{"id":9316,"date":"2021-01-25T23:35:41","date_gmt":"2021-01-25T23:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=9316"},"modified":"2021-01-25T23:40:09","modified_gmt":"2021-01-25T23:40:09","slug":"blm-vs-mlk-spiritual-art-apple-fritters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=9316","title":{"rendered":"BLM vs. MLK, spiritual art, apple fritters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jim Mott’s painting of a mailbox, after arriving at this spot in his Landscape Lottery.<\/p><\/div>\n

Jim Mott came by this weekend for a conversation after a long absence, and we picked up more or less where we\u2019d left off last time, talking partly about spirituality, art and God, BLM vs. MLK, his new art project, and some other things I ordinarily don\u2019t talk about, like apple fritters. Though Jim is deeply political, in a way that goes back more to the Sixties than what\u2019s happening now, he\u2019s the least confrontational and least angry political person I know. Many people obsessed with politics seem to have embraced it as a substitute for religion. Jim already has a faith, so politics is simply a way of thinking about how to put that faith into action. What I like about his politics and his religion are the way in which they get submerged into his paint, in a sub-rosa way, neither overt nor strident, producing work that embodies his spirituality rather than illustrates it, if that makes sense. Most of the artists I\u2019m close to are deeply spiritual, but each one in a very different way from the others. Here\u2019s a good portion of our long conversation:<\/p>\n

Dave: I went through this spiritual crisis in my teens and it was discovering Van Gogh who got me into it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jim: The crisis?<\/p>\n

No, he got me into painting. He was so screwed up, but he responded to it by painting. He started by preaching and then went from that to painting, so it was kind of the way he dealt with there being something wrong with the world, or with him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s that romantic notion or tradition that the world doesn\u2019t get it and the individual poet does, so you\u2019re at odds with the world.<\/p>\n

It was just the opposite of that with me. I didn\u2019t get it. Life was absurd and I didn\u2019t get it, but that was repugnant to me, so at some level I knew I wasn\u2019t right to have that perception. That was my dilemma. The idea that meaning seemed impossible and this was a crisis, a problem. It seemed the world was pointless and amounted to nothing, and this was horrifying because I couldn\u2019t see out of that mental trap. But there\u2019s a contradiction I didn\u2019t see in this. Camus based The Rebel<\/em> on a recognition of this contradiction: that people inwardly rebel against nihilism. If nothing matters, then there\u2019s no reason to be dissatisfied with that, just enjoy what you can and that\u2019s that. Why is it horrifying that life seems to amount to nothing? There\u2019s some context in which the absurdity of life is unacceptable but if everything is genuinely pointless how can anything be unacceptable? I couldn\u2019t get to that state of \u201cthere\u2019s no way any of any of this can really matter, including my anguish over the impossibility of meaning, so I might as well enjoy life while it lasts.\u201d I couldn\u2019t reconcile myself to this nihilistic certainty I had. So I looked at Van Gogh because I assumed he had to have gone through something like that and responded to it by painting. I\u2019d already been painting pictures of my favorite guitarists, Hendrix, Clapton, Bloomfield. I was in a band, I loved playing my Telecaster. I did the paintings just to have them on my walls. Enlarged copies of album covers. Then I read about Van Gogh and thought, hm, painting is an activity that\u2019s interesting in itself, partly because Van Gogh, this incredibly discontented guy, was so devoted to it. Van Gogh got me to that point. My reading later gave me a way to understand this crisis I\u2019d gone through in a spiritual perspective. So the painting and the spiritual perspective merged. <\/strong><\/p>\n

When you\u2019re doing a good painting you feel like you\u2019re participating in something larger than yourself, at some level it\u2019s about ego-lessness and service. Given all that, the way the art world is all about ego competition and material symbols of success, what would happen if, I don\u2019t know, what happens to you when you buy into that at all. You\u2019re doing what you need to do to advance yourself but, as a result of that, cutting yourself off from your deepest, most authentic sense of what it\u2019s all about \u2013 and that awareness of doing something in service to something larger, that awareness and how it imprints itself on the painting, that might be as important to the viewer as all the other qualities that would make a painting conventionally successful.<\/p>\n

You mean given the art world\u2019s definition of success. Should you fight it or resist it? <\/strong>That\u2019s always a question.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You\u2019re working to show this . . .<\/p>\n

Mystery . .\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right. The art world wants someone who\u2019s world-famous. If someone had handed me world fame, I\u2019m not sure I\u2019d turn it down, but . . .<\/p>\n

