Art’s Theory 1
chapter one
Sam Bored
“I’ve got to get up before I wet the bed.”
The urge to pee has nudged Sam Bored into a state of semi-consciousness. In a sleepy daze, he mindlessly rolled over and nearly fell off the threadbare sofa. Waking up in the living room has Sam disoriented and he struggled to recall last night. He must have passed out with his glasses on making it possible for him to read the yellow glow of the digital clock sitting on the fireplace mantel – 10:01. He looked towards the picture window and squinted into the planes of intense morning sunlight slicing through the vertical window blinds. The solar rays cast a shadowy world of prison bars across the tattered couch he still laid upon. Those stripes of intense light and shadow continued up the interior wall the sofa rested against. Sam’s neck was stiff from sleeping up against the armrest of the couch so he started to turn his head from side to side, trying to relieve the ache. Turning to view that interior wall he discovered colorful slices of a stretched canvas between those opaque bars of dark shadow. Extruded skeins of spaghetti shaped paint exploded out of the painting, creating a rainbow world of linear squiggles seemingly viewed through vertical slits. When viewed as a composite whole, the columns of ropey acrylic paint combined to reveal another interior in which a nude woman sat on a loveseat. Through the window behind her Sam saw a man on fire. The painting created a moment that seemed urgent - shall we warn her or help him?
Sam has always felt that his painting of the man on fire was misunderstood. Everyone seemed to be concerned for “her” safety, but he was the one on fire! What a strange reaction Sam thought. If such a man were to burst into flames right now wouldn’t we act to help him? Maybe not.
In the process of regaining full consciousness, Sam managed to push his aching body into a sitting position and robotically stood. Still unsteady, he stumbled his way across the hardwood floor of the living room and onto the dirty tile floor of the bathroom. Sam rested his head against the wall for balance and tried to remember the night before. Did he really climb a mountain trail with Doug Under or was it all some wild fever dream from just moments ago? It had been almost a year since his best friend left North America to work on some remote island off the coast of Chile. Sam missed seeing his friend, whose life as an archeologist always had more adventure and better stories than his own pathetic routine. Getting the two of them together caused hilarious duels of mental masturbation fueled by a liquid diet of handcrafted ales and various strains of cannabis.
As Sam began to empty his bladder, he became momentarily mesmerized by the undulating patterns reflected off the water’s rippling surface. As his urine flow changed, the reflections evolved into a ghostly image of a cherub that quickly melted into an abstract kaleidoscope of dancing hues. He blinked and the water’s surface came back into focus. No amount of shaking seemed to be enough, so Sam flushed and turned to look in the mirror. He was living the romantic bohemian myth of the struggling artist and, judging by his reflection, it seemed to be killing him. As he stared at his droopy-eyed face in the mirror the concept of super-symmetry came to mind. The idea proposed that every known particle of matter had an anti-matter twin particle; although not all of them have been found. With one ear lower than the other and a large nostril because of a deviated septum, Sam could see no evidence for the theory in his own face.
Stuck into the bottom corner of the bathroom mirror, a photograph of his roommate’s beautiful bare ass stared back at him. Turning on the faucet to wash his hands, Sam noticed a vial sitting next to her face soap. Taped onto the small glass container was a single word note: please. Zia hated when he used her face soap on his hands - now the whole bathroom smelled like his girlfriend. Once again, he had not managed to wake up and join her for breakfast.
Time always seemed to be a challenge for Sam. Maybe a result of all the chess playing, he often had the feeling that time was out of sync somehow. To be sure, all humans have experiences of time slowing down in emergencies and speeding up as they age. But for Sam it was more like seeing the winning chess move too late, missing his moment. To borrow a jazz expression, the only time he experienced being “in the groove” was during painting sessions in his studio. In those creative periods Sam often got lost in time and space.
