Hasta La Gadget!

There’s a gun nut in Alabama named Mike Rogers who represents the 3rd Congressional District, an area which includes the town of Anniston. And every gun nut like me knows Anniston because it’s the headquarters of the Civilian Marksmanship Program, aka the CMP. One of the easiest ways to get certified as a gun nut is to buy a rifle from the CMP. I bought two of the surplus M-1 Garands, one an original made at Springfield, the second a 1950s makeover turned out by Harrington & Richardson located right up the road in Spencer, MA.

Congressman Rogers, like most Republicans, has no trouble pushing government spending if the money is somehow connected to the military and the result is to create civilian jobs. So he’s attached an amendment to the 2016 military spending bill which changes the law covering the CMP. If the amendment stays in the bill, from now on civilians will not only be able to purchase rifles, but all “firearms” that the Army considers to be surplus and thus available for anyone to buy. And it further turns out that the Army happens to be sitting on 100,000 old Colt 45 pistols that were first brought into service in 1911 and then replaced by the Beretta 9mm beginning in 1981.

There are probably more pistols built on the Colt 1911 frame than any other handgun ever made. Commercial models newly manufactured by various companies sell quite well; hundreds of thousands manufactured overseas have been imported back into the States. I have probably owned at least a dozen Colt 1911s since I bought my first commercial model in 1976, but the ones that were made for the military and are stamped “United States Property” are few and far between. As opposed to the M-1 Garand and Carbine, of which the Army has probably sold off several million guns, the pistol has never been made available to the civilian market, although on occasion one pops up here or there.

The problem that gun nut Rogers has encountered, however, is that the Army doesn’t appear willing to go along with his scheme. Last week the military sent a memorandum to Congress citing concerns about public safety, accountability and possible violations of federal gun laws that needed “additional study” before the CMP’s charter could be revised. In brief, the Army feels that these handguns, as opposed to CMP rifles, would be released to the public through unverified, online sales, therefore could not be traced by the ATF, and would therefore be a violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968. And don’t think that the Army made this up on its own because the document cites as its source for this information none other than the DOJ.

This document is a quintessential example of the blind leading the dumb, or maybe the other way around. The CMP ships all its guns from and to federally-licensed dealers; purchasers must fill out a NICS background check form and agree that NICS must approve the transaction before the gun is released. Judging by my experience when I bought my Garands, the CMP creates a larger paper trail for each transaction than anything done in the local shop. Incidentally, although the Army cites DOJ as the source for this misinformation, the DOJ no doubt was given this nonsense by those regulatory geniuses at the ATF.

Given the stink that was made over the ATF’s attempt to ban some .223 ammo, you would think that the gun lobby would be yelling and screaming about what is a bona fide violation of 2nd-Amendment rights. But while some of the pro-gun blogs are blazing away, so far the NRA has uttered nary a peep. And I’ll bet they continue to keep their mouths shut, because for all their talk about being the first line of ‘defense’ for gun owners’ rights, these stalwart defenders of the Constitution aren’t about to say jack when it’s the Army and not Obama who wants to keep us from owning guns.

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Tidal subscribers were in luck on Monday when Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé dropped the video for “Feeling Myself” exclusively on the streaming service. The song, which appears on Minaj’s “The Pinkprint,” first leaked online last December. And now the video for “Feeling Myself” has leaked.

In the video, Minaj and Queen Bey play with squirt guns in inflatable pools in pink fur coats, eat cheeseburgers in a bounce house, have a champagne pool party and share Now and Laters. It’s pretty much the summer party of your dreams. (And proof that bucket hats only look good on Beyoncé.)

Image via Tumblr

Beyoncé previously released her video for her new song “Die With You” on the artist-owned streaming service last month. Soon after, Rihanna released her video for “American Oxygen” and Jay Z released his music video for “Glory” via Tidal. There are also rumors that a possible Jay Z and Beyoncé joint album will exclusively premiere on Tidal, proving that the streaming service is serious about rewarding its users, especially after Jay Z’s special Tidal shows over the weekend.

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I’ve been holding off writing about Jenny Morgan’s work because I’ve had trouble figuring out how to look at it. It is very beautiful, but of a kind of formal beauty which tends to push me out of a painting. This is a weakness of mine and I am working on it.

