tom moody

Visited several galleries yesterday on New York's Lower East Side. Some 40 spaces have popped up in the last couple of years, mostly small, one or two room, well-appointed oases of white-walled serenity in a zone of commercial clutter and urban rot. The northern anchor for this array of map pins is the New Museum, where guards inspect visitors at the door for cheekbones and personal elegance (not really, but at least half the gallerygoers at any given time seem fashion model gorgeous--even the visiting curators--what ever happened to the arts professionals with middle-aged paunches and bad hair? and whatever happened to the dumpy old New Museum after it moved from Soho to the Bowery? Somewhere enroute it became fabulous.) The Urs Fischer sculpture show mostly borrowed from other artists but the next morning found me thinking about a purple piano that deflates. Derivative of Claes Oldenburg's giant soft drum kit, toilet, etc, but redeemed by the craftsmanship of a large complex object cast in vivid seamless violet and allowed to wilt, with all the inner strings visible and merging into an undulating mass. The piano came to mind because 10 or 15 galleries later, at James Fuentes, down on a bleak stretch of St. James, a Jonas Mekas video depicted an elderly, wheelchair-seated Nam Jun Paik repeatedly toppling an upright onto its back. A team of eager young assistants scrambled to lift the instrument, and Paik knocked it over again...and again...like a petulant child pushing away an unwanted toy, each time with a nerve-wracking crash. (The video occupied one corner of a quartet of screens with live Mekas-shot footage of the Berlin Wall and World Trade Centers falling and the mop-up after a Danius Kesminas fire sculpture/performance.)

Two destroyed pianos, one at the start and one at the end of a series of gallery visits. Somehow the musical non-accompaniment for the adventure lingered after [Tom - this is a great lead - are you going to fill in the rest of the details of your trip? --ed.]

"Can we come up?"
"We're closed."
"When's the next show opening?"
"Uh, mid-December."
"Any remnants of the last show you could show us? Anything at all on the walls?"
"No."
"OK, goodbye then."

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This DailyKos post, Big Mike and the Paper Hanger, discusses the flaws in Francis Galton's theory of Eugenics, that stellar example of bad science from the 19th Century that led to the Nazi final solution and still holds sway with many birthers and educational testers.* Short version of the Kos thesis: genetic diversity is good, and non-diversity results in the death of species. Breeds such as the over-refined Big Mike banana discussed in the post, a "larger, sweeter, tougher banana that was sold before the 1950s," is "nearly extinct after a fungal disease struck banana plantations around the world... Because all the Gros Michael were the same, they were all susceptible to the same disease. " By extension, your Nazi superman (here's where the paper hanger comes in) would have been a similarly vulnerable hothouse strain.

Not discussed in the article is the point that seems to me most glaringly wrong about Eugenics: the huge jump in logic it takes from conceiving an effort to weed out traits in a small portion of the population (inheritable disease) to weeding out the majority of humans on earth (non-WASPs). It should have been obvious from the start that Eugenics was scientific hokum to justify its practitioners' racial prejudices. The hero of the Kos post is Francis Galton's older half-cousin, Charles Darwin, who "considered most people to have more or less the same level of intelligence" and "regarded accomplishment as a measure of opportunity and hard work." Races did not exist to Darwin, according to the post, "except as a convenient way to group individuals that carried some common traits. Evolution could not act against race, because race was no more than a construct, a fiction. Only individuals existed for the purposes of selection."

*Galton and the Eugenics debacle are also the subject of a new movie War Against the Weak, which recently had its New York premiere (film website) (book website).