In terms of verbal communication, someone who grew up learning English in the classical sense might have no idea what any of the above meant. Also, what is a "PhD w/ Rhizome?" Is Rhizome.org now "accredited" is that just some fun thing? Must have missed this somewhere.

The tweet also comes up mysteriously short in the visual department. Those familiar with MTAA's decades-old "The Art Happens Here" cartoon know that the image was a blinking animated GIF (the lightning bolt trembled). You can't upload those to Twitter -- Twitter converts them to video -- but Rossenova didn't take that step; it was simply rendered as a flat .png. So much for net-art-as-inspiration (&more!). Worse, what is that swirly stuff surrounding MTAA's rectangle? Apparently it was one of a series of ambient backgrounds uploaded to Rhizome's server by an ad agency that did Rhizome's last design. It's basically decorative fluff and has no business being attached to "art" -- imagine a show of 1960s conceptualism at the Metropolitan Museum with Rainbow Brite patterns instead of white walls. So much for "designing archival interactions" and "interface transparency" (again, whatever those might be).

A friend of mine is a one-percenter and thinks he is self-made. His lack of empathy for the little people is staggering. If you lost your house due to covid quarantining or related job-loss, well, many people have internalized the American Dream but let's face it, not everyone is prepared or qualified for the responsibilities of home ownership. And if a private equity company snaps up the house, along with hundreds of other homes lost to similar misfortune, who is better qualified to manage the house? If the market determines that the US will turn from a nation of homeowners into a nation of renters, that is as it must be, because the market is all-wise.

These companies won't gouge on the rent because the renters will leave (i.e., become homeless). Nevertheless, the market entitles owners to charge the highest rent they can, and if it means warehousing the property until a better class of tenant comes along, so be it. It can be a tax write-off.

Who is a better landlord, a professional property management company, or grandma-with-a-spare-room who may or may not call the exterminators? Grandma also might do unprofessional things like not raise your rent for several years, or let you skip a payment. She would be, of course, a poor specimen of Homo Economicus, and the sooner she loses *her* house the better the country will be.

Addendum: The experimental drug hesitancy causing workers all over the US to resist employer vaccination mandates can only be the result of "ignorance," my friend also said (in the same conversation above).

Addendum 2: Illustration by Ralph Steadman, from Hunter S. Thompson's book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hat tip to Discogs staffer Diognes_the_Fox, who is grappling with similar issues on that hydra-headed monster.

I am working on a mix for (open source) internet radio streaming. Below are notes explaining my choices. The mix is tentatively scheduled for this Thursday. I'll post again when know more. My thinking here is closely tied in with music I am making in the studio at the moment.

This mix explores the power of the simple, primitive, incantatory riff in postmodern classical and "jazz fission" music (Kodwo Eshun's term for the brief period of poMo experimentation in the late '60s/early '70s, which eventually jelled into more codified -- and bankable -- "fusion" jazz). My touchstone composers here are Carl Orff and Eric Satie, and their music is interwoven in the mix with experimenters on the "rock" side (John Cale, Frank Zappa, Penguin Cafe Orchestra) and the "jazz" side (John McLaughlin, Ralph Towner, Eberhard Weber). My aim is a musical conversation where common themes, differences and "sidebars" are all considered.

The mix begins and ends with a version of "Something Spiritual," a piece attributed to Dave Herman, who may or may not have played with Glenn Miller (Discogs sometimes mixes up artists with similar names) and appears to have written only this one tune. It's a bifurcated composition, with a wistful, soulful beginning that breaks into a repeated 7 note riff (da da, da da, da da, da) that is very "rock and roll." The piece keeps switching back and forth between the soulful part and The Riff, trying to make up its mind. At the beginning of the mix, John McLaughlin plays it on acoustic guitar(s), showing off his speed and technical skill. At the end of the mix it's played by The Tony Williams Lifetime, a towering group of the fission era, with McLaughlin on electric guitar, Larry Young on Hammond organ, and Williams intricately flailing away on drums. Here The Riff takes over the song, and is played by McLaughlin and Young ad infinitum, with subtle variations in timbre and syncopation, allowing Williams to go off into outer space with metric variations and polyrhythms on a standard drum kit. The loud guitar and pulsating organ are rock, not jazz -- were it not for the drums, this could be Steppenwolf.