If it does amount to something, a painting, then if you aren\u2019t known, how do you get it out there? Something essential to your life, how do you connect it to other people?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even with the significant but moderately narrow level of recognition we get, is it worthwhile to generate a counter-narrative about what it\u2019s all about? As an alternative to the pursuit of the material rewards or even critical recognition. I don\u2019t know. Just to have a small audience to tell that to, you\u2019re still having an impact. Integration is the mission now for me: art and spirit, left and right.<\/p>\n

<Behind him on the little end table, I always display his night painting of the Memorial Art Gallery and nearby Tom Insalaco\u2019s painting of an eclair. We have a sidebar discussion of eclairs vs. apple fritters and where to find the best fritters, which was possibly the most impactful part of the entire conversation, but not worth transcribing.)<\/p>\n

So what are you painting?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I find I\u2019m not very motivated unless I have a project. So I\u2019m doing this project with my wife\u2019s niece. During the protests, my wife was saying the protestors were destroying the neighborhood where she\u2019d grown up here in Rochester. She said, \u201cMy friends in the suburbs were cheering them on, but the people who live there, the ones the protests are supposedly helping, don\u2019t have anywhere to get groceries now. She said, \u201cDefund the police? What are the victims of domestic violence going to do when they\u2019re getting beaten? So she was thinking of writing an essay. She knows the inner city. Her family comes in all colors.\u00a0 She\u2019s keenly aware of racism and poverty. She was writing an essay about how your lawn sign isn\u2019t helping anyone. She had just visited her niece. Her niece\u2019s son, whose father is Black, doesn\u2019t see those signs.\u00a0 What he does see is poverty and chaos and a school system that\u2019s failing. He\u2019s in third-grade at a school where the majority of students can\u2019t pass state exams for their grade in math and English \u2013 on a good year. During Covid he\u2019s been doing his schoolwork, doing all his classes on a smartphone with a smashed screen.<\/p>\n

What a year.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So I was thinking, she went around looking for Black Lives Matter signs in her nephew\u2019s neighborhood, where the message might reach him and make some difference, and there was just one in this area of several blocks. She was saying the people in those neighborhoods don\u2019t need people in the suburbs to put up signs; they need people to go in and connect with them and understand poverty, start to make a larger sense of community a reality. So I decided to work with her niece. The project was to get together once a month and go sketching at a series of places that are meaningful to her. I\u2019ll make paintings to go with the sketches. Ideally we\u2019d have our sketches and the painting and a story about a place that meant something to both of us. But mainly we both sketch. It\u2019s a model for how to reach out and connect with someone, using art \u2013 which has the benefit of being visible \u2013 show-able. It\u2019s the next project after the Itinerant Artist series and the Landscape Lottery.<\/p>\n

All of these projects encourage me to go out of my way to pay attention to parts of the world I otherwise would overlook or not see.\u00a0 There\u2019s a forced getting past my own interests in order to connect with something more (which I suppose is a deeper interest). Art is inherently spiritual, and this sort of builds on that, makes art practice a spiritual practice. I found what I painted in Ferguson, when I went there a year after those riots, it felt like a vigil or prayer, just being there doing a painting.<\/p>\n

Did you see the Simone Weil quote I sent you in that material from Matthew Crawford. She said basically . . . Crawford wrote these books . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

The World Beyond Your Head.<\/em><\/p>\n

Right. Shop Class is Soul Craft<\/em> was the first one.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Which one did you like better?<\/p>\n

The first one because it was so out of the blue. The second one is sort of the sequel, extending his philosophy beyond craftsmanship and the trades. His way of doing philosophy was to repair motorcycles. It\u2019s analogous to painting in the way it connects physical skill and physical awareness. Iris Murdoch was one of the most powerful references in the first book. She wrote about how art is a way of simply paying attention to something else but yourself. That\u2019s what you were saying: egolessness, just redirecting your attention to anything but yourself. That alone is ameliorative or just a way of approaching the Good. She calls it unselfing.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not just attending to it, but identifying with something greater.<\/p>\n

The whole surround, the world you are in. You a part of this wholeness you\u2019re inhabiting and just trying to be aware of it. Weil was saying that any moment of intense awareness is akin to prayer. That\u2019s all prayer is, surrendering to something bigger. I thought that was interesting that you made that connection too.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I went through some of her stuff in my thirties and was really impressed.<\/p>\n

