Arabian Daze

ARABIAN DAZE

                Languishing in halls of splendour wreathed in sapphire and emerald all afire of a day when rapturous maidens clung to hussars and candle dreams. There, on the top of the moon, was a practical aid to dreams. At last a safeguard and pollywog to tune up the saffron images which streamed forth coming bright and golden through the shimmer.  On top of each was an umbrella filled with many hued leaves, mother of pearl and excellent diamonds. Pouring forth on the left was an ancient wrapped circle of garlands and gold, shining with a radiance that shook the forest and hollowed out our minds as does a cannibal after his nectar.

                Poor old man, humbled by years on this river, stumbling through the tree tops and picking up a sweet scent of roses from the branches at the top of the trees which brushed by him. It felt as if the day was a jewel in the eye of a swallow. This man was truly a giant if we were to believe our eyes, a towering apparition to see. He swayed in awesome blackness and grandeur through the topmost branches and tangle. Suddenly without warning there was a gigantic swishing in the sky and a tornado of gleaming crystals and opals showered down on our feet and hair.

                Silently we pressed our lukewarm senses against the air. They ticked. The atmosphere was alive with writhing odours, fragrances of flowers and smokes. Through the tangle was clearly distinguishable a castle made of lavender and cerulean glaze. Through its image shone the moon and the sun. The universe yawns. The sky is everlasting. At a distance is all the past and near at hand a large plant called the future. But it is red and barks like a watermelon. We are clearly no nearer our goal of perfumed water and bliss in the palms. Interject here sad nuptial seeds and a host of other dizzying monuments and the scene has returned to normal with no dust and less ivy.  Truly the forest nears its climactic end somewhere near here. A large red sun sinks into the sea.

                The walls heave and new day dawns on this tent alone in the desert of cloud and waste. Thanks to a friendly zephyr there is still plenty of pink and grey. The sky is a fine yellow with light lemon polka dots. Each cloud lies in a bed of eiderdown on the ground; it is neither down nor up. Neither however matters for we are in free fall here a thousand light years from limbo. The light is an awkward shade of deafness. A gentle rain from time to time falls. Its water is lush and warm like a balmy lagoon in the heat of a fabulous moon tide.

                Contrary to the popular belief it is not to anyone’s discredit to pronounce the word perpendicular as the word schooner. We climbed the masts every day and hoisted marvellous banners from them as if each day were our last and each evening a huge tortoise on the edge of existence. Flying now several feet above even ourselves, it was obvious that no description of the proceedings would be more apt than a factual nothingness.

Gregg Simpson, 1968

The Thundering Legion

The Thundering Legion

The most famous and perhaps the least voracious fathers of the church had for guides the debris of the spring avalanche. In the year 174 A.D. between which we saw on our right against the flock, that it was not expedient to rush, for in that, his splendid command arrayed all the malignancy. It is impossible not to feel interested in a people of his personal dangerous heretic, fleecy mists and other marks of a progressive nation.

To try a man for his opinions of the old and new, the pool gardens of his personal or official foes come to have less meaning. He was one of the chosen few who rising on a sturdy trunk to four or five inches at the point of death then transacted.

It remains only for us to abjure at the slightest fear

he was led to the cathedral to breathe through.

On the fatal day land and sea and the stone implements which were encouraged and hidden away had taken certain cities. Personal resentment now supported his hiding place. The owner thinks he can use the money in the next world.

Good; go and light up the next village

            By the flames they pursued their conquering sulphur gases ‘til now foolish enough to be dragged by the heels. Volcanoes are dangerous and encourage the blowing off of steam.

I am ready to die for the gospel of Jesus.

            Two days after his fit began, the pipe of the volcano was ordered to be dragged by the heels; and the fate of the famous geologist having gained these points drowned nearly a million natives. The League was delighted for caves, underground streams and abysses admitted him more friends. The spirit in which the leaders entered the hands of the clock may be seen in a kind of whirlpool. The theologians of the whole surface of the country would be a good rise in life reading yet these speeches.

            The clergy denounced the teaching of the shooting stars like casting a little incense on the wide spaces. Now that we know that this terrible star would look quite faint and dull like pebbles, the idol priest and possibly the speech or worship of the Christian principles and other victims have something behind it.

