Metro Lines. This was at 13. Up to that time, my consciousness had been shaped by forces beyond me.

By far the weightiest of my childhood picture adversaries was the famous Joe Vogel. Vogel was a painter who had been connected briefly but un prosperously to the family by a cousin on my mother's side. This cousin was practicing free love and communism in the thirties, and so was held simultaneously in Abhorrence by the Goldsteins and an adoration by my mother, who secretly wanted to do everything her wicked cousin did.

Being an artsy type, Marian married a painter. Unfortunately, Vogel wasn't a first string painter. Indeed, his name might've remained foreign to my ears, and I would have one less tick. Had my parents not bought one of his creations in their young and innocent days, shortly after their marriage. They had recently moved to California from a lifetime in Chicago, and the sun still dazzled them cousin Marian and Joe had made it out before them, and Vogel had painted enough canvases of the company's people's victory to put on a show.

Stuck up its vicious head, but for the most part, Vogel kept the revolution in the for. My parents were invited to the show and mother apparently liked one of the pictures. She persuaded my father totally indifferent to buy it naturally. Marian remarked you would choose the only picture that had no social significance.

What Karl Marx lost, however, went to the side of Freud, the original Joe Vogel, as my father referred to it, became a permanent fixture. This explains the appearance of abstract art in what was otherwise an eclectic but strictly representative art household. Vogel's abstract style placed itself somewhere between futurism and paranoia.

The painting naturally took up long residence across from my bed, along with baby pictures of my father. The source of more personality kinks, and I would spend long hours contemplating the black slipper that seemed to be adorning, a flesh colored pogo stick, other shapes represented. As best I could tell, the monstrous offspring of fruit letter openers and household furniture all engaged in acts made unspeakable by their cluttered, menacing indecipherable.

When I say that all of this melting and mutating took place in a brilliant blue background, which was itself far from breeding the brightest color, you'll perhaps appreciate how this unnatural pulie could have sinister and unforeseen effects.

I was given to nightmares. Another household picture, which puzzled me greatly in my childhood was 10 nights in a barrel. This was not, the name of the picture wasn't important enough to have a name. That is simply how I remember it. The print was innocuous enough. A New York Street scene painted in the style of Grandma Moses.

Bright colors, flat perspective, not far removed from greeting card art. The one anomaly, however, was an old fashioned billboard advertising a play called 10 Mites in a Barrel. One could lose oneself. Trying to fabricate stories for this title. This interesting but unusual question occupied my mind more than was healthy since the picture was placed squarely over the toilet.

I have since formulated the theory that the mind is more susceptible to subliminal images of art while a body is performing certain functions. Urinating and defecating obviously softened the mind for a temporary period. The only time I ever saw Buddha and then there were five of them, I was on the toilet while peaking on acid.

At any rate, 10 nights in a barrel worked its convolutions on me for many years. I'm sure it influenced the next stage of my formation in Paris. When I returned from Europe at age 13, I noticed that the poster actually read 10 nights in a bar room. After two years in Paris, southern California could seem a bit prosaic and a surrealist element had been taken from my life.

Not before it had accomplished its work. However,

I hit Paris at a curious stage in my development. I became superstitious. I had always known that repeating an action three times would increase its good effects or an all its bad. But my belief in the power of magic was considerably heightened by an incident that in its fiery revelation alone, left an indelible imprint.

This manifestation of an unseen order occurred while we were still in Pasadena. The month before we left for Europe, I was jumping on the trampoline in the backyard with my two sisters. The sky was black, but the diffused light of the city dimmed the brilliance of the stars. As always, the San Gabriel Mountains dominated the scene with an enormity that no man made light could diminish.

Suddenly a livid flame cut through the air. A meteor cried. My sister Alice, we wondered that we had heard no shock of impact. So near to the streaking fire scene and in our astonished and anticipating silence, we each made a wish science classes that taught us that falling stars were actually bits of matter that had pulled into the Earth's atmosphere.

But the mystery of these sudden flashes in an otherwise predictable sky still provided us the opportunity to supplicate unknown Gods falling stars belonged to the same class of phenomena as wishbone, dandelions, and birthday candles. My wish was that our Bassett hound could come with us to Paris when that wish came true, some five months later, it merely confirmed my belief in the invisible spheres.

My life became so full of private rituals that as I write now in the glare of an adulthood shor of miracles, I can scarcely remember how complicated it was. Walking to school was a labyrinth of magic crossings, unlucky corners, and auspicious lampposts that had to be touched. Policemen could only be looked at through the left eye.

I walked under scaffolding, holding my breath. For much of my family stay in Europe, I was solicitous in avoiding evil by all the means that my childish unshared religion could devise Paris stone. Gray city on the river San eventually awakened me a sense of beauty and thus separated superstition from art, but it was mostly unconscious.

And I passed from childhood to adolescence with only a glimmer of awareness. Europe taught me that art was the conscious creation of beauty. 90% of what I saw in museums and galleries left me indifferent. My conception of beauty was as narrow as my 12 years of experience, but when a picture or a statue came through to me, it did so with surprising force, Michelangelo's David odd me as the jelly clothes raft of the Medusa.

