12 mayo 2008

12 mayo, 2008

HOLD THE PICKLES HOLD THE LETTUCE SPECIAL ORDERS DON’T UPSET US…HAVE IT YOUR WAY…HAVE IT YOUR WAY…

It was almost 30 yrs ago that the punk provocateurs first album came out, released by Warner Bros., & produced by Eno, after Eno & David Bowie had competed over who would produce this new band.

Devo were a bigger joke than the Ramones and equally as serious. (And ultimately Devo and the Ramones wound up with different franchises.)

People laughed and didn’t get it, or they laughed and got it.

And a few got the joke and got mad (cranky assholes afflicted with perception, like Robert Christgau).

The best, & most prophetic, lyric from that album was:

HOLD THE PICKLES / HOLD THE LETTUCE / SPECIAL ORDERS DON’T UPSET US… / HAVE IT YOUR WAY… / HAVE IT YOUR WAY…

They firmly had their fingers on or up something of the emergent zeitgeist...the corpus politic…

Pulse, cock, asshole, whatever...

We were all bozos on this bus, all consumers in this shopping mall, and we were so determined to have it our way that the bourgeois individualists drifted apart...

& a true sign of the times was when public schools started removing social studies & history classes from the syllabus, hoping that college would pick up the slack (I had learned about the Hansiatic League in 5th. fucking grade)...

We have become so atomized & anathemized, that there are no common coins in the realm, no common references, no agreed-on map-coordinates.

A few years back and old friend died.

Her passing was mentioned on NPR, and on Salon, & in the Village Voice, and eventually in the New York Times.

She was an Afro-American science fiction writer and McArthur genius grantee. (And she was a better friend to me than I to her, even lending me money to attend a writing workshop and being gracious when I took years to pay her back; through the years we would get together for coffee when she was passing through town, and when appropriate she would give me the requisite son-of-a-bitch slap.)

I called a mutual friend to share the bad news, as this mutual friend was so against the wall as to not be able to afford internet access, not be able to afford the bus fair to the nearest library. (Absolutely tragic for a computer programmer.)

Even though he had been a friend of this decedent, he was much more upset over the death of an old radio-serial actor who had been in every sci-fi radio serial in the 40s and 50s.

He had met this person once, a long time ago.

Yet he did not want to hear about the death of an old friend, in her mid-50s, as he was still grieving over the death of this radio actor who he had only met once, an actor in his late 80s.

I know that there are elective affinities and that not every work of art will resonate with everyone.

Over a week ago I was greeted by an acquaintance who made an odd & sarky comment about Robert Rauschenberg dying.

At the time I thought he was kidding, making one his usual very bad jokes.

I went home and checked on-line.

Nothing in the Village Voice.

Later I found an item in the New York Times, and then on the Beeb…

I had been in a downtown gallery the week before and saw a very good Rauschenberg silk screen from the late 1970’s, a terrific knock-off.

And if it wasn’t Rauschenberg’s best, it was a very good self-parody.

And if an artist can’t rip themselves off from time to time, then who can they rip off?

Rauschenberg was a bridge between the abstract expressionism of de Kooning and the pop of Warhol and Jasper Johns, and he had obvious links to the surrealist and Dada couch boys. And he was king collagist…

Rauschenberg even co-designed an album cover for Talking Heads, a sort of sculptural jigsaw.

With Rauschenberg form not only followed function, but took notes and came back to take names and ask questions.

His work was a continually evolving demonstration of the William Carlos Williams axiom that the pure products of America go crazy.

And per L. Bangs or J. Feiffer, if anyone did a dance about architecture, it was Rauschenberg.

His work always had energy, a visceral and kinetic buzz that delights and informs the eye.

And it still does.

If you can’t get to a decent museum or gallery, then go to a few of these links.

guggenheim rauschenberg

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_133_0.html

rauschenberg link

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/rauschenberg_robert.html

rauschenberg - erased de kooning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