Going back to the beginning of the mix: McLaughlin's acoustic version is followed by Penguin Cafe Orchestra's "In the Back of a Taxi," which has a upbeat folk-like Riff played on bass, piano, and ukulele that you could listen to all day. But then a zany quasi-mariachi band comes in with trumpets and breaks the hypnotic groove. This happens twice in the song but the Riff remains constant throughout.

Next comes the first of several pieces by Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman from their "Schulwerk" series, a decades-long compilation of pedagogical music for children (or students of all ages). In "Diminution Schrei," an infectious stew of bubbling xylophone and wood block percussion suddenly erupts into shouts and Native American "hey-ya"s -- from a German boys choir, no less. It's fun and pretty wack. This short piece takes us to Eric Satie's score for Rene Clair's film Entr'acte, which ran during the intermission of the ballet Relâche in 1924. This is my favorite Satie piece, an example of his modular "furniture music" -- a concatenation of simple Riffs ranging from circus music to melancholy strings -- which could be repeated or shortened as needed, to keep the score in sync with the film cuts. This was way ahead of its time.

Next up is Moondog's wistful piano tune "Sea Horse," which could be a continuation of the Entr'acte score, followed by Ralph Towner's solo guitar piece "3x12 (2)." Towner riffs, too but his mind is so musically inventive the motifs never settle into grooves but, instead, serve as links in chains of free association. Then it's back to Moondog, with his most famous work, "Bird's Lament," for reed instruments, including a honking baritone to die for. For this mix I used a version without percussion, from The German Years 77-99, sped up to the same tempo as the better-known version from Moondog (1969) on Columbia. This seques pretty nicely to Carl Orff's "Dance (arr. Wilfried Hiller) for Violin and Cello" from the Schulwerk series, with short sections that could be a sequence of stately folk dances.

This is followed by a threesome of piano works from my blog playlist hatin' on Haigh -- -- which presumed to find some better examples of solo piano (more fun, more tuneful, more diverse, more emotional) than those offered by Simon Reynolds favorite Robert Haigh in The Wire a few years ago. Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin (I. Prelude)" receives a lightning fast treatment from David Korevaar. I owned the orchestral version of this for years and only on hearing the piano version realized what Ravel is doing with a Baroque composition by Francis Couperin -- unstiffening it and making it more romantic, more obviously French. You can still hear the Baroque trills and mathematics but with syncopating pauses and lush sweeps of cabaret expressiveness: a truly amazing reinvention. Then Gertrude Orff's haunting kids' music piece "Kleiner Klavierstücke, Heft I, No. 2," suggesting another quiet court dance. Then Philip Glass' Spanish-flavored "Modern Love Waltz" (performed by Amy Briggs), a machine-like arpeggio workout. You can almost see punched rectangles on a player piano going by, even though it has a human player.

Back to Orff: "Tun Ma Gehn, Rösserl Bschlagn," a children's piece featuring claps and a spirited mezzosoprano voice, precedes Sandy Bull's version of Carmina Burana -- played on a banjo! I owned this years ago, on a vinyl compilation of Bull's music, and can't imagine why I forgot this was on there -- it's completely memorable. Carmina is so familiar from horror movie scores it almost sounds like hackwork today. The banjo strumming puts us back in touch with its roots in the Jungian meme pool that Orff was tapping into: elemental strummed notes that are part folk, part medieval, part "world," touching something deep and primordial. This is followed by another Orff-penned children's piece, "Dance 1 (Piano Exercise, No. 29) for Violin and Cello" (1933), which seduces with its counterpoint between bowed and plucked strings.