I was disturbed and fascinated by Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights and could barely bring myself to look upon the statue of Percys holding the Go's head in Florence's municipal square. Stained glass appealed to me particularly, and I remember how dazzled I was by the jeweled interior of the San Chappa.

I was unimpressed by the Mona Lisa, fatigued and bewildered in general by the Louvre. But I did like the Titanic dimensions of David and Jerry Cole. The brilliance of Van Gogh's colors made his church at Ove stick in my memory, and no child could fail to be captivated by the pointilism of Sikha. The late 19th century was as far as I could go.

However, the Ali of cubism and after caused me an occasional wrinkle of wonderment. But I rather dreaded going to exhibitions at the palate to Tokyo, except that its Terrace was excellent for roller skating as sketchy and imp impressionistic as my introduction to art was. Seeds were sewn for later germination, these late dormant upon our return to Southern California.

Art once again receded to the frame non-entities that hung on the walls of houses and banks. Indeed, the life of the middle classes such as we lived, it was not conducive to an appreciation of high art. The architectural monstrosities that littered the LA landscape, the corrosive flood of television images that washed through my adolescence, the fortress of manmade beauty in museums, in the homes of the rich.

All this served to eclipse any sense of the aesthetic I might have acquired in Europe. My high school education passed over the subject in total silence only nature persisted in beauty, and this in the face of smog, freeways, and an urban sprawl that shared all the qualities of a lava flow. Perhaps art was not so much quarantined in museum as it was protected, like some species of orchid that would perish in the harshness of the outside air.

Like the rest of my generation, I grew savages of weed, tough, healthy, and Philistine from root to stem. In the Southern California version of photosynthesis, sunlight was supposed to be turned into money. But my generation had its revolt against the prevailing American materialism, and in the battles we waged, we embraced an art that expressed and seconded our vision for the eye that had opened on acid.

Cher's graphics and the paintings of Dai were a pleasing, provocative site. Picasso was found to be politically correct for his dove of peace in the horrific Guernica. This made the weakness of some members of my generation for the droll penetrating sketch of Sancho Panza and Don gte, if not comprehensible, then at least acceptable.

Some of the more literary of us affected a taste for Aubrey Besley and Art Novo. But that was as far into cultural elitism as any of us dared Venture. The sixties was something of a mass movement. Since most of its participants had money to spend a mass produced art was created that catered to our tastes adorning.

The walls of my college dorms and communal houses were op out posters of Cha Guevara, reproductions of Buddhist Fissions, Peter Max and Maxfield Parish, Marxist Mes and the Tenal Alice, an art of fantasy movement and color. Following the taste of my non-artistic peers, I took the visual arts for granted and devoted what scattered energies I had for aesthetic cultivation to books and the realm of classical music.

If I went to a museum during that time, it was only because another had suggested the excursion. I joined the Peace Corps and went to Africa for three years. My contact with Western culture was through print conversation and memory. There was beauty enough in the African scene, but the manmade beauty I encountered there was a foreign inspiration and far removed from the idea of high art I had up to then.

This was only a testament to the inadequacy of my notions, but I had no inkling of that. Then. Unaware of the changes being wrought in my perspective. I came away from my time outside the West transformed in ways that surfaced somewhat later when I left Africa to live again in Paris, I was 27 man, and presumably formed in my taste.

I might have remained in infidel darkness, but like Saul of Tarsus, I was suddenly struck by the blessedness of vision. My rot to Damascus was the Bud Sangerman, where I stood one day idly leafing, a book of reproductions I had taken from one of the sidewalk bins of a ri. My eye fell upon a Vermeer plate.

And instantaneously I was entranced the chambers of my soul glowed vent force with light of delt, that same light so magically captured in young woman with a jug framed in an act of unconscious beauty. Vermeers young woman, so fresh, luminous, and modest held open the casement of a window, the miraculous sun streamed through in gilding brilliance.

And brought to Sensuous Beauty, the pelleted surface of things revealing their soul. The delicate warmth of the woman's white skin, the sensual folds of cloth, the subtle sheen of the metal jug, the touch of her hand, the weight of her wimple, the presence of her next move, never to be taken, caught between the map and the window.

Past, present, and future were crystallized. Captured made visible through eternity. Once the scales had dropped from my eyes, I could see with second sight and saw that I was living in a city that was home to the Louvre, the bul, the the mu, that I lived less than a day from Shara Ti Vo. The riches of Europe spread before me.

I, who had never before experienced hunger, awoke to find myself at a feast. Yet, I was no late blooming Ruskin. No Ahe Matisse discovering his vocation as a painter at 20. My response to art was primarily visceral, and my taste matured only slowly to encompass a wider variety of styles, a different set of aesthetics.

Art never became a passion, but it did provide a pleasure. One day as I was accompanying a French friend through the Museum of Modern Art at the bulb bulk, I came upon a huge blown up photo of plastic flowers in a cemetery. The point of the photographer was clear enough. The ghastly bright plastic provided an ironic counterpoint to the black austerity of the tombstones, the gentle life green.

