Eye On Art: Alexander Archipenko

 He was born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1887, but his pursuit of art took him to Moscow, Paris, and eventually New York, where he was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, when he passed in 1964. Archipenko is credited as having been the first to apply Cubist principles to architecture and the creator of "sculpto-paintings", which are pieces that combine 2-D painted art with 3-D sculptural components on a canvas. 

"Médrano II" 1913-14. Painted tin,
wood, glass and painted oil cloth.

My introduction to Archipenko was entirely incidental. I had biked over to my local library and was looking at a book on Cubism, hoping to find some spark of inspiration that might ignite the pilot light of my imagination and result in a sketchbookin' session. I don't recall the exact title of the book, or its author–not that it's entirely important here–but on a page amongst some quarter-page reproductions of Fernand Léger's and a couple of Braques, was this tiny black and white picture of an Archipenko sculpture. It was this tiny, Post-It note-sized reproduction of Médrano II (1913). It stuck out like a neon sign. As much as I adore Léger's cartoonish pop color compositions, and Braque's broken-mirror-reflection building scapes, this tiny little insert photo was able to draw my eye away from the featured stars and put a bug of determination in my brain that buzzed to know more about this artist and his work.

"Femme assise" 1920. Gouache on paper.

"Femme Marchante" 1912. Sculpture in bronze.

There's a certain dynamism in Archipenko's pieces that vibrates with an aesthetic resonance in tune with those to whom Mid-Century abstraction appeals. Archipenko's work not only encapsulates everything that I find appealing about Cubism, both in form and principle, but also, as stationary, inanimate objects, his sculptures seem to resonate with a frenetic energy that other Cubist sculptors like Joseph Csaky and Jacques Lipchitz don't. I'm not disparaging either of those artists, Lipchitz's series of angular figures Le Guitariste (1918), Pierrot (1919), Harlequin With Clarinet (1919-20) and Man With Guitar (1920) would be tempting purchases if money were not an issue; but speaking subjectively, it's the negative space that Archipenko incorporates into his forms that create a sense of movement. He commented on this practice by saying:

"Traditionally there was a belief that sculpture begins where material touches space. Thus space was understood as a kind of frame around the mass... Ignoring this tradition, I experimented using the reverse idea, and concluded that sculpture may begin where space is encircled by the material." 

"In The Boudoir" 1915. Oil, graphite, photograph,
metal and wood on panel.

"Der Tanz" 1912. Sculpture in plaster.

"Carrousel Pierrot" 1913. Painted plaster.

"Venus" 1954.

"Red" 1957.

"Torso In Space" 1952-53. Lithograph, screenprint and embossing on paper.

Obviously this is just a taste of Archipenko's prolific output. Some of the pictures above were gleaned from Archipenko.org, which is an amazing resource that breaks down his life by decade and allows one to really see how his process changes, how his work progresses. It's definitely recommended to dip your toe into, even if you just want more eye candy.

Well I'll Be Sammed

Benny

About a month-and-a-half ago, around a week before my 41st birthday, we found ourselves saying goodbye to the second of our two dogs. My little Benny was ADR, as they say in the veterinary industry, and, sadly, it was his time. It may have hit extra hard due to the fact that his brother, Moss, left us just six months prior. Seeking a diversion the day after we had to cease our journey with Benny, the wife and I wrapped up our yard work and decided to find some spot of local interest to take our mind off of things for a while. 

I don't recall how I'd heard about Hot Sam's Antiques and Foto Park, probably some wide net Google search for local activities at some point, but I pitched the idea of driving over to Lakeville to check it out and we did. 

The "Antiques" portion of the business isn't so much a draw. Most of small town America from the Catskills to San Ysidro has a string of brownstones in their downtown district that have been converted into thrift stores or overpriced junk drawers, that have more to offer than the mildewy office/antique store at Hot Sam's, which more resembles a residential property that had to be hastily evacuated than a Goodwill. But that's not where the real business is anyways. It's the "Foto Park", where you'll find the proprietor buzzing around in his golf cart, chatting visitors up and making sure they pay the cover charge. The cost varies based on intent. If you're a yokel like me, walking around and looking at the sculptures and maybe snapping some cell phone pictures, the cover's an easy $5. If you have a fancy camera and are planning on taking some prom photos or something, then the cost per person goes up.