Crawford talks about skilled physical labor. He talks about how, in motorcycle repair, it becomes intuitive because you get so familiar with the machine, the sounds it makes, the way it moves, whatever, that you diagnose what needs to be done, sometimes, subconsciously, by attending to physical cues without even being conscious of it. It\u2019s partly a physical learning. Like muscle memory. It all derives from intense periods of just paying attention with care, even love.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

That reminds me of one of my hates. At Mendon park, one of the workers cut down some bushes that work as habitat for certain birds and put one of these carved benches with a little awning over \u2013 it doesn\u2019t work as shade, the bench is crudely made, and it all looks horrible. He\u2019s crafting but there\u2019s no aesthetics and no knowledge of the environment. I complain, but who\u2019s to say what\u2019s bad. I am, I guess, . . . but you know . .<\/p>\n

These days nobody hesitates to say what\u2019s bad. Everyone is constantly passing judgement on someone else.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right, and that doesn\u2019t dissolve the ego. I realize I can be very judgmental.\u00a0 There was this show in NYC in the 80s that was called Concerning the Spiritual in Art.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wasn\u2019t that Kandinsky\u2019s title?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. I was excited. But it was such bad art \u2013 well, a lot of it was weak. More to the point, the curators seemed clueless, and the writing in the review\u2026 it was clear the person didn\u2019t know what spiritual was.\u00a0 It was just something theoretically defined, satisfied by certain prescribed \u201cspiritual\u201d criteria.<\/p>\n

Kandinsky\u2019s art was spiritual, but it wasn\u2019t overtly religious. If you asked someone to do a spiritual painting, you might get an illustration of a story from the Bible. Of course that could be a genuinely spiritual painting, but not necessarily <\/strong><\/p>\n

Someone who goes to a church I sometimes go to tried to get me to paint a picture of a holy mountain in India, but he wanted saints faces floating around it and I told him I didn\u2019t do that kind of work. I tried to persuade him that a painting of an everyday landscape could be spiritual. He just got mad and found somebody else to do the painting. The guy just wanted that and nothing else would do. That\u2019s one end of the spectrum, but the NYC end is that spirituality is one small sub-category of abstract painting, and nothing else was.<\/p>\n

Kandinsky didn\u2019t mean a particular kind of painting, but that painting itself is an attempt to show what\u2019s there in the world unseen that might become more visible through the imaginative struggle with paint.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And for him it was mainly abstract \u2013 although he did leave room for \u201cLandscapes with Spirit\u201d. There were no landscapes in that NYC show.<\/p>\n

With the surrealists and the heart of abstract expressionism there was an attempt to channel spiritual energy, not just a formal innovation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They painted as if their lives depended on it. So I met with my niece once and did some sketches and tried to get some paintings done from them. She sketched a tree and it was good. She isn\u2019t being artistically ambitious \u2013 at least not yet \u2013\u00a0 it\u2019s mainly a chance to focus on something good or benign \u2013 in this case a tree \u2013 that she doesn\u2019t make time for otherwise. It was just a way to get her out there sketching. She said she missed that. The first location was a church where she said she\u2019d been baptized. And then, more recently, when her life was getting too crazy and she needed to get away, she\u2019d slept on the back steps of this church one night.<\/p>\n

So she got something out of the sketch that others wouldn\u2019t. We did a sketch of houses with shadows on the roofs and the sketches were exciting, but the painting didn\u2019t have life of the sketches. I got this photograph from that setting and I was blowing it up and just to focus I blocked off a panoramic strip of it and that strip got really interesting so now I may have this little thin painting that has nothing to do with poverty.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re drawn to it, do it. Don\u2019t stick with the plan.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<Then I contradict myself, talking about how I\u2019m sticking to my plan, despite resistance. We talk about my marathon of taffy paintings and the way I have to postpone other things I\u2019d just as soon be painting. I do small sections every day, a very laborious and long process but I don\u2019t want to drop it and move on until I get the project done. A painting takes six weeks generally and when I get to week five, that\u2019s the test in terms of energy and focus. They aren\u2019t hyper-realistic but also not overly rough in a painterly way. You know it\u2019s paint but you don\u2019t see all the execution, the mark making. I\u2019m surprised that this is what I want. I thought I wanted something else in the handling of the paint when I began this series.><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t do much plein air anymore. I sketch and do photographs and work from them in the studio. I miss working from life. It\u2019s different. You might change the image in ways that are poetic.<\/p>\n

