Ranting about Artists; June 23, 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I know pretty much what my personal problem with artists is, which is envy mixed with anger; it started with the Oedipus complex, but then it also has to do with my general make-up which is low Chutzpah, minimal draftsmanship ability, and general Avoidance Personality Disorder, all of which are motivation for my major annoyance at the Art World..

But my main complaint concerning said World today is that I'm really unable to create new friendships with artists or to keep old ones going. And that's frustrating because I've been fascinated with the process of making art all my life, and have studied artists with fascination since, when? Day one! [ That's true, absolutely. ]

My fascination started with a dialogue with my mother, under the heading of What Makes Dad Tick.  Which is to say that it is a discourse going back before time began. It starts with having a certain awe, combined with the love of a paternalistic God. But the text was always there, to paraphrase Lacan, et. al. including Heidegger. This of course I've written about in my one book, [see; Anton Prohaska ] and will attempt to delve into in #2, should I live so long; and was best wrapped up in a nutshell by a book by the noted Psychiatrist and Analyst and friend of Artists, Dr. Daniel Schnieder, in his book Psychoanalysis and The Artist, which I perused when it was new and I was young, and re-perused, read and read again. If I'd been rich, and older, I could have gone to Schniedz, as he was called by his in-crowd of clever and fortunate and in some cases famous patients; and if such a thing had come to be, I would now be someone too successful for words, rather than this person who seems content to be Blogging about himself to an audience of three.

Of course then during the early days of my protracted adolescence, which lasted in to my early thirties, I fell in love with Henry Miller, and read everything he wrote, so that I felt I was partly him, and then of course had to read all of Anais Nin, which was all entwined with Otto Rank who was her therapist and lover, and the one who took artists apart in the most intricate and convincing way of anyone before or since; so that when I fell in love with a lady artist and quickly made a mess of it and had to leave for The Coast, where I planned to "get myself together", (it was the early seventies), the first thing I felt compelled to do after checking into a piss-in-the-sink hotel in Chinatown in San Francisco and after having a good Northern Italian meal in North Beach, was to find a good used bookstore and get a copy of Rank's Art and Artist; which meant that I needed to allow for an extended sabbatical on limited funds, and also meant that I would have to start taking notes.

And in those days, and up to that time in my life, I'd had not much trouble finding artists as friends, not just because I lived in an artist colony, but because I was a good drinking buddy. And when I got to San Francisco, while there weren't many painters around, I fell in with a group of poets, and a few Jazz musicians, without even trying. They just appeared. By the time I was in San Francisco for a month, I was being mistaken for a local. (I also became friends with a whole tribe of third generation Irish cops, firemen and Civil Service workers, but that's another story.)

My point here is, see; I changed. California, not my friends, but the larger context, began to give me the creeps. A creepy Smiley Face Fascism was rolling in like the fog. If you were sad or depressed you had to go underground. I began to be homesick for New York, and more especially, my home in Eastern Long Island. And back home, where the world was bleak, and Jimmy Carter had become President, and a new generation of artists were getting rich, I was able to bottom out on my own personal pain, while scraping by as a house painter, and at night reading Celine, and Pynchon, and going to a confused child psychologist for therapy to the point where it began to dawn on me that I didn't really like the response I got when I began to question the political motivation of the local intelligentsia. 

And so my reading became more critical; I discovered the incestuous relationship between the KGB and the CIA's Anti-Stalinist Left, and the existence of a small group of non-Communist non-Liberal sane people, who courageously were standing up to the biggest, richest Liberal cabal in history. And when I began to voice new opinions, I also began to discover, and make peace with, being a complete outcast.  And  now I live in Florida, I have very few friends, and I am as happy as a long-neck clam when the tide comes in, but I do allow myself to hate. Why shouldn't I! I mean do I have to be more saintly than the people I left back home in East Hampton who foam at the mouth with any mention of the Bush family, and are, as we speak, having some sort of a group Stroke over Trump? Wouldn't being holier than thou towards them just be some sort of hubris?  I won't bother.

Let me just say that they should take note; not one of them, not the whole insider-trading bunch of the "Arts" crowd in the "Hamptons" and Manhattan actually need their beloved "Old Left", that which seems to be their only source of nostalgia or romantic feeling, nor do they need the factitious New Left or Pelosi-Schumer and Co. Let me say it loud and clear, "You don't need it!" It's just a big blemish on your otherwise lovely mug.  xxoo