Until very recently, I hadn’t actually seen her work in person. Let me share with you the experience of seeing it at a remove, and then describe how physical presence adjusts that impression. Here’s a painting from her current solo show, “All We Have Is Now.” This piece is fairly typical of the aesthetic she’s developed over the past few years.

LINK, 2014
Oil on canvas, 84 x 60 inches

Familiar elements include the layering of a nearly monochrome, front-lit tonal rendering of the female nude over a sherbet-like varying color field, hyperclarity and darkness of hair, nipples, and belly button, blurring of the face, and crisp edges where figure meets flat, bright ground. There is a kind of industrial perfectionism to this approach. The delicate layering allows no corrections to errors made during the rendering. The pristine ground prohibits the canvas from getting even slightly dirty during the painting. Stephen Jay Gould remarks that a perfect evolution erases its own history, and Morgan paints to erase the history of her work; process is nothing, goal everything.

So fierce is her will to control that she has recognized and incorporated into this aesthetic her own, and the viewer’s, need for mistakes, for chaos. She provides two safety valves to avoid total procedural determinism:

First is the unevenness of her sherbet-field. The gradient from red to pink to orange to yellow under the two women is uneven and washy. It could be perfectly smooth, but it isn’t, it never is in her work. It lets in a little breeze of the unpredictable.

The second valve is the blurring of the faces. As far as I can tell, she’s sanding down finished renderings, wiping away her own work and possibly augmenting the faded features with dark streaks. This too is an unpredictable procedure, this attack on completed work. Apart from any narrative meaning it holds, it transmits a sense of danger, of risk – the face is the most important part; how much will she wipe away before her painting is destroyed?

And yet, each of her paintings makes use of this same toolkit, with most of the elements under total control, and the messy bits corralled in their right places. I have found their foregrounded graphic design and their utterly polished quality alienating. I could see that they were beautiful, but I did not want to look at them.

When I finally got around to seeing them in person, though, I was reminded of something my friend Kelly Nichols once said. I was guiltily confessing to wanting some new Apple product for no particular reason except that it was awesome. Kelly, who is a brilliant and enigmatic designer, said, “Since when is awesomeness not a valid consideration in evaluating a technology?” I hadn’t considered this point of view.

I had occasion to consider it a second time looking at Morgan’s work in person. It is, if anything, more perfected in person than in photographs – she is quite willing to place a highlight on a single point of the canvas where warp and weft overlap to create a tiny bump. Her figures are scaled monumentally, at perhaps 1.5 times life size. Morgan herself is very small, and if she is anything like many other small women I have met, she is interested in strategies for claiming the space she deserves in the world. Many of her paintings are self-portraits; in them, her grand interior scale leaks outward, like the TARDIS on Trenzalore. To me this is very likable, her transmutation of a personal circumstance into an aesthetic of authority.

It is easier, in person, to make room for what Morgan’s work is offering, and to stop asking it for what it does not have to give. It has tremendous formal beauty, focused ambition, a strange but first-rate set of technical skills, and a charged creativity of composition. Its intense graphicality, coloring, and proficiency give it a Cupertino feeling; perhaps it references psychedelic posters, but for me, it is more sympathetic with the iPod or the Balloon Dog, and their finite and distinct catalogues of colors. Awesomeness, as we use that word now, seems like a fair way to describe it.

Morgan’s work has so rigorous a degree of precision that it exhibits a bias toward fixed literary meanings conveyed through visual symbolism. Consider HEAVENFACED, completed not long after LINK:

HEAVENFACED, 2014
Oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches

Here we have the classic scenario of a figure and its reflection, in which the figure’s gaze is offset from our own and yet, uncannily, the reflection meets our eye. Atop this narrative proposition, Morgan layers a scenario in which the real figure exists in a world of hard edges, and the reflected figure in a spooky fading world where the individual features wash away. Only the intense but distorted eyes remain, which is to say, awareness remains. The reflection lives in a haunting world of awareness which is different from our own familiar plane. And yet, the right eye of the real figure is beginning to exhibit the same blur as the reflected image. The reflected world is bleeding back into the real one. So what are we to make of the direct contact the reflected gaze makes with us, the viewer? Must we blur too? We have here three figures – two of her and one of us – in a striking evocation of a familiar literary concept, aphorism 146 from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” – or, more generally, you will tend to become the thing you gaze upon – including yourself, including enlightenment.