Another short, frenetic Ralph Towner solo, "3x12 (3)," leads into John Cale's "Days of Steam," from his mostly classical third LP, The Academy in Peril (1972). This rhythmic piece for piano, viola, and tambourine (with trumpet scales and recorder at the end) presciently resembles Simon Jeffes and his Penguin Cafe Orchestra, which appeared a few years later. It's followed in the mix by Penguin Cafe Orchestra's "Yodel 1" (1981), a strummed acoustic guitar riff with piano and bongo accents. The simplicity and transparency of the instrumentation puts it very much in the Orff "Musik Für Kinder" ballpark, even though it's a 4 minute jam rather than a short structured chamber work.

Next is "Aybe Sea," one of the Mothers of Invention's prettiest pieces, from the Burnt Weeny Sandwich LP. A trio for piano, harpsichord, and Zappa's pedal-inflected guitar, the piece conjures a kind of deranged Renaissance dance number, before settling into a long piano coda. Eberhard Weber's "Silent Feet" is notable for Rainer Brüninghaus' liquid, exploratory piano intro, reminiscent of Ralph Towner's music in its improvisational complexity, rippling through a series of twists, turns, and key changes in a completely Western tonal framework (there are a couple of flubbed notes about 2/3 of the way through, which he recovers from brilliantly). This type of playing would resurface as the Windham Hill "new age" sound a few years later, without Brüninghaus' edgy melodic poetry.

The Ralph Towner acoustic guitar solo that opens Weather Report's "The Moors" is the stuff of legend, another freewheeling journey that resembles pure thought, turned into sprays of 12-string notes. The story goes that Joe Zawinul gave guest-instrumentalist Towner a chair to sit on in the recording studio and let Towner warm up before playing with the band. Unbeknownst to Towner, Zawinul had the tape recorder running and the warm-up session became the finished intro. "The Moors" then continues in Weather Report's early controlled free jazz style (coming off their years with Miles Davis) which had largely disappeared after their next LP, Sweetnighter. The mix then ends with the Tony Williams Lifetime version of "Something Spiritual," discussed above.

In my own thinking about computer limitations back in the 2000s, I wasn't aware of Augé's writing but came to it recently by way of Pierre-Luc Verville's essay on my art and music. [3] Augé isn't concerned with computer art per se; he's mostly interested in how an artist who lives and participates in the modern world of global capitalism can somehow "shift" an audience to see outside this continuum.

Augé obliquely discusses Antoni Muntadas' installation in the Spanish Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. I say obliquely because there is very little physical description of the artwork: I had to find that elsewhere. According to Michèle C. Cone in The Brooklyn Rail:

...Muntadas showed details of his research on the history of the pavilions in the Giardini, the lovely grounds of the Biennale. His intention was to make perceptible the fact that the “Giardini” in 2005 looked quite different from what they had looked like earlier, especially during the era of Mussolini when, for example, the Italian pavilion was reconstructed to suit the Duce’s taste, and then rebuilt again after World War II. Much had been lost in translation since the first Venice Biennale, much had been added, but it took a Spaniard to unveil the less than transparent history of an Italian landmark. The project was named On Translation: I Giardini. [4]

Art historian Reesa Greenberg gives more descriptive detail: "On one side of an angled freestanding wall, he arranged same-size archival and current photographs of the façades of the pavilions in rows, similar in structure and glow to arrangements of images of real-estate properties for sale or hotels for rent. Viewers could learn more by picking up the attached phones." [5]

This grid of photos appears in a sort of airport waiting area, along with another series of photos of people standing in line to get into various cultural events. According to Greenberg, the room also had a kiosk with "rolling aphorisms and statistical facts taken from the world at large ... information about the number of tourists to Venice in the last year, the number of dead and wounded in a Buenos Aires nightclub, the number of hits a day on Google, the number of Colombian soldiers killed in an ambush, and so on." [6]

Augé writes about all this [machine-translated from French]:

A place and an institution rooted in time: this could well be the definition of the Venice Biennale. However accurate it may be in a sense, this definition raises many difficulties, at least today. The institution celebrates contemporaneity, but it endures. The place celebrates the spirit of the present time, but it consecrates the frontiers of the past. From then on, the contradictions are revealed and made visible. It only takes a little (but this little is everything) to bring them to light: contradiction between a recurrent celebration and the claim to embody the avant-garde, contradiction between the very idea of avant-garde and the representation of an eternal present that dominates contemporary representations, contradiction between the traditional organization of the Biennale (national pavilions, rivalries, competitions, prizes) and its ambition to express the state of artistic research in a globalized world, contradiction between the reference to Venice and the extra-territoriality of the Biennale...