He still felt fuzzy while walking through the kitchen towards Zia’s lukewarm pot of coffee and the cold pizza in the fridge from the night before. Sam returned to the couch with breakfast and began his morning ritual of reading the newspaper and scanning the television channels to ensure that it was safe to leave the apartment. He channel surfed through body counts from the Mideast, Wall Street updates, two old white guys in suits arguing about politics, a glassy-eyed dog begging for his gravy soaked supper, bad weather footage from the Gulf of Mexico and the tail end of a short spot on the current chess championship which cut to a commercial for some dive bar and grill. Some obnoxious character named Ole Pop Culture was rapping off a string of cliché phrases like: “just keeping it real with a two-for-one deal, can you feel the funk?, then come shake that junk in your trunk and just over the hill and through the woods to Grandma’s Rustic Tavern you should go.” Sam recoiled from the aggressive sales pitch and switched to a local PBS science program about Quantum Mechanics. A particle physicist was explaining the strange phenomenon known as entanglement. The narrator described how sub-atomic particles are paired for life and affect each other even when separated by great distances. That concept always made Sam think of stories about one identical twin sensing the other’s death.
For Sam, entanglement seemed to offer some scientific basis for how premonitions or déjà vu could be real. Humans have always claimed to have had experiences that were out of time – backward or forward from the present. Sam wondered if such mental, nonphysical, journeys might be possible by way of sub-atomic particles moving backward and forward in time. Sam could accept Descartes’ axiom: “I think therefore I am” unless you put a couple beers in him and, then just for fun, he’ll argue that maybe it isn’t such a self-evident truth. The question Sam asked was, “What am I?” This line of inquiry led Sam to an examination of how our reality is constructed and inspired many of his paintings.
One might ask, what’s the point? Such an odd expression when you stop to think about it. That word comes from geometry, as in point, line, shape, volume, etc. Then again, those are also what artists refer to as the formal values. Anyway, a point is a very specific mathematical concept that really only makes sense if you include space and time. The point of this postmodern tale exists somewhere inside Sam’s mind as it wanders towards ideas beyond human comprehension. Sam is a ten dimensional savant; he just doesn’t know it yet.
Sam smelled a half-smoked joint in the ashtray sitting on the cluttered coffee table. With a complex series of moves he collected the stinky roach, a lighter, the section of the newspaper with the crossword puzzle and an ink pen. Standing up, he juggled everything into one hand in order to grab his coffee cup and head outside onto the apartment’s balcony. Sam’s favorite feature of the living space he shared with Zia was this weathered redwood deck. He sat down in a beat up wicker chair pushed into the corner up against the building. The morning sunshine bounced between the two stucco walls and made that spot twenty degrees warmer than the actual outside temperature. This allowed Sam to get his daily dose of vitamin D even in the winter months.
While enjoying this unique micro-climate, Sam folded the newspaper down to reveal the crossword puzzle and lights up last night’s roach. With pen in hand, he quickly started filling in the missing words. Sam has learned that it helps to start with a light hand, just in case he needed to amend his guess. The fact he writes it out in ink revealed something about Sam – extreme confidence in his own intellectual abilities. Over confidence, some would add. But not today! Sam was making quick work of today’s grid of words. He seemed to sense some answers even before he read the clues. Sometimes such premonitions were so strong they made Sam feel like he had already seen it, done it, been there before – déjà vu. The sensation always freaked him out, but allowed him some insight into the near future. For Sam, life often felt like he had skipped ahead in the novel and knew what was coming without fully understanding why.
Sam snuffed out the tiny roach into the planter he has been using as an ashtray. Grabbing the ceramic cup he made with his own hands, Sam’s mind flashed through the history of Zen pottery and the concept of the “perfect” cup - the epiphany being that both humans and cups are uniquely flawed but still potentially beautiful. He tossed the remaining dark roast coffee down his throat in one fluid motion and sat his uniquely flawed cup on the redwood deck. He removed his shirt to bask in the warm solar radiation – it felt great, like returning to the womb. Reading the next puzzle clue, Sam was irritated by a couple of stubborn answers. This can often mean he has some wrong words written down, something he never liked to admit.