Gregg Simpson, 1967

THE SCAMPER IN THE COUNTRY

The twenty-five scouts marched to their corral in the staves over the top of the hill, the British Government stroking his straggling white beard; he looked like a stranded ark.

“He’s very wide”

He once painted the evening, foaming by stealth along the coast, clutching the little emblem during the period 1700-1860. The young losels had already gone ashore, dismounted, tethered their horses to a tree reaching the knots and making no resistance. Mr. Bane pronounced that one of his horses had been stolen. But we could throw no light on it. It was getting dark, rubbing his eyes so long as I have.

  

“There are a few elephants left in Borneo,” said Dick.

The professor nodded. Thirty years spent in Bermuda, saw him draw from around his neck. To his amazement with eyes glittering in the glory of a western setting, a practice that had never before been put in earnest, his splendor was completed by an embroidered deep gully. The vicar ventured into the enclosure.

It was at one o’clock two days later that saved that batch now tussling on the shore. The youngster was at his last grasp as he kept his saddlery, the village street under his arm.

                “It’s a bomb!” he gasped.

His very uneasiness did not permit him to move  along the edge because there’s a hunk of water in the bottom. At half-past four he was ensconced, after the fight fearing the surface every mile. The old warriors plight was evil to his taste. He sampled the oyster. The latter he has cleared out so as to leave room for the scouts. The groom was questioned, but in the dark ages they used caparisoned elephants in Borneo. Followed by the professor they used to continue into the crumbling thatch.

He went to the steps of the bungalow, taking him by the arm and through sheer force of numbers took their rifles and, un-noticed, got away, firing to give the alarm to have been unloaded tomorrow. He nodded toward the sulphurous emphasis worth two cents on that envelope of an electric torch loaded up with contraband. On a drift of sand near the cleft of a fissured horse, a large javelin, he heard the noise of footsteps.

                “Hullo!”

No answer. The voice of professor Rosario inspected Mistress Isabel behind which fell steeply to the river. But the trial dragged  slowly on, from the top of a stump they poked at his unfinished breakfast.

                “Perhaps you now know one reason for refusing.” 

   

Here that young man came presently his eyebrows elevated at the moment it was not butterflies. To his amazement he seized the officer’s hand and became a definite statement of fact, and the ground around it. But the foul fiend would be fitting the nooses farther than the young waterfall. It shovels away, leaving the nozzle of the hose-pipes tucked away under the campsite. 

On Sunday afternoon, eager that the symptoms thrust behind in the ounce on two fellows frowned at Rawbones, an action which drew the heavy soil when he had taken stock. He wiped at the perspiration on his halter, wandering and outwitted as far as say 40 degrees and a narrow gap that the Antarctic Current could reckon. What with her high sides, funnel, ventilator and foolish remarks, he took it as a matter of wool in the nest. 

The descent was difficult. They set out just as they were and waged a relentless river in the valley. 

After the first fight they hit their own men.

Gregg Simpson,  1967

Pastel and gouache works done in Umbria, the Marches, Tarquinia, Monaco and Aix-en-Provence in May, 2018

Collaboration with Wijnand Steemers

Poems inspired by the photographs in Classic Mode: A Reverie
 by Gregg Simpson, New Arcadia Publishing, Vancouver, 2008

Translated from the original Dutch by the author

Not in a lotus position on the carpet at home, not

in a buddhist monastery or during a yoga session, not

on a bank with a view at a park or sea, not

in the seventh heaven of a long-lasting orgasm, not

at the toilet or at the dentist's waitingroom reading magazines, not

to the roadside to take a rest from a long drive, not

during the reading of a good poem, nor this one, not

at the back of the ship of the desert, not

on a air bed, bobbing up and down an austrian lake, not

certainly not, perhaps, no, maybe, not at all, not

after the silence of a lost football match, not

standing before these solemn pillars, no, probably not

but in our improperly long-lasting stare at this stone globe, oh yes

when the gods had stopped to play at marbles

Critical Writing   Harold Rosenberg (From Criticism and its Premises)
        In art, the prime history-makers are painters and sculptors.  As indicated earlier , there are writers and cultural commissars who wish to appropriate this privilege of the artist and to use him as an instrument for their own art-history-making.  The result is a new kind of conflict - between the artist and the professional representatives of his public.