Muntadas summarizes this set of questions by questioning not only the current status of Venice, but also that of the Biennale's setting, the Giardini, and that of the works presented there. The contradictions that jump out at us are no longer contradictions from the moment the artist... put[s] them into shape in order to question them. [T]he contradictions are always there... but change status by becoming the object of the artistic reflection.

We have to rely on Greenberg, Cone and others for descriptions of how historical photos of the Giardini "put into shape" the contradictions of the Biennale. Presumably the kiosk and telephones visible in the photos don't offer Cone's politically-tinged history of the Biennale grounds above. How are we supposed to know this? Augé writes:

[A]rtists have the difficult but essential task to signal to the public of the consumers, of which they are also a part, that they are, as artists, external to the system of production / consumption... This signal, to be perceptible, can only be the product of a ruse. If the classic putting at distance is impossible today [because art-making is part of a commodity system --tm], it is nevertheless possible to put the accent on the [inconsistencies] and tensions of a system which sacralizes the present and the image. By attacking the heart of the system in this way, we translate its spirit. Because it is less a question of attacking, here, than of "translating", as Muntadas says. The art does not aim primarily to subvert, but to show. It is up to the society or the public authorities to question, if the fact of showing takes in their eyes a subversive character. But to succeed in seeing, in order to show, it is necessary to find angles of view, to experiment, to displace the admitted limits, to shift the observation in time and space.

Ultimately, it seems, viewers have to puzzle it all out -- why does this pavilion look like an airport? what is the content of these photos? why are they placed here? -- and make their own connections. Augé implies the artist must "show" rather than tell.  We don't know how many Biennale viewers came to the same conclusions about the work as Augé, Greenberg, and Cone in their essays. Probably very few? At best we can say the ingredients for a shift in perception about the Biennale and its own agendas and contradictions are here.

NOTES

1. Dan Graham, "Legacies of Critical Practice in the 1980s," Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Hal Foster, ed., Dia Art Foundation, 1987.

2. Marc Augé, L'art du décalage, Multitudes, vol. 25, no 2, 2006, p. 139-147.

3. https://leparergon.org/index.php?title=Tom_Moody (French) https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2021/06/08/le-parergon-tom-moody-bio/ (English)

4. Michèle C. Cone, Antoni Muntadas and Translation, The Brooklyn Rail, Nov. 2014

5. Reesa Greenberg, The Currency of Time: Muntadas and I Giardini, Ciel Variable, Fall 2007

6. Id.

In thinking about "contradictions in the computer aesthetic" back in the 2000s, I wasn't aware of Marc Augé's writing [1] (cited by Pierre-Luc Verville in his essay on my artwork). I came to Augé's idea of the "aesthetic of the shift" (more about that in a later post) by way of artist Dan Graham, whose essay in a Dia Foundation symposium, "Legacies of Critical Practice in the 1980s," made a strong impression:

I believe now that the task of the artist is in part to resuscitate the just-past -- that period in time made amnesiac by commodity culture -- and to apply it as an "anti-aphrodisiac" (Walter Benjamin's phrase). The Rolling Stones song "Yesterday's Papers" -- "Who wants yesterday's papers? Who wants yesterday's girl? No one in the world" -- makes this anti-aphrodisiac aspect of the just-past clear. [2]

Like Augé, Graham wasn't talking about computers per se. He gave two examples. One was Walter Benjamin's Paris Arcades research. The arcades were glass-covered walkways that turned city streets into indoor shopping malls.

These were an early-1800s idea of modernity that were mostly torn down in a later-1800s renovation of Paris by Baron Haussman.