Yes. I think the people who are opposed to working from photographs, they are looking for variations you can\u2019t help but make in the way you render what you see. Like Van Gogh\u2019s marks. There\u2019s no way he could get away from those marks. There\u2019s no way a photograph could tell him to make them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a selfish question. I feel I should try to do a Landscape Lottery<\/a> somewhere else. I\u2019ve done it here with good results. You get public interest. I\u2019m trying to think of where to go next. It should be a city.<\/p>\n

You randomize the GPS to come up with the locations.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, for the Landscape Lottery the idea is to define an area \u2013 say Greater Rochester<\/a> \u2013 then generate random points within that area to determine where I\u2019ll go to paint.\u00a0 The first time I did it \u2013 in Tucson \u2013 I used a computer to generate random GPS points. For Rochester I used a pair of dice and six by six grids superimposed on a map of the metropolitan area, nested grids. Roll dice three times and you end up with a fairly precise location. With randomized locations you find something demanding that you might not have picked voluntarily. It challenges my preconceptions about what\u2019s worthy of being painted, my ability to feel a sense of connection. I like the idea that \u201cthere is significance in all things waiting to be attended to.\u201d But it can be hard to tune into.<\/p>\n

It’s just you and the device. Not someone else saying or giving you a suggestion. The itinerant project as you and the other people you stayed with.<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the rules I give myself for the Lottery is that at any painting stop I have to try to meet people. Particularly, if I meet a stranger, I will ask them to roll the dice \u2013 determining my next painting destination. Someone in the inner city rolls and I get sent to farmland in Hilton. The farmer I meet there \u201csends\u201d me to the next stop (it happened to be the airport). And so on. \u00a0It\u2019s a way of getting to know people I wouldn\u2019t meet otherwise and weaving these invisible connections through the community. (These people from very different backgrounds are sort of collaborating.) I would need to do it probably in a metro area with a gallery that would want to show the results.<\/p>\n

Try Cincinnati. It\u2019s a big art town. Manifest might be interested in a project like that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s good. The heartland.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re non-profit. It\u2019s a research center. They\u2019re always looking for new ideas. They aren\u2019t going to turn it down because it isn\u2019t a money-maker.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not really sure why I\u2019ve made enforced randomness such a big part of my practice. Initially, with the Itinerant Artist Project, the focus was more on a way of sharing life \u2013 typically with strangers \u2013 that art made possible, especially getting outside the gallery and into their homes. The unpredictability was just a byproduct of relying on volunteer hosts. But I was drawn to the challenge of making art anywhere and being able to connect with anyone. And I\u2019ve noticed the hosts for the IAP are self-selecting \u2013 I\u2019ve gone all over the country, but it\u2019s mostly been the world of middle-class white people who can afford to put me up for a night or two. When I do the Landscape Lottery, it\u2019s different. I end up interacting with people from all walks of life. In both Tucson and even more here. \u00a0One of the memorable stops was \u2013 I think I told you this \u2013 the random point was in Gates and there were all these things on the way I really wanted to paint. But I had to keep driving to get to my spot. No, not the quarry, not the railroad. . . oh it\u2019s just a residential street. And the light\u2019s nice. But there were a bunch of American flags and odd little houses and nothing picturesque at all. It was a Republican street. That\u2019s not bad, but there was a vibe that I was in a place . . .<\/p>\n

That\u2019s funny. Democrats don\u2019t put out flags.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There was a certain feel. I knocked on the door of the house I parked in front of to explain why I was there. I was very uncomfortable, but I told them about the project and this nice old lady and her daughter living there, we had a great time. They rolled the dice and sent me to the next place, which turned out to be Mount Hope Cemetery where her husband was buried. <Along with Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony> But then the scene I actually chose was just a mailbox on that Republican street with some old Fifties ranch house, and it ended up being a really popular image for the show. The woman who lived there came out to get the mail, and I apologized for being in the way and I said, \u02dcYou know any artists around that I can give a sketch pad to?\u2019 She said \u201cmy husband sketches all the time.\u2019 Sure enough, he was coming down the road, and he looked suspicious, kind of unpleasant, but it turned out that he sketched everything, all the time. I got him to talk a little. He\u2019d done a painting in high school, in Manhattan, which the school kept and he once went back to try to look at it and someone from the board of MOMA had bought it.<\/p>\n

I remember that story. <\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I like being on my own and withdrawn but I actually enjoy making these connections. Extending who I can identify with. I can be very very left on some things and my whole family, my grandfather was a socialist who helped set up Canada\u2019s healthcare system and my parents were activists. Everyone was so enthused about the BLM movement but Sonja and I were horrified that they were demonizing the police.<\/p>\n