Art criticism today is beset by art historians turned inside out to function as prophets of so-called inevitable trends.  A determinism similar to that projected into the evolution of past styles is clamped upon art in the making.  In this parody of art history, value judgments are deduced from a presumed logic of development, and an ultimatum is issued to artists either to accommodate themselves to these values or be banned from the art of the future. An aesthetician founded on art history wields a club of dogma similar to moralistic criticism in the nineteenth century or political criticism in the Soviet Union.

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Dead art movements are the normal life of art; all that can be expected of them is good painting. 

In regard to creation there is nothing to indicate that a new art movement has any advantage over an obsolete one; the contrary may well be the case.

After 1972 anyone could be an artist, except, perhaps, painters and sculptors.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

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Rosenberg on Museums and their Acquisition Policies:
        Moreover, its new position of power led the museum to develop its own version of bureaucratic corruption: favoritism in buying and showing, falsification of recent art history, using museum prestige to enhance investments by trustees, secret deals in the acquisition and sale of  museum properties.

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Edwin Varney (From Preview Magazine, Feb./Mar.,1998)
Curators and critics of the late 20th century have dominated  the visual arts - intimidating, contaminating and corrupting artists who want to play the game and ignoring and deprecating those who won't.  Beauty has become an ugly word. In the process the public has become alienated by effete, elitist, theoretical, and academic versions of what art should be. Meanwhile the best artists starve while the  curators and academics get fat and advance their own careers.

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Geoff Chris Olson (Vancouver Courier)

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Greg Felton (from the Courier,Vancouver, October 10, 1999)
        We are told to accept non-art as art because our obsessively democratic culture is too craven  to acknowledge that artistic standards should exist. Art is whatever an artist says it is, whether that be a Renaissance fresco or hasenpfeffer al fresco. Anyone who dares challenge this nihilistic dogma is anathematized as élitist, yet art is inherently an élitist enterprise.
        
I recognize that artists  must seek new means of expression to remain vibrant and relevant, and that censoring bad art will  only make matters worse, but the bar of what is classified as art has been lowered so much that anything, no matter how moving or mindless, is treated equally. The fault lies less with these "artists" than with the politically motivated ignoramuses who allow such work to be funded.

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Vincent Van Gogh
 The buying and selling of art is nothing more than organized robbery.

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William Baziotes  From The Artist and His Mirror

When the demagogues of art call on you to make the good art, the intelligible art, the social art, spit down on them and go back to your dreams, your mirror and the World.

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Edgar Degas
I think literature has only done harm to art.

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Matthew Collings from Art of the Moment (Modern Painters, Autumn, 1995) : From a review of the Rites of Passage exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London         The exhibition is all doomy and deathly and obscure.  It's not for normal people. It's for the artworld.  ...Usually I flit amongst the artists who do the more jokey and ironic type of exhibition... But this one doesn't beat around the bush with japes and cleverness and banality, like Jeff Koons, but just goes straight for death and the body and sickness and millennial fears.
        Probably to normal people the smirky art and the death art are all the same old onions, and, if so, I kind of know what they mean. But anyway King Death is Joseph Beuys and Queen Death is Louise Bourgeois. King Smirky is Jeff Koons and Prince Smirky is Damien Hirst.  So this is definitely a Beuys and Bourgois type show.  Long faces all round.

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Pablo Picasso Quoted by Herbert Read         ...mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music and whatnot, have been related to Cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories.

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Pierre-August Renoir (as quoted by Cezanne to Ambroise Vollard)         Renoir once said to me: They think we are nothing but makers of theories- we whose only object, like the old masters, is to paint with clear and joyous colours. These literary people will never understand that painting is first of all a craft, that the material side of it comes first.

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Robert Motherwell (from a 1944 lecture)

Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art, when it aspires to be a social science.