For all that seeing these paintings in person reconciled me with them, I do not think I would feel so compelled to write about them if Morgan were not already growing past them. This is no small thing. If you go to her website, and study her work from 2009 to 2014, you will see her refine the toolkit we’ve been discussing. There used to be more elements to it, and less skill. Sometimes roughnesses crept in at the edges. With each painting, she has thrown something away, and improved her execution of the elements that remain. Having reached, at last, a purified form of her initial impulse, you would think she’d stick with it for a while. It is testimony to her seriousness as an artist that she grew restless right away.

We turn now to early 2015, and find that she has brought a skeleton into her studio.

IN THE MOMENT (DEATH HYMN), 2015
Oil on canvas, 56 x 38 inches

Well this is very interesting. You can tell it’s her first time, or close to it, dealing with this skeleton, because it has the same awkward kind of pose as a model one works with for the first time. You don’t know your new model, and your model does not know you, so between the two of you, you choose a weak or obvious or generic pose. Morgan hesitantly bends the skeleton back, letting the arms hang, and starts from there. She’s trying a new subject, and doesn’t know what it does yet.

She is also trying new tools, or at least mixing up the ones she’s got. She tries a new thing in each part: here jet black, there rendering without color, here a new algorithm for the sherbet-field, there a stain edging into the pristine yellow ground. It does not especially work for me, and yet I like very much that Morgan is so clearly laboring to shock herself out of her assumptions about how to make a picture and what to make a picture of.

Next she takes a stab at synthesizing the elements of this new paradigm with her literary sensibility:

POV, 2015
Oil on canvas, 56 x 38 inches

We see some but not all of the elements of the first skeleton painting. The handling is surer now, the pose decisive, the color coordinated. In fact, she has imported the hanged man from the Rider-Waite tarot deck:

Even as she is groping her way toward expression in this new territory, her choice of the tarot tells us that she is becoming preoccupied with magic. Magic takes many forms, but I think one of the important ones for artists lies in making the leap from explanation to assertion.

Artwork that explains comes stammering up to you, wanting to account for every little thing. It feels a need to justify its contents, setting up clockwork cosmologies which can only be grasped for a moment before artist and viewer alike forget their intricacies.

Artwork that asserts is content merely to be. Often it can be explained, but explanation is not its goal nor its mode of creation. It comes from a blazing core of creativity, and the artist has matured enough to trust it – to step out of its way. I think of Francesco Clemente and William Kentridge as two modern masters of assertion.

Morgan soon stops thinking about magic and begins simply performing it: she asserts.

IN THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS, 2015
Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

Consider how much lighter this is than the work we have been considering, how fluid in composition and effortless in aspect. The jumpy background color – gone. The rendering of the figure – gone. The individuation of the face – gone. Both the hesitation and the overdetermination of the pose of the skeleton – gone. This painting falls into the exact configuration natural to it, without the index finger of the artist nudging all the bits into position. Morgan trusts her minimal elements, and tells a very simple but open story of a dance of life and death, of weight and weightlessness, burden and flight and letting go. She reconciles in this piece the strict perfectionism of her method, which survives intact, with the demands of art, which makes so much of its home in mystery and a dreamlike flux of meaning.

This is not to say that the maturity of this piece cancels out, or even precludes continuing, the kind of work that Morgan made before. Let’s look at one last piece from the show, painted during the same period that Morgan was trying to figure out what to do with the skeleton.

DARK STAR, 2015
Oil on canvas, 70 x 48 inches

To me this is one of Morgan’s strongest applications to date of her earlier idiom. The range of values is more pleasing, the coordination of colors more beautiful and more ambitious. The match of hue and expression on the face, that mix of vulnerability and catastrophe which seems to give the painting its name, suggest to me that the literary skew of Morgan’s work has developed into a psychological skew, a more complex and trusting means of perceiving and expressing the humanity of her figures. At the same time that she commands the medium, she surrenders to the work.