A small Brown Towhee touched down on the handrail surrounding the deck. Sam often tried to convince Zia that the neighborhood birds land on his finger. Not quite, but this one sure seemed comfortable around Sam, like he was part of the furniture. As if on cue, his feathered friend hopped down onto the redwood planks, ten feet away. The way the bird moved its head in sporadic jerking motions reminded Sam of old stop-motion animation techniques. The bird walked in spurts as his head looked this way then that, rotating in the same on-and-off way. Sam wondered if the T-Rex had a similar way of moving about. With that train of thought, the bird now seemed to exist in a parallel time and space. His new avian buddy mechanically turned towards Sam and made eye contact. “What the fuck are you looking at?” the bird’s face asked Sam. Even though he knew a telepathic connection to this modern relative of the dinosaur was absurd, he can’t rationally explain how frequently it seemed to happen.
Sam slowly stood up, trying not to disturb the bird, and stepped back through the sliding door and into the living room. The morning news program was still broadcasting today’s factoids – murder, rape, theft, arson and updates on the local traffic jams. As the anchor forecasted the weather – rain, Sam took his unfinished crossword puzzle into the bathroom. Sitting on the throne, he stared past the newspaper in his hand and focused on the pubic hairs curling on top of cracked white tiles. The curvy human lines overlap the straight zigzagging geometric ceramic fault lines.
Sam finds the juxtaposition to be fascinating. Suddenly, he thinks of an answer, a breakthrough, which makes finishing the puzzle quite easy.
As he gives yesterday’s food back to the ecosystem, Sam looks up from the newspaper at a towel rack surrounded by chipped paint. Up above on the wall hangs a framed portrait of Edgar Allen Poe and for the millionth time Sam will automatically read the quote: “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” For Sam, Poe represents what is best about America’s contribution to art history. Inspired by Surrealism, Puritanical sexual repression and Sigmund Freud, American artists have shown us the waking dream of everyday life. This aesthetic can be found in the melancholy loneliness of an Edward Hopper hotel room or the nightmare of a George Tooker subway entrance. Sam has come to realize that his paintings create the same psychic vertigo – a state of shock brought on by the awareness that things are not always what they seem to be. His paintings contain images that are both illusionistic and impossible – a visual conundrum. They present an alternate reality seen through Sam’s eyes where the viewer is invited to get lost in a puzzling world of unexpected possibilities.
For years Sam had explained his theory of American art with a visual metaphor - imagine yourself standing on the opposite side of a Möbius strip. This seemed to be an ingenious visualization until, his more mathematically inclined friend, Doug, pointed out that a Möbius strip only has one side – so, technically, you can’t actually be on the other side. Even now, it turned Sam’s brain inside out to think of such logical contradictions, so he turned his attention to the paper work and flushed. According to Sam, the true measure of a civilized lifestyle is shitting before you shower.
Finally dressed and out on the street by noon, Sam will try to melt into the anonymous mass transit system of people going everywhere in a whirlwind chaotic frenzy of Brownian movement – a random small scale phenomenon caused by colliding particles. Looking around his manicured middle class neighborhood, Sam was once again awed by the inherent beauty of the everyday world. He quickly snapped out of his wake and bake bliss upon seeing the bus already sitting at his stop. How was he to know it would be on time today? The driver identified a regular customer approaching and reopened the folding door. Sam stepped up into the bus, smiled with gratitude and flashed his monthly pass.
Walking down the center aisle, Sam struggled past vacant stares to find a greasy and smelly bus seat. Looking through graffiti-covered windows, he gazed upon what felt like an alien world. At times like this, he imagined himself to be a different species. Fear of having to interact with these animals sent Sam escaping into the world of subatomic particles. From his bookcase full of contemporary science paperbacks, this is the latest look into the theory of everything. Written for people who are not scientists, the dog-eared book patiently tried to explain a ten-dimensional reality of vibrating strings that can only be experienced as subatomic particles in our four-dimensional world.