Some arcades still lingered, jarring the traveler out of the dream of the "renovation" by exposing a substrate that was actually more modern.

About this, Dan Graham wrote:

According to Benjamin, "progress," the 19th-century scientific and ultimately capitalist myth, is expressed in commodities, fashion goods which "produce a sense of eternal newness." This makes progress a mythical goal, never to be reached, for there is always the new and it is always superseded by the next new. For Benjamin, then, progress is actually a state of stasis. And yet it is the very stasis that makes the recovery of the just-past potentially subversive.

Graham also mentions Gordon Matta-Clark, [3] who famously chainsawed out sections of buildings to expose their inner structures. Often this revealed a tree-ring-like history of the building's renovations, including design assumptions of earlier eras. Once again, the presence of this older, perhaps better-constructed, world jars us out of the eternal now of our modern cities.

The Arcades Project is a bit of a critical tabula rasa. Benjamin never finished the work so people project meaning into it. It has led to at least one awful-looking New York exhibit. Graham doesn't explain well how the arcades of the past critique the present (in the absence of a focused artwork). He mentions dreams, as if dreaming of the Arcades would jolt anyone out of the static continuum of present-day Paris. Graham's evocation of Matta-Clark better buttresses his argument: here at least is a physical thing an artist did to force recognition. In the next post, we'll discuss Marc Augé, who articulates "the aesthetic of the shift" bringing the past into the present, with reference to a contemporary artwork, Antoni Muntadas' pavilion in the 2005 Venice Biennale.

NOTES

1. Marc Augé, L'art du décalage, Multitudes, vol. 25, no 2, 2006, p. 139-147.

2. Dan Graham, "Legacies of Critical Practice in the 1980s," Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Hal Foster, ed., Dia Art Foundation, 1987

3. Frances Richard, Spacism: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Politics of Shared Space Places Journal, March 2019

By the mid-2000s, I was stubbornly clinging to MSPaint and 8-Bit music as they became retro styles. In 2004 I began experimenting with animated GIFs, applying some of the pixelly MS Paint ideas I had been working with. At that time GIFs were definitely retro and seen as a '90s, dot com era phenomenon. I thought about Richard Phillips' use of dated fashion photography to make large scale oil paintings and remembered this 1987 quote from Dan Graham:

According to [Walter] Benjamin, "progress," the 19th-century scientific and ultimately capitalist myth, is expressed in commodities, fashion goods which "produce a sense of eternal newness." This makes progress a mythical goal, never to be reached, for there is always the new and it is always superseded by the next new. For Benjamin, then, progress is actually a state of stasis. And yet it is the very stasis that makes the recovery of the just-past potentially subversive.

I believe now that the task of the artist is in part to resuscitate the just-past -- that period in time made amnesiac by commodity culture -- and to apply it as an "anti-aphrodisiac" (Benjamin's phrase). The Rolling Stones song "Yesterday's Papers" -- "Who wants yesterday's papers? Who wants yesterday's girl? No one in the world" -- makes this anti-aphrodisiac aspect of the just-past clear. [1]

I never articulated my "program" the way artist and musician Pierre-Luc Verville does below but I think he gives a compelling reason for all those MS Paint drawings and animated GIFs:

What is contradictory in the computer aesthetic is between what we expect from computer tools and what they do. Moody exploits this paradox by turning the fundamental elements of the perceptual system of computer environments into expressive elements that refer directly to the history of art. By exaggerating what the computer may or may not be expected to produce aesthetically, Moody reveals a world whose conditions of aesthetic possibility are constantly being transformed by the machine.