The sculpture yard is definitely interesting; there's a lot of creativity and craftsmanship in some of the pieces. There are some other artifacts that seem dilapidated, like the rotting boat fragment that reads "S. S. Minnow" on the backside, but overall all of the actual sculptures are pretty great. You'll find plenty of dinosaurs, extraterrestrials, lizard men and robots, as well as several nods to pop culture from the early-to-mid 20th century, like Betty Boop, the Adam West Batman television show, Snoopy, Tweetie Bird, even a Gumby and Pokey (of which there's a picture of me posing with, somewhere). 

If you're looking for something to do in the South Metro, Twin Cities area, and the weather permits outdoor activity, I would have to say I recommend a stop. Whether you're looking for a hit of nostalgia or just want to take in some outsider art, it's a good place to visit. The business's website is here.

Happy Birthday, Olga

 

When I was in high school, I had the privilege of meeting and interacting with a number of foreign exchange students who would, for whatever reason, come to our little hamlet in southeastern Minnesota, through the school's exchange program. I got the know one cool Frenchman named Romain (even if he does love RHCP), and many more. One of those students, someone I consider a friend even though we haven't seen each other face to face in decades, is my friend Olga. Olga turned 40 this past Thursday. Olga is Ukrainian and, as a Ukrainian living in the Ukraine at this point in history, means she might not be having the best of all possible birthdays.

I don't paint portraits for a number of reasons, but I wanted to do something for Olga beyond a social media shout out. This is what I did. Looking at it, you can probably discern why I don't paint people from photographic sources very often. Be that as it may, this is what I painted for Olga. 

Olga (R) and I (L) in May of 1999.

Above you can see both Olga and I avoiding the eye of the camera, for whatever reason, in May of 1999. This would have been the celebration for my 18th birthday. As for the hats being spun around backwards – what can I say, the past is a different country, people do things differently there. I've learned from my mistakes and now, when I wear one at all, I wear it properly.

Macumba Noir

 

Acrylic on black paper

Holy Batshit, Batman!

There's very little to say about William Dozier's mid-Sixties Batman series that hasn't been already said. A pop-cultural tour de force that managed to ape its source material, while somehow remaining truer to the spirit of it than anything that has come after. In the interest of full disclosure, Adam West's Batman has been my favorite television program, and "thing", period, since I was old enough to be cognizant of it. I don't know when I first saw it; I know I was very young, and would watch it from the kitchen table of our tiny house on West 7th Street, in Winona, Minnesota, on the even tinier television perched atop the (presumably standard size) refrigerator. The very idea that Batman was a thing outside of an illustration on a pair of pajamas (I surely wasn't old enough to have or know what comic books were at that point) exploded my brain like six packets of Pop Rocks® and a jigger of Coke® taken all at the same time! 

To make a long story short, it's something that I've carried with me into my forties, and, in a sense, it has carried me as well. And as we age, if we're not strictly seeing things through the distorting lenses of nostalgia, we find new facets to the things that we've kept with us since childhood, or pick up on certain themes or nuances that were maybe aimed at a more adult portion of the audience, that we couldn't process at the time.

Of course Batman was nuts. There's all kinds of insanity going on, all of the time. Folks will often site the Season 3 episode "Surf's Up!", in which The Joker, played by Cesar Romero, challenges Batman to a surfing competition. The hope is by besting Batman in a surf competition, he will become surf master of Gotham City, which, in turn, will win him the allegiance of all hip Gothamites, and then, of course the world. Nuts. It makes no sense, whatsoever, but the way it's executed is fun as hell. There's the statue of Khnum that King Tut puts in Gotham Central Park, in the episode "The Curse Of Tut", which Batman describes as "An exact replica of the sphinx at Giza," which it isn't, obviously. Nobody points out what most grade school children know to be wrong, to the greatest detective in the world? And then, of course, there's the sexual tension between Batman and Catwoman, which comes to a (figuratively speaking) head in the two-parter "Catwoman Goes To College" and "Batman Displays His Knowledge." When Batman confronts Julie Newmar's Catwoman in the second episode of the adventure, she propositions him with the line: 

"Batman, let's throw caution to the wind. I mean after all we are two adult human beings and we're both interested in the same thing. Happiness. I can give you more happiness than anyone in the world."