“How do you get to ten dimensions?” Sam wonders to himself. In day-to-day life there are three physical dimensions, add time and you have a fourth. Try to visualize our four dimensional world as a flat, but flexible, chessboard and you can add a dimension by rolling it up so one side meets its opposite. Then imagine this space/time as elastic and bend one end of the tube to meet the other. Now we have a donut or torus shape that represents a six dimensional space. String Theory actually argues that the extra dimensions fold-up inside the subatomic world so that humans who live on the flat chessboard world can’t experience the extra dimensions all around them. That Möbius strip might provide some insight into how such folding could work. When looking at that twisted loop common sense argues for two sides and two edges, but if you run your finger around the strip you’ll discover one continuous side and edge. Just like a magic trick, two fold-up into one.
Sam squinted at the strong midday sun pouring through the urban tree branches and wondered how many other bus riders realize that light left the sun eight minutes ago. Do they sense how fast they are all moving? Unlike most people, Sam wasn’t thinking about the speed of city traffic. Instead he sensed slight fluctuations in the one thousand mile per hour rotation of the earth. The G-force created by the sixty-seven thousand miles per hour yearly revolution around the sun was presently making him feel faint. As a member of the Milky Way galaxy, Sam was flying through the universe at over a million miles per hour. The velocity made him hold on for balance just as the bus squeaked and jerked to a stop.
Sam stood up and waited his turn to proceed down the aisle; abruptly turning he stepped down and exited the bus. He is relieved to escape from the cramped space inside the poorly maintained mass transit vehicle. His eyes hurt from the bright intensity of the sun breaking through the clouds sending Sam searching for his sunglasses. Tucked in the pocket of his tattered painting shirt, the hard case was oddly angular, revealing itself to be a triangle when viewed from the end. Sam removed the extra-dark wire rimmed spectacles and admired the beauty of his perfectly round high density plastic lenses. In a complex reflexive way, he took off his glasses and put on his shades.
Suddenly Sam’s mood changes, with those John Lennon-like sunglasses transporting him to a higher realm of psychedelic nirvana.
On his blissful walk to the studio Sam passed a familiar bookstore window and stopped to examine a cover illustration of a binary star system behind a colorful planet that looked a little like Jupiter. Two tiny moons are shown orbiting along the same path, but on opposite sides of the gas giant planet. Above this image in bold type Sam read the title: “REV-VER” and was curious enough to enter the claustrophobic retail space and pick up the used science fiction paperback. Although he mostly read real science books, Sam had a soft spot for the mental masturbation of science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick. When totally stoned Sam had the habit of steering conversations towards the possibility of parallel universes and doppelgangers – he even had a science fiction idea of his own. It is a story about an astrophysicist who discovers a particle accelerator at the center of a black hole and eventually realizes this is how all advanced civilizations end.
As he skim reads REV-VER it becomes evident that the main character of the story is a humanlike biped named Yttib Yddub who lives on a moon named REV that is orbiting a gas giant planet his people call Hue. The enormous colorful planet is orbiting two suns – one a red giant the other a blue dwarf. This binary system is imagined to be on the opposite side of our own Milky Way galaxy. The now out-dated religion of REV saw the suns as two gods engaged in an eternal race through the heavens. The contemporary civilization thinks it looks more like a dance as the suns change position throughout Hue’s six hundred- and sixty-six-day year.
When the people of REV achieved space flight the prediction of their most controversial astrophysicist was proven to be true. Through exact measurements of Hue’s movements Mas Derob theorized a second moon must be orbiting the gas giant. So indeed, directly opposite of REV sat a twin sized moon very different from Yttib Yddub’s world. While REV rotated on its tilted axis creating days, nights and seasons, the second moon did not rotate, always having the same side facing Hue. REV contained a liquid metal core and resulting magnetic field that protected the moon from the intense binary solar radiation. The companion moon had no magnetic field and a much thinner atmosphere.