What we see, then, is that the new revitalizes the old. There was nothing wrong with what Morgan did before, except that she already knew how to do it. She was close to seeing that line of image-making, so clearly a labor of love spanning many years, wither away. In setting out to question what she did and expand what she could do, she breathed new life into her first mode of working.

This is a standing dilemma of art as a process of making. Mastering the means of making the work leads to great creativity, because creativity feeds on basic obstacles. But overcoming those obstacles often long pre-dates the heart of the artist losing interest in the given mode of working. Resolving the formal and technical problems does not mean one is done with the thirst to make the work.

Most artists, as they grow, should abandon what came before. Many do not, and go on rehashing the same few motifs for many decades. The ones with integrity let go of the past. There is a tiny third category: a few who blaze alternate paths to keeping their labors fresh. Morgan is pursuing this more difficult goal. Her path has bifurcated, and at least for now, her new ideas and her established ideas are talking to each other and helping each other along.

So this was what was so exciting for me about “All We Have is Now” – not only the specific qualities of the work, but what the body of work tells us about the still-developing process of its creation. It is a show full of discipline, creativity, growth, and hope. It vibrates with possibility, it is an unfinished, exhilarating story. Well done, Ms. Morgan, and best wishes for many years of new roads.

—

Jenny Morgan: All We Have is Now
Driscoll Babcock Galleries
525 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

until July 02, 2015
all paintings copyright Jenny Morgan, courtesy of Driscoll Babcock Galleries
tarot card via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RWS_Tarot_12_Hanged_Man.jpg

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Yesterday, my baby sister Mel Giegerich graduated college at Davidson College in North Carolina. Yesterday, many of your loved ones graduated as well. You attended commencement services and sat proudly in your seats beaming as you watched your loved one walk across the stage in black gown and mortarboard. You listened to powerful speeches about the next steps they will take in the world and the precipice of greatness they stand before.

I was not at my baby sister’s commencement yesterday and hoped that she accepts this love note as a small gift to the awe-inspiring woman who walked across that stage.

Mel, Pacific Palisades CA, August 2009

Mel has championed her way through college with difficult challenges in her way. She paid for college awarded a full basketball scholarship, a blessing for a girl who did not have a silver spoon.

Mel (left) in February 2012 / Photo courtesy of Davidson College

Between her hours of basketball training, games, psychology major, volunteering with autistic children and friend engagements, I’m lucky if I got to speak to her in the last four years. When I was in college, I showed up to row crew for a week and promptly discovered that five hours of practice a day was not something I could mentally or physically handle. Mel shoulders all of this effort with extra energy in tow.

We weren’t the type of children who had the financial easy street to college with full support from mommy and daddy.

Manic depression’s a frustrating mess. – Jimi Hendrix

We’ve become resilient. My younger sister, in comparison to me, has a lightness of being which is inspirational. In her transparency and honesty, she has taught me so many coping mechanisms I have found invaluable.

Not only does she support herself taking whatever jobs she can find to pay for whatever remaining expenses she’s had, but she spends her time taking care of her friends and roommates, making sure everyone is taken care of. She has been, since her younger years, one of the most generous human beings I have ever been blessed to meet.

When she was seven, she used to rescue bugs and other disgusting creatures in the yard, chronicling her achievements to me as I looked on with fear, a woman who hates bugs of all kinds. She would pack up her bug discovery in a glass container, screwing in the little fiend with air holes to let it breathe, and then chase me down in the yard to show me. She was the Mother Theresa of her yard, taking care of all creatures cute and not so cute with her equanimity.

The first thing you should know about my baby sister is that she’s no longer a baby and she surely isn’t the size of one. At 6’5″, my sister surpassed me in height when she was twelve years old, a discomforting feeling for the sister fifteen years her senior. I held her in my arms when she was one year old, a nugget so small I thought I would harm her with my clumsiness. Now, she towers over me like the World Trade Center and I have to wear heels to be present in photographs.