The appropriation of obsolete devices is thus the occasion for a critique of the obsolescence of the various aesthetic stages of the computer, for a re-reading of the horizon of expectation which frames the experience of it. [2]

Just as the "simple" had been used to critique the overly complex, the "old" can be used to critique the seamless world of the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution: the interconnected virtual reality of smartphones and platforms -- the latest incarnation of Benjamin's stasis of eternal newness. A pixelated sphere was the best a drawing program could do in 1984. What limitations (or assumptions) might a super-duper slick iPad be putting on something made right now? I also appreciate Verville's implication that art history can be used as a gauge or measuring device. Unlike my attempts at portraiture, everyone can see that the pattern of concentric circles (Kenneth Noland target) is made up of pixels in my OptiDisc gif. What similar soon-to-be-dated constituent part might the seductive iPhone be hiding? In future posts, I'll be comparing my theorist of choice, Dan Graham, with Verville's, Marc Augé, on the topic of past-as-critique. (They are saying very similar things.)

Tom Moody, OptiDisc, projection of animated GIF file, "PAUSE (Prelude)" exhibit, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2018

NOTES

1. Dan Graham, "Legacies of Critical Practice in the 1980s," Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Hal Foster, ed., Dia Art Foundation, 1987

2. https://leparergon.org/index.php?title=Tom_Moody (French) https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2021/06/08/le-parergon-tom-moody-bio/ (English)

Tom Moody

Tom Moody is an American musician, visual artist, and art critic. His work is characterized by the détournement [diversion, hijacking] of digital means of expression in order to subvert or sublimate their contradictions.

Biography

...Moody studied literature and art in Charlottesville [VA] and then in Washington, D.C., before moving to New York City...

Course of work

Banality and technical obsolescence are two important leitmotifs in Moody's work. Both embracing the limitations of the tools he uses and developing his art within the corporate world he infiltrates, he creates a body of work that can be said to explore the aesthetic and social ramifications of postmodern computing. His music explores the sonic aesthetics of the computer retroactively, as well as the aesthetic peculiarities of telecommunications and computer technologies and the social fantasies attached to them (Generic PC, 2017; Hypercylinder, 2019). In the visual arts, he is interested in optical effects, the dialectic between economy of means and maximalist aesthetics, and the changes brought about by new techniques in pictorial production (Kevin, Les, Steve, Kerry, oil on canvas, 1979-80; Advil Box, 1994, acrylic on promotional display box).

An aesthetic of the shift

From a technical point of view, Moody's art exploits the extreme limits, even paradoxes, of digital forms of expression. The audiovisual and minimal computer environment of the late 1990s (Microsoft Paintbrush and Paint, Windows 95 and 98, Sound Blaster, etc.) is reused by the artist in a way that subverts the corporate logic of the computer.

What is contradictory in the computer aesthetic is between what we expect from computer tools and what they do. Moody exploits this paradox by turning the fundamental elements of the perceptual system of computer environments into expressive elements that refer directly to the history of art. By exaggerating what the computer may or may not be expected to produce aesthetically, Moody reveals a world whose conditions of aesthetic possibility are constantly being transformed by the machine.

The appropriation of obsolete devices is thus the occasion for a critique of the obsolescence of the various aesthetic stages of the computer, for a re-reading of the horizon of expectation which frames the experience of it. In other words, his appropriation of computing is an art of the shift, which consists in shaping the contradictions of the aesthetic language of the cybersphere in order to question them [1].

References

1. Marc Augé, L'art du décalage, Multitudes, vol. 25, no 2, 2006, p. 139-147.

Grant Wood, March, 1940, charcoal on wove paper

In the Texas visual arts magazine Glasstire, former publisher Rainey Knudson considers the above drawing, owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her essay, "Do Art Critics Need to Know How Sausage Is Made?" has two parts. In the first, she describes her experience of going back to school, after many years as a professional art writer. She tells us what she learned in a college-level drawing course, and how it changed her perceptions about artworks. (1) In the second part she critiques the Wood drawing, as a kind of test of these perceptions. Employing a series of close-up photos, she discusses the artist's techniques (crosshatching, erasure, etc.) and how they give interest to the work.

She doesn't really cover the content of the drawing, however. She says a "picture of a country road disappearing into a landscape" could be "sappy" if not for the "energy and movement" of certain marks, and the artist's intuitive handling of texture, but that's about it.

I haven't seen this drawing in person so this is a "jpeg review," take it for what it's worth.