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     Alex Gregory, New Yorker Magazine
   Man Ray From The American Masters Documentary Film         I am an old man now. In sixty years you can do a lot of work. I  did a lot of things in sixty years, my paintings, my photography, my objects. I change all the time.  I have periods where I do one thing, then for a few years do something else.
        I am a free man.  I do not work for a padrone, or a boss. I am indifferent to things  that do not interest me. But never would I attack them. Especially in the creative arts. Because I say anybody who does creative art is a sacred person. I do not care what he does. Whether he paints academic pictures, or he is modern, or different from anything else. He cannot do any harm. Whereas a bad politician, or a bad doctor, or a bad cook can kill you!"

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Donald Judd (from an essay in  Art in America, 1984)         The elaboration of the term ‘post-modern’ is not due to real change but is due to naked fashion and the need to cover it with words.

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Bridget Riley
A woman artist needs feminism like a hole in the head.

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Sandro Chia (from Flash Art, Trevi, Italy)

        The transavantgarde means nothing to me, signifies nothing, just as neo-expressionism signifies nothing.

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Waldemar Januszczak London Sunday Times         Thaw appears to be a typical rich American Europhile, whose collecting taste has an undertow of fierce disillusion with the modern world. I know this because the catalogue features a marvelously haughty interview in which he frequently interrupts his own display of high connoisseurship to take a pop at modern life. "In a period of declining standards, its staff has maintained the old ways of scholarship, and I believe in that," says Thaw of the Morgan Library. "In the current age people are looking forward to museums with nothing in them except television monitors where you can dial the Louvre and get some kind of holograph," he opines, casually, of the electronic revolution.

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 Dr. W. Grampp Prof. of Economics at the U. of Chicago  from Pricing the Priceless (1989)
        Because museum, arts councils, art service organisations, and even some artists are subsidized, their reasons for negotiating/dealing with each other are often difficult to divine.  In his chapter on art museums, a fictitious cultural worker admits: I don't know for sure what I'm supposed to be doing and if I did I would have no way of being sure I was doing it -- but I would like to go on doing what I'm doing, whatever that is, and I ask you to give me the money I need to do it. 

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Jose Pierre from Surrealism, 1979
        Today it is a fact that the art market has placed itself almost to a man under the flag of a dominant ideology….  American Minimal Art, and its paler European imitations, only accord favour to painting which is only painting, that is to say that which forbids any modulation, vibration, emotion, form, any manifestation of the sensitive and even more of the unconscious and of myth.  This admirable conjugation of puritan iconoclasm, of neo-positivist empiricism and of Wall Street is sometimes - like the olive in a dry martini- accompanied by a pinch of Maoist ideology.

Regarding the new book and Facebook Community, Vancouver Vanishes, I have to say it reminds me of the Modernist heritage battle I was part of in the early 1990's over the fate of the Main Branch Library, a silver Governor General's award winning building designed by Semmens and Simpson in 1957.

It's not that different an issue in the sense that the old character homes being leveled for the uber rich are the victims of the same old gang: greedy developers, super wealthy buyers who care nothing for Vancouver's history and may not even live in these giant houses, plus weasel politicians who dance to their tune.

Like Caroline Adderson, co-author of  both the book, Vancouver Vanishes and the Facebook Community of the same name, I believe whether it's character homes from the early 20th Century or the mid-century West Coast Modernism of my father's generation, we need a collective roar of disapproval from Vancouver's caring citizens.

This never came in the Library issue because at that time Modernism was the enemy. One wag wrote to the Georgia Straight calling that building "evil, phallic Modernism", despite the actual shape of the place. I blame many academics for fostering this ignorant attitude by systematically, and with the apparent blessing of so-called Post Modernist critics, laying at the feet of this movement all the ills of western society.

Doubtless they would say these early houses now being destroyed are relics of colonial and eurocentric thinking and are better off gone. Like the architect of the new library, Moshe Safdie, who called the attempts to save the old library nothing but sentimentality, we are again being over run by a cabal who cares nothing for Vancouver  history, short as it is, who will remind us that, like the old Main Branch VPL, these structures are not worth saving. 

I urge everyone to write Vancouver City Council and join with Caroline in her efforts to save our heritage: https://www.facebook.com/VancouverVanishes/