It's not just the line that pauses the Biff! Pow! comic book shenanigans, but the delivery. There's a significant pause between "thing" and "happiness". It has less subtlety than a Desiree Cousteau performance, and may be the single horniest thing I've ever seen put to film. 

Still, all of the wackiness of the most discussed bits of the series, all of the grease paint-coated mustaches, sexagenarian thugs in sweater vests and Bat Anti-Penguin Gas Pills aside, may be trumped by a two-parter from Season 2, featuring a seemingly disposable, and largely forgotten villain called Shame. The episodes are titled "Come Back Shame" and "It's How You Play The Game," and aired on Novermber 30th, 1966 and December 1st, 1966 respectively. Shame is an ornery hombre deftly played by Cliff Robertson, and his game, so to speak, is rustlin' up some specialized engine parts from various vehicles around Gotham City to build a super fast engine for his truck. Why? Well, he plans to steal some prized cattle, and wants to be able to outrace the Batmobile when the Dynamic Duo inevitably give chase. But that's merely a formality before which all kinds of insanity plays out.

First of all, Robin gets shot. Not by colored gas, not with a tranquilizer dart, not with a confetti bomb or freeze gun; he gets genuinely plugged with a slug from a revolver. Granted it's off camera and in the heel of a foot, but for a show that generally reduces the real world threat and seriousness of violence to being trapped in a giant clam, or potentially hacked apart by a massive Calder-esque pop art mobile, the Boy Wonder out-and-out getting a bullet in him seems so out of the rhythm of the show that it genuinely gave me pause on rewatch. Double that with the fact that Batman then puts a piece of metal between Robin's teeth so he won't bite his tongue off when he extracts the bullet with his Bat Pocketknife. Yes, the extraction is done just below frame, yes Robin is rushed back to the Batcave, where he's given Batcillin, which has him hopping on his feet pain-free in one jump cut, and yes, it's obviously an homage to the western films that the writers are playing with the tropes of for the episodes, but, wowza! Not something I necessarily processed when I was watching as a five year old.

Cliff Robertson as Shame.

Secondly, the guest stars. Our main villain, Shame, is played with cowboy cliché camp by Cliff Robertson, who would win an Academy Award just two years later for his performance in Charly, the 1968 film adaptation of the Daniel Keyes story "Flowers For Algernon". His gal pal in crime, Okie Annie, played by Miss November 1958, Joan Staley, is also the female lead in my favorite movie of all time; the Don Knotts vehicle The Ghost And Mr. Chicken, which came out the same year as these episodes. While they do a great job, there are some other folks who pop up which provide a much more perplexing insanity to the show. 

From Joan Staley's 1958 Playboy pictorial. 

Staley with Don Knotts in The Ghost And Mr. Chicken. Staley
famously had to wear a brown wig for the role because her 
naturally blond hair made her "too sexual."

First of all, the infamous window cameo–in which a celebrity pops out of a window to have a back and forth with the Dynamic Duo, as they scale the side of some building–is Werner Klemperer, in character as Colonel Klink from the television series Hogan's Heroes. One might think ABC, the network behind Batman, was trying to cross promote television programs, since Hogan's Heroes was on the air at that time, but oddly enough, Hogan's Heroes was on CBS, a rival network. Even more head-shaking, is the fact that Klemperer doesn't appear as himself, undoubtedly a household face, if not name, at the time, or as some other random business man or Gothamite, but as the Nazi Colonel who oversees a Prisoner Of War camp! Batman pauses to caution Klink/Klemperer to be careful not to get caught by Chief O'Hara, and "sends his regards to Colonel Hogan", which is its own mindfuck, because Batman is definitely rooted in "present-day" 1960s, and Hogan's Heroes is inarguably set in 1940s wartime Germany. Wouldn't Batman aid in the capture of a Nazi colonel? Even an escaped one? The allusion that the second World War was still going on, or at the very least that the Nazis were still in power and operating P.O.W. camps in 1966, in nuttier than a goddam squirrel turd! And the fact that Batman acknowledges he's aware of both Colonel Hogan and his status as a prisoner in Klink's camp, is equally bananas! He traveled to Londinium in Season 3, is Batman above traveling to Germany to liberate American soldiers? The whole thing is asking for a suspension of disbelief light years beyond a man escaping a shark attack with handy can of Bat Shark Repellent. 