After many failed robotic probes, the inhabitants of REV decided to send a manned spacecraft to explore the hidden world on the other side of Hue. The humanlike voyagers were shocked to find a monster movie of a companion world. They named it VER after the most intelligent creatures on the newly discovered moon. This strange world was populated by six-legged exoskeleton life forms able to stand upright on their hind legs and use the other four limbs as arms. But when in a hurry or frightened, they drop down to a horizontal position and use all six legs to scurry away. These semi-intelligent bug people of VER could be identified by the unique colored patterns on their shiny metallic shells.
The variety of designs seemed endless and, sometimes, comical. Family members shared colors and shapes, but the variations evolved quickly through generations of cross-breeding. The bugs that had shell colors and shapes that resembled known symbols or language characters found promotions forthcoming and nicknames ubiquitous. Whether it looked like a company logo or traffic sign, their shells became a source of never-ending cruel amusement for their overlords from REV. The jokes were always at the expense of the insect’s dignity – which was questionable to begin with. Up close the six-foot-tall bugs were hairy, greasy and off gassed an odor most humanoids associated with excrement. Add to all of that the odd creaks and clicks of their robotic movements that reminded everyone of outdated stop motion animation techniques.
All the bug descriptions were making Sam itchy. He often claimed the ability to feel the microscopic mites crawling through his eyebrows and using his eyelashes as springboards. His aversion to being a parasite host was the second most important reason for his daily shower.
The bookstore clerk erupts with a violent sneeze and Sam’s germ phobia kicks into overdrive. He pulls his t-shirt over his nose trying to filter out whatever disease cloud is now floating his way. With renewed urgency he returns to the used science fiction paperback.
≈
As the space plane finished boarding the cheaper seats in back, Yttib Yddub settles into his executive class lounge chair. Looking out the small round window he can see another beautiful duel sunset colorize the atmosphere of the moon he calls home. Brilliant colors also bounce off the cloud layers of Hue – the gas giant often visible from REV. Once again, he is on a business trip to VER. “What do they want?” Yttib asks himself while resenting the time he spends traveling between the two worlds.
Most of the factories for REV are now on VER, making space travel between the two moons commonplace. Used as semi-skilled labor, the bug people of VER did all the toxic manufacturing work for the humanlike world of REV. Exploited but no longer hunted for sport, the insect people had a long oral history of buzzes and clicks, and a slight telepathic connection to each other. Using a written language of symbols, the bugs have been conditioned, through behavior modification programs, to work the machinery of the factories.
Mr. Yddub looks across the aisle just as a fellow space plane traveler looks over towards him. It is hard to ignore the circle tattooed on the man’s forehead and Yttib Yddub is afraid his immediate reaction may have involuntarily shown on his face. But what actually comes back at him is what one always sees on such cult members faces – that vacuous dumbass smile. They are at peace knowing it is all nothing. Empty space as they say. Fuck them! They are politically deaf and delusional about current events. For them, the end of the world will reveal that everything was an illusion.
Yttib Yddub tries to get his mind off work and the nearly two-day flight to VER. He reaches into his carry-on bag and pulls out the best-selling book he purchased just for this trip. Opening the fictional novel at his dog-eared stopping point, Yttib attempts to escape into the pathetic life of a frustrated artist tortured by his own obscurity.
≈
Sam put down the used science fiction paperback and exited the musty bookstore. He looked at the sea of humanity on the sidewalk and imagined himself surrounded by “Bug” people. Mechanically moving about, the giant insects were making bone on bone crunching sounds. Lost in surreal thoughts, he trudged down the sidewalk and unconsciously turned in the direction of his studio. He jay walked across the busy boulevard to cut across what the locals called Wino Park. He looked beyond the giant chess pieces and spied his sanctuary straight ahead. The third story windows of his painting studio stared back at him. No longer commercially viable, the dilapidated old building was now protected by the city’s historical registry. With woodstove heat, no insulation, old wires, single pane windows and a leaky roof; the narrow structure leaned lovingly up against the much taller modern office building to the left. The tilt seemed comical, like over acting. Once the most famous bordello in the city, she now looked pretty rough in broad daylight.