Of the grasses, the markers, sed symmetry. I wondered aloud with a photograph, even one as huge as this was doing in a part of the museum, devoted to painting and sculpture. It is a painting. Said my friend, a young man studying to be an artist close inspection, verified his observation. I was dumbfounded.

What's the point? I asked my friend. The point of what? What's the point of one medium relinquishing its identity to another? It's a technical tour de force. But doesn't it imply that photography has the last word in the depiction of realism? What's surreal about a photograph? Does it move, smell, feel like anything but a piece of paper.

Reality is not art. My friend, that's elementary. Much art is obviously unreal. I replied granted, but some arc derives its power precisely from its depiction of reality. Give me an example, Vermeer. Francois shook his smiling features at me. You picked a bad example. Vermeer used a camera obscure in his painting.

No? Yes. Why are you so shocked? Vermeer? I thought he was. I just, I just didn't know. Yes. Another mechanical representation of reality that doesn't make Vermeer any less of a great realist. It just points up the inadequacy of the term realism to describe art. And photographs. Art is not realistic. If photography is the medium of art, that makes it no more realistic than painting or sculpture.

Alright, Francois, what is a photograph that is not art and not reality? A snapshot. And what is a painting that is not art and not reality? A failure. Later that evening, I sat in my neighborhood cafe in one of the working class suburbs of Paris and fingered a cracked photograph I had brought down from my room.

The bar was noisy with the bonomi of Portuguese and Algerian workers, but I sat at my table with this lone glass of red wine and something of a reve. If binocular vision creates the illusion of depth, I was having a similar experience in the realm of memory. I was taken beyond the picture I held in my hand to one of the dark Starr nights on the edge of the bush.

Africa for me enforced the inevitable separation from my family, and I was sick at heart. Longing to be once again, a child once again at home, was so strong upon me that the most mundane memories of my Pasadena childhood flashed through my memory with amazing force. The bicycle ride to the supermarket, the site of wet eucalyptus in the rain, the mission style library with its ponder inscriptions in stone.

At night in my house on the edge of the endless Savannah, I would sit at a table in the study next to the louvered window and work by the light of a kerosene lamp. I was a teacher and had to prepare my lesson plans. One evening towards the end of my third month, just as the homesickness was beginning to wane, a photograph fell from between the pages of a dictionary that I had finally received from the states as part of a book shipment.

I had mailed to the Peace Corps office before my departure. As I was packing the dictionary bag home, I'd stuck in a photograph I had found in my mother's cache of snapshots. As with so many American families, the ease and inexpensiveness of photography had led my mother into indiscriminate portraiture.

20 years had created an enormous volume augmented in its dismaying impression of narcissism run rampant by the chaotic condition of the photograph drawer. Albums were much too orderly for the. So all the pictures were roiled in a chronology place in drama Personae. Even my mother came to sense the futility of so much richness, throwing out the innumerable, indistinguishable baby pictures of the four children.

She kept one of an infant lying naked on a mattress in the backyard and labeled it Phillips and Baby. But one picture in the sea of silver nitrate appealed to my sentimental nature. And I slipped it in the fly leaf of my dictionary when it fluttered onto my lamp lit table months later in a continent away.

It was plunged into a painful mix of joy and loss, discovery and distance. The very seal of my break from home was this photographic reference to my past, taken by an unknown hand, my mother and father walked across a high meadow above the city of Oakland. My sister sat in the grass at one end. As my parents walked towards her, my parents walked in a casual unity, the intimacy of many years incorporated into their gate.

My sister sat wonderfully beautiful in her robe like dress and long black hair. Her face was sad. It was I who perceived her face as sad for. I recognized the timeframe as that of the recent past, the last few years, which had witnessed her divorce, her disenchantment with her career in social work and her questing experiments and sex and drugs.

This was information that I supplied as a supplement. My sister's face in the photo was too distant to read for expression what I held in my hands. In the flickering lamp light was a snapshot. The eye behind the lens had not been that of an artist to strangers. The image would've been clear but awkward.

A cracked black and white photo, no garish colors to underscore the accident of composition. My friend at the Berg was right, and I had known it all along, just as sound was not equivalent to music. A frozen image did not make art until the advent of photography. The frozen image had been equated with art busts, portraits, the crested wave forever about to crash.

Art made the frozen image eloquent. I'd learned that from Vermeer, Michelangelo, Monet. For every one of these, there were hundreds of lesser merit. And the same could be said of St. Eisen, Cartier, Bristol. The picture of my mother, father, and sister, the three I love most in the world, has never failed to invoke in me a response of regret and longing.

Yet it is a snapshot as an art. My emotions are engaged, but it is emotion arising from personal history. It would mean nothing to you. One black night in the cricket filled bush, a snapshot fluttered from a dictionary. Instantly I was transported to a meadow high above a city. The darkness about me faded into the creed, glossy surface of a black and white day.

My parents walked together towards my sister in the grass. The crickets sang. My heart increased. Her face was sad.

What dew.