Minner (center) with Jan & Dean.

In addition to Klemperer, we have actress Kathryn Minner, aka The Little Old Lady From Pasadena, herself. That's right, the white haired granny that had a minor period of fame as the face of a Dodge commercial campaign from 1964 to 1969, and appeared on the cover of the 1964 Jan & Dean album "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", which featured the hit single of the same name. In the second part of the two-parter, "It's How You Play The Game", we see Minner hagling with Laughing Larry, a used car dealer who happens to be in cahoots with Shame. And yes, she gets to mention "I had to come all the way from Pasadena!" before speeding off the lot. It's true that surf and hot-rod culture were still percolating in the pop consciousness in 1966, but twangy surf guitar and songs about carburetors were more or less giving way to fuzzy frat rock and stream of conscious psychedelia at this point. I don't know if Dodge was a sponsor of Batman at the time, but it seems like such an odd inclusion to shoe horn into an episode, especially since the Jan & Dean tune was considered something of an oldie at that point.

Minner buying a new hot rod from Laughing Larry.

Perhaps the oddest, or at least most annoying inclusion into the mix, is a little boy named Andy Stevens, who wanders in and out of the affair, begging Shame to come back (hence the title of the first part). The tiresome tyke is played by a child actor named Eric Shea, who did a fair amount of work afterwards in television shows and Disney pictures through the early Seventies. His wandering in and out of the thick of the two episodes, shouting out his lines as a sort of comic relief character that, I guess, adds a soft touch to Shame, showing he's not just a cold-blooded cowpoke, makes relatively little sense. And, believe it or not, Andy's transistor radio is a major/minor plot point. All in all, these two episodes aren't just a Mad magazine parody, they are the parody plus the Sergio Aragones margin doodles all crammed into two 22 minute television show episodes. 

Andy decides he doesn't want to be a cowboy any longer,
he now wants to be an upstanding citizen, instead.

Add to all of that the fact that the final showdown at the Gotham Corral finds Robin riding one of Shame's henchman like a bucking bronco, shouting "Giddyup!" makes for a truly surreal viewing experience. No to mention Bruce and Dick lingerie shopping for Aunt Harriet!

Looking at the credits for the episodes, it's hard to suss out exactly why this two-parter seems so much more intensely nuts than others. They were directed by veteran series director Oscar Rudolph, who directed 36 episodes of the show, and the scripts were written by series regular Stanley Ralph Ross. Weird choices were made, to be sure, but I stand by my claim that whatever shenanigans The Joker, The Riddler or Catwoman may have gotten our Caped Crusaders up against, it ain't a ping in the spitoon compared to Shame.

* On an unrelated note, the magic of home video technology has finally allowed me to answer one of the lingering questions about the Batman series that I've had since day one: What the heck are we seeing when they do the spinning scene transitions? The red and black one appears to be the ignition button for the Batmobile, and the multi-colored one appears to be an image of Batman and Robin looking down at something. Now if I can find out why the hell there are always clouds of smoke wafting into view from the left-hand side of the screen every time the Batmobile pulls up in front of City Hall, I can die unburdened.

Finding Hugh Walpole

I had been thinking about going swimming. It would have been the first time in Lord knows how long since I'd been, but the weather wasn't having it. Initially, the weather report had read full sun and eighty-some degrees. Well, in northern Minnesota, the weather seems to be a different animal than is found anywhere else. So there I was, sitting cross-legged on the end of a dock, bracing myself and my inflatable Justice League pool raft against a persistent wind that whipped the slate-colored waves into angry peaks, looking like a little kid who'd just witnessed his scoop of melting ice cream do the slow-then-speedy slide off the mouth of his waffle cone, before making a messy, Jackson Pollock impact with the concrete.

It was cloudy, it was windy, it was maybe sixty-five degrees, tops, for those brief pockets of mere seconds when the shifting cloud cover permitted some direct sun exposure. Some bleeping vacation, huh? 

No, the round, red apple of summer was starting to show the brown rot of autumn at that point. Which, naturally, put me in the mood for ghost stories. Fall always does that to me.