A grungy burnt-out sign above the street level retail space reads: Joe’s Style Shop - a store full of dusty outdated pimp clothing. During all the years Sam has painted in the studio above, nothing seemed to change in Joe’s display window. Inside the store front sat Joe, a shriveled up old Jewish guy from New York City, with glasses as thick as coke bottles, he packed a derringer in his waistband and a shotgun behind the counter. The nagging question for Sam has always been: what does Joe actually do for income? Sam’s best guess was either bookie or fence.
Unlocking the faded green door to the right, Sam scaled the creaky wooden staircase to the top floor. Winded by the two-story climb, he keyed another deadbolt lock and finally entered his inner sanctum. Years ago, Sam covered all the grime with an opaque coat of white gesso causing the floor and walls to now resemble gestural abstract paintings from the accumulated drips and spatters. Scattered about the room, the incredible illusionism of the actual artworks created a fascinating contrast. He agreed with Frank Auerbach that without subject matter, painting is meaningless. Picasso said it best: “Non-figurative painting is never subversive…you can’t impose your thought on people if there’s no relation between your painting and their visual habits.”
Sam’s paintings are subversive in form and anarchistic in cultural spirit. He does not invent images, he confiscates them. With scissors and glue, Sam collages together a seductive rebus of magazine fragments that lure the viewer into a hypnotic alternate reality. Like mind altering drugs, his composite images created hallucinogenic experiences that changed a person’s mindset. Using impossible linear perspective combinations, the pictorial space of the paintings crystallizes into a Cubistic topography – complete with bizarre visual juxtapositions that haunt the recesses of a person’s subconscious mind. Sam’s technical skill level made everyone believe in his absurd contradictory world, where opposites become two sides of the same thing.
He envisioned himself making Art with a big “A”. Art, as in Philosophies of Art and Beauty – and like philosophy or science, an Art focused on the big questions. For ages humans have wondered “What am I?” and “Where am I?” Sam believed Art got closest to uncovering the answers to such questions. “The lie that reveals the truth” was how Picasso defined Art. In the quote stapled to the upper left corner of Sam’s designated working wall, Cezanne seemed to agree when he states “I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you.”
With both hands, Sam Bored lifted a vertical painting of a dog off the studio wall and gently laid it on the paint splattered floor. The dark eyes of the canine plead for our love and companionship. Now, with the canvas lying on the floor, raking light magnified the extruded texture of the dog’s fur. As Sam grabbed an oral syringe used to create such tubular acrylic lines, he noticed the recycle symbol printed on the side of the box. For the first time ever, he realized this ubiquitous icon of contemporary culture was, actually, a Möbius strip.
Dark liquid eyes will seem to stare up at us from the world created by Sam’s painting. An expectant face will want to beg us to come closer as a long pink tongue slides across a wet black nose. A manic tail will switch back and forth with excitement, as the dog leads us through tall grass towards the sound of the ocean surf. The smell of saline mist fills the air. As we arrive at a sandy beach, the eager canine will sprint ahead and stop at a huge rock sticking out of the ground. Looking up, we will discover the volcanic stone to be shaped like a human head with an overstated jaw. The exuberant dog will circle the statue several times before lifting a hind leg to pee. He will spring back towards the tunnel of light we seem to be looking through, and a hand will appear and reach down to pet the eternally grateful dog. As we zoom in the hand will look dry and cracked, like that of a working-class laborer; the thumbnail will have a jagged chip missing from its edge. The hand will then slide out of our telescopic view and our focus will leave the dog, move across the beach and stop to observe a beautiful ocean sunset. The weathered hand will reappear holding a small glass cylinder between its index finger and thumb. Light passing through the tubular prism will appear to form a holographic image made from rainbow-colored hues- it resembles a double helix.