Now you have this \u201cinsurrection\u201d and the police are heroes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s just, I\u2019ve had bad interactions with lots of police. They\u2019re often power-hungry jerks but . . .<\/p>\n

But you have to have them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Try to be on good terms, at least keep open the potential to interact with them as human beings, reach their humanity.<\/p>\n

There aren\u2019t that many serious anarchists anymore. Where is Bakunin these days?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

<Jim read from his phone Obama\u2019s chastening comments about how unwise it is politically simply to talk about defunding police.><\/p>\n

As soon as someone\u2019s camping on your lawn, you will call the police. The new District Attorney in L.A. says he isn\u2019t going to enforce trespassing laws. As soon as someone pitches a tent on a front lawn in Brentwood, that will change. Compton too, probably, for that matter.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Strategically, when the protests started, I remember the news. Police all over the country were taking a knee. Yes, some are very racist. L.A. and St. Louis, but a lot weren\u2019t that way. After a few months of demonizing police, that changed.<\/p>\n

If I\u2019m just a racist copy why should I answer the 911 call? With social media you feel as if you have to respond to stupidity with stupidity. It\u2019s like the Goya painting of those two giants just bludgeoning each other with cudgels. That\u2019s social media.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Almost all I watched of the Washington protests were these moderate Republican senators who had just lost Georgia and were talking about just getting along. They looked as if they\u2019d had a conversion experience. Some of them really meant it.<\/p>\n

Of course, they did. What happened to Martin Luther King Jr? Who is out there calling for the sit-in rather than the riot?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a friend, also named Dave Chappell, who is a student of Christopher Lasch and he\u2019s now considered one of the top scholars on the civil rights movement. He\u2019s white, but he\u2019s . . .<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s really Black, like Bill Clinton?<\/strong><\/p>\n

He has an inside pass. He works so hard on that stuff. One of his books was about what made civil rights work. His argument was that it was prophetic religion that really had force and the leaders were willing to die for it. They had these high principles. The segregationists used church to reinforce their convictions but they didn\u2019t have the same energy because they didn\u2019t have the moral foundation.<\/p>\n

It was the New Testament. Resist not evil. Love your enemy. It all comes from Tolstoy\u2019s later writing when he embraced his own form of Christianity. He inspired Gandhi. They corresponded. MLK followed the example. Don\u2019t answer evil with evil. Give love in response to evil.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Which is hard.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s seriously hard. But anyone can realize that if you\u2019re sitting there in the photograph being attacked by police dogs and offering no violence in return, you\u2019ve won. You don\u2019t win against evil by being evil.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The movement now doesn\u2019t have religious conviction.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s postmodern. It\u2019s completely abandoned the absolute values that were undergirding the civil rights movement. Values are whatever works to seize and sustain power. Now it\u2019s just power against power with no underlying absolute value. We have narratives, not values.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The push for justice and not being treated with bias is good but when you start pushing the police lines because you have demands based on what the people did who rioted last week and treating people like animals to get what you want \u2013 that\u2019s not the moral high ground.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Saul Alinsky not Martin Luther King, Jr. If the conservatives could wake up the same way. A hundred thousand people show up and sit down on the steps of the Capitol and refuse to leave, demand an investigation of the election. That\u2019s a sit-in with a clear objective. Just sit peacefully and force the troops to carry them away. How would the media condemn them? That would be a way to ask for an investigation to find out whatever actually happened and move on. Everyone turns it into a struggle to the death because they want to turn the opposition into the enemy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well art can still save the world, Dave, right?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly a way of sitting still and refusing to move. Wasn\u2019t it Dostoevsky who said beauty will save the world? It’s worth a try.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jim Mott came by this weekend for a conversation after a long absence, and we picked up more or less where we\u2019d left off last time, talking partly about spirituality, art and God, BLM vs. MLK, his new art project, and some other things I ordinarily don\u2019t talk about, like apple fritters. Though Jim is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBLM vs. MLK, spiritual art, apple fritters - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=9316\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"BLM vs. MLK, spiritual art, apple fritters - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jim Mott came by this weekend for a conversation after a long absence, and we picked up more or less where we\u2019d left off last time, talking partly about spirituality, art and God, BLM vs. MLK, his new art project, and some other things I ordinarily don\u2019t talk about, like apple fritters. 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