I had been wanting to wade into a good collection of ghost stories for a while. My foundation in the genre of supernatural/horror fiction is firmly built in the Ray Bradbury/Robert Bloch/Richard Matheson/Charles Beaumont/Marjorie Bowen/Seabury Quinn tradition; i.e. I really like late 19th century and early-to-mid 20th century material. I wanted something in that vein, so I turned to that local light in the dark, Dreamhaven Books. 

When I stumbled across the reprinted All Souls' Night by Hugh Walpole, I knew absolutely nothing about the author. I'm not sure I'd ever even seen or heard his name mentioned before, but the book sold itself as a book of chilling horror tales:

"But it was in the field of the macabre and supernatural that Walpole was at his best, and this collection of sixteen tales contains many of his finest, including the classic werewolf story 'Tarnhelm'; the oft-anthologized 'The Little Ghost'..." (from the back cover).

It was originally published in 1933, so it was right up my alley.

I gave it a shot. 

All Souls' Night does in fact contain ghost stories. And it does contain the shapeshifter tale "Tarnhelm; or, The Death Of My Uncle Robert". But the ghosts in tales like "The Little Ghost" are almost incidental to the tales they haunt, and very rarely do they do much ghosting. There are genuinely dark moments in the stories included in the collection, ranging from a house that decides to look after the best interests of its owner, in "The Staircase;" the aforementioned "Tarnhelm;" and the darkly surreal "The Silver Mask", which, I have to believe Thomas Ligotti read at some point. But by and large, the book is full of character studies and explorations of the human condition that are much more W. Somerset Maugham than H.P. Lovecraft, and frankly I found it amazing.

There are at least two stories about dogs, and what they mean to the people who take care of them, such as "The Whistle" and "Sentimental But True". Dogs are only the impetus, of course, for the dissection of human pride and a look at human relationships, as well as setting up a dare I say modern analysis of the expectations of women dealing with wounded egos in a patriarchal society, as well as a melancholy meditation on how humanity can be lost in translation when people are viewed through the stratified layers of the social classes. 

Another thing that struck me about Walpole's fiction is how little he relies on subtext. It was clear to me  by the time I was a couple of stories in to the collection, that Hugh Walpole had been a gay man in a time when it was illegal to be a homosexual in the United Kingdom, but seemed to write like it didn't matter!   

For example, this blurb from the male protagonists's point of view in the tale "Portrait In Shadow": I liked him at once. Standing there in the new morning sun, the water dropping from him in crystal drops, he was as handsome a man as I've ever seen – more handsome, I sometimes think, than anyone else in the world. 

Again, the male narrator's words about his recently deceased male friend Bond, in "The Littlest Ghost": I believe that he knew me, with all my faults and vanities and absurdities, far better than anyone else, even my wife, did.... I missed him, of course; was vaguely unhappy and discontented; railed against life, wondering why it was always the best people who were taken and the others left;....I had a flashing, almost blinding need of Bond that was like a revelation. From that moment I knew no peace. Everyone seemed to me dull, profitless and empty. Even my wife was a long way away from me, and my children, whom I dearly loved, counted nothing to me at all.

I haven't done a deep dive on Hugh Walpole, I don't know much about his personal life and struggles as a gay man during a time when simply being one meant punishment by law and social persecution, but damn if it didn't seem ballsy as all hell to put such blatant prose into his work. It's the literary equivalent of beating the reader over the head with a cast iron skillet, and you'd have to be as obtuse as hell or have the mental acumen of a rutabaga to not pick up what he's laying down.

Hats off the Hugh Walpole! For the horror reader, there are some genuinely good chillers in the collection, including "The Silver Mask", "The Staircase", "Tarnhelm", "Seashore Macabre. A Moment's Experience", and "Mrs. Lunt." The remaining eleven stories in the collection of sixteen, are incredibly cognizant distillations of human folly and frailty, hubris and ignorance, in the guise of short stories about seaside vacations, marriage proposals, dogs and more. Recommended if you're a fan of Maugham or the short fiction of Roald Dahl, minus the humorous twist endings or shock value accoutrements. 

I was tricked, when I bought into the ad text on the back of Valancourt Books' 2016 edition of Hugh Walpole's All Souls' Night. It isn't a book of macabre ghost stories. It isn't anything like what I had initially wanted it to be when I purchased it; and I was treated in the best possible way.

Ruff Neighborhood

 Acrylic and spray paint on paper.