Grant Wood is known for his stiff, iconic portraits of rural Midwestern subjects, American Gothic being the most famous. Perceived as a slightly bohemian "character" in his native Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he was nonetheless a staunch regionalist, and famously wore farmer's overalls to make the point. He had taken several trips to Europe in the 1910s and 1920s but remained mostly unaffected by Modernist art movements in his early career. He had absorbed some of the "arts and crafts" thinking of fin de siècle Romantics but resisted the more extreme lessons of Cubism, Surrealism, and pure abstraction. (2)

In the populist 1930s his regionalist vision was celebrated but near the end of his life, when this drawing was done (he died two years later), a backlash against his type of art was in full swing. He fought bitterly with members of his own university art department, who saw him as a self-promoting hack and has-been. After several years of glowing press, his reputation was starting to slip. Publicly he continued to fight for the regionalist vision, but privately he was vexed by the criticism, and strove to make his last works more abstract and Modernistic, incorporating rhythmic patterns and geometric compositions. (3)

The lithograph version of March (above), belongs to these late semi-abstracts but is fairly calm and composed, at least from what I can see from a jpeg. Even as a digital reproduction, the drawing version that Knudson reviews (seen at the top of the post) feels more dynamic. A simple country road winding through bald hills becomes a jagged slash of movement. Strong gusts of wind blow from left to right while afternoon sunlight beams in the opposite direction. The crosshatched hills seem to throb and undulate. All this movement is even clearer in the detail posted by Knudson:

Grant Wood, March, 1940, charcoal on wove paper (detail)

There's a well-known tendency for artists to tighten up when making formal "permanent" statements such as paintings but to be carefree and honest when drawing. Perhaps that's what happened here. Pure speculation, but this may be more of a reflection of Wood's emotional state at the time than the more polished, lithographic version of the same image. ("They say I'm not modern -- slash slash with the eraser -- I'll show them!" might be his thought balloon as he worked on this.)

Wood's angular hatching and patterning recalls Cubism's folds and involutions, or some crazy Futurist cityscape. Yet instead of explosive urban traffic there is only a lone horse pulling a carriage. It's as if Wood wanted to depict a calm America, a place of rural, nostalgic refuge, while at the same time channeling The Vortex. His slightly superhuman, illustrator-confident hand facility perfectly balances aggression and control, giving us not so much a drawing as a map of unresolved doctrinal tensions.

Despite the patriotism of World War II era, American culture was changing around this time. Fleeing the war, European artists moved here and brought international art attitudes with them. (4) New York became a world art capital, cosmopolitanism became the norm, and "regions" became objects of anthropological study rather than sources of inspiration. Wood's small town conservatism, already beginning to be an issue in the 1940s, would certainly kill his chances of acceptance today in the world of museum installations and international art fairs. Were he making this work now he would be doomed to remain cordoned off in the "other art world" of people who collect Remingtons.

Even though drawing is perceived as more ephemeral than painting (still) among curators and collectors, it's nevertheless an act of freezing time and fixing history, in comparison to digital art products, which can be manipulated in endless ways. The idea of creating a timeless, stand-alone artifact seems quaint now but in Wood's time what went down on the paper had to count -- that's what art was. This may explain the level of verve and commitment that can still be perceived even in a series of jpeg details, long after battles over "regionalism" have dwindled down to nothing.

1. In the comments to the Glasstire essay, an artist complains that Knudson's years of pre-art class criticism were "like expecting someone who has never even held a screw driver to be able to tell me how to fix my car." Like Marshall McLuhan coming out from behind the theatre sign in Annie Hall, ex-Newsweek critic Peter Plagens suddenly appears in the thread and responds: "Old saying: You don’t have to be a chicken to know a rotten egg... Art writers and curators aren’t trying to tell you how to fix your car (metaphorically, how to make art). They’re judging your art -- something that viewers do, in writing or not, all the time... Betcha when the judgment is along the lines of, 'Hey, that’s a great piece of art you made!' you don’t complain about being judged."

2. Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision, Yale University Press, 1983

3. Id.

4. Id.