Mel: 6’5″ and her mom Robin: 5’6″ in April 2013

Being an avid cyclist, I used to bike Mel around the neighborhood in a bike carrier fitted on the back of my bike. She would bounce up and down uncontrollably with glee making California hills an atrocious challenge. “Mel, quit it!” [giggle giggle giggle giggle] “Mel, seriously, quit it!” [giggle giggle tee hee heee heeeee]

I never told her how much these bike rides meant to me. Bike riding is my favorite activity, the two-wheeled thing I do to feel free from the chaos of the world. I got to do it with my baby sister co-pilot laughing hysterically like a hyena and that is a memory I will never forget.

We didn’t bike together again until she was twenty-one years old, this time along the coast of California in Venice Beach for July 4th.

Mel, Brittany, and Caroline Venice Beach, CA in July 2013

This time we each had our own bicycles and her bouncing had subsided…a bit. It was equally magical to ride alongside her and her friend pointing out the odd participants of the Muscle Beach scene and merging around the tight sandy beach turns narrowly avoiding the children who never seem to have watching parents. On this trip, she convinced me to get tattoos with her and her friend Brittany.

Quintessential Mel is that she got a tattoo which symbolized her love for her sisters: an E for Elisabeth, M for Mel, and C for Caroline encased in an infinity sign. She’s so precious. I continue to be in admiration of her spirit. Meanwhile, I got a bicycle tattoo, which in comparison made me feel like a selfish asshole.

In the summer of 1997, I was a radio DJ for a small commercial radio station called 95.5 WBRU in Providence, Rhode Island. My sister came for a visit. I invited her to the studio and ambushed her with a microphone in front of her face during my show. At first, she silently looked at the metal contraption in front of her peering skeptically from the microphone to me and back again. Then, she breathed something that sounded like a whisper and I asked her to speak up. A peep here. A giggle here. Her first radio show and as always she jumped to the occasion.

The next day, I brought her with me to the radio station’s summer concert series, a free concert held down by the water in Providence. My job this day was to introduce the bands on stage including the Goo Goo Dolls and The Specials. My sister was five years old and had no idea who any of these bands were. While I was on stage, I left her with a Yo Yo to pass the time and asked the guys from The Specials if they would watch her. I came back to find her teaching singer/guitarist Lynval Golding Yo Yo tricks which mainly consisted of her lassoing the Yo Yo around him or twirling it around in circles. They were giggling like school girls, he showing her his new kicks and she showing him her mighty flip flops. Mel became the most popular person backstage inspiring throngs of people chuckling everywhere she flitted.

While introducing another band, I returned to overhear her telling lead singer John Rzeznik from the Goo Goo Dolls that “You should really eat more. You know, you’re far too skinny Mister.” At the time, it was rumored that Rzeznik was anorexic. My eyes grew wide and I scooped her up, laughing nervously; These kids today say the darndest things Mr. Rock Star. She had no idea of course. She just smiled at me while I scurried her away.

Mel has always lived her life with an adventurous spirit that knows no bounds, a girl who always puts all the windows down every time she gets in her car. While writing this, I thought of all the wise things an older sister can say to a younger sister on the day of her graduation.

I worry about her as I have been in her shoes, about to exit the comfort of the college life and enter the world. The world immediately humbles you with its vast expectation and demands. I have risen and I have fallen flat on my face. I so want her to always rise and never fall. However, what those commencement speeches should tell all of us is a message sometimes forgotten.

Failure should be expected.

It is a part of success as it creates an understanding of what not to do, an understanding just as powerful as what to do.

Mel, on your graduation, I want you to know how proud I am of you today and every day. I am proud not because of your physical achievements or because you are gaining a diploma on this day. I am proud because of the person you are, a generous empathetic young woman, so rare in this world. I am the lucky one, because I get to know you.

As you enter the world and strive to figure out your why, know that it will come to you when it comes, not when you want it to. It will come and it will be the second most important day of your life. Give me a call. I want to hear all about it.

Happy Graduation to all you graduates. Go LIVE IT LOUD.

Blanca, Caroline, & Mel on Blanca’s 2nd birthday in July 2014 from Gaffney, South Carolina / Home of the Giant Peach from House of Cards

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No glue. No cables. No steel reinforcements. The only thing keeping this bridge intact is, well, physics.

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