It has always interested me that in art for instance an object can be seen in so many different ways. A specialist notes markings that establish authorship, someone else notes provenance another does the same but to establish value not origin. A fourth, likes the color because it reminds her of her long lost lover's eyes and so on. But a work of art is a privileged object: it's meant have instability past its mere presence in front of you. In some ways you have to project meaning onto it and all that meaning is essential a product of you, the viewers experience and knowledge.

Since 1990, the U.S. Border Patrol knows of about 170 tunnels between Mexico and the United States, mostly in California and Arizona.

We Sail at Dawn

http://www.blurb.com/books/1719261-we-sail-at-dawn

Images that for whatever reason caught my eye at image-bookmarking site: ffffound

http://ffffound.com/home/v-gates/found/

What is to be gained in Afghanistan?
It costs apparently one million dollars a year to keep one soldier in combat. It is almost certain that it costs the Taliban far far less if anything at all. Our mountain of materiel is only a mountain to be stolen or re-used. It would be a shame if our only legacy in the country is spent casings, crates, armored cars, all olive drab. It is an impossible leap believing this 30,000 bump will somehow fundamentally change the war: we pile in all kinds of stuff, set up up for war and get ambushed on the way to the airport by a 9 year old with a rpg.
Strategically two goals: keep Pakistan a client state by bribing generals who are blackmailing us anyway and two applying pressure on Iran who is surrounded.
Tactically the borders should be sealed with operators who stay in place so they are familiar with the habits of terrain and movement. Flying in for the kill seems a waste of initiative. They have to be in place and kill hostile fighters as they come across the border. The ways in are known.
At the same time we should build concrete factories, irrigation pipe plants, brick foundries. We should design simple modular shelters, simple generators for power, wind turbines, water pumps, clean water filters. Construct a cell phone network. Why not? Maybe the rebuilding of New Orleans should be seen as a way to do this. Why not fly in 30 thousand volunteers? Identify ( hasn't this already been done?) what each village, hamlet, valley needs and have them built and leave.

It will not be long before sleeping bags will be sold with belts for that all day soup line convenience.

Trivial supposedly from "tri via" or a crossroads where because three roads met was a convenient place for messages attached to sticks, perhaps there was even a wall, for other travelers. Given the means of distribution, very little could be written, probably not more than a squib.
Print news media is a market in decline and if hopeful will become marginal the way radio is sustained by a small emotionally engaged audience. It will no longer be public in the sense of providing news of the world. The Washington Post has just undergone a major graphic redesign of the newspaper. Bodoni, Giza, something called Postroman. Very hard seeing the difference between advertisements and news text. If they cannot weigh the difference is there one? Its all content.
Of course had the WP paid attention they never would have allowed Politico any traction. They would have bought Roll Call. They would have become the paper of record for Washington the way The WSJ is for business. They should have dumped Sports,dumped Style,dumped Classified. Have a newspaper of two parts: Politics and Metro. But even this is just Hans pushing two fingers in the hole thinking a redoubled response must be doubly effective.
Push Op-Ed to the web: who reads that shit anyway? after the Post's disgraceful capitulation during the Bush admin to on your knees at the trough non-journalism and non-investigation its too late now trying to stand for the good and beautiful. Has anyone applied a metric to the Op-Ed page?
What the Post says doesn't influence the public so what does it do exactly? It's the voice of the permanent bureaucrat (no change except in salary) and increasingly the voice of the lobbyist ( money talks through journalists.) The truth is the Post can no longer explain what's wrong.

Under Sulla, proscription was a way of eliminating political opponents or other convenient enemies, so many in fact, that the arresting officials, perhaps fearing their own vulnerability in addition to the false guarantees of anonymity announced themselves as " Lucius Cornelius."

The review in the Washington Post of Anne Truitt at the Hirshhorn was, bar none, the most bizarre essay by a paid critic I have ever read. Bloke Gopnik wants to be clever and erudite but it takes an intellect far deeper than his to pull it off. He wants to play high and low by joining opposites as if the value of each thing he isolates is without value until he combines it. Thus he can say the sculptures are really anthropormorhic and even dressd up in designer fashions while at the same time he fiddles with this weird association he claims Truitt is most like Correggio. Like Correggio because she seemingly operated in the provinces far from the babylon of New York. Yet he mocks Truitt and curiously praises her too. Hard to tell what he means.
There is no question it is a sexist essay however. No one man would be described the way he describes her or her work, in both ways belittling. Would that she were alive.
He would wither in her polite dismissal.

"This is great art to live with," he said. "A lot of it is challenging. There are different styles: figurative art, abstract art. A lot of it is avant-garde: It was avant-garde, and a lot of it still is avant-garde."

So said Harry Cooper, curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of the selections of art now exhibited at the White House. In fact very few works are challenging and certainly none could be considered avant-garde a term that describes nothing especially as described by Cooper. It was and remains avant-garde!
Nicholas de Stael by far the most interesting choice since he has fallen by the wayside evrywhere except at the Phillips Collection which has substantial holdings. This should bump his auction performance. Ligon, Ruscha, Johns comme il faut. Alma Thomas, yes OK, same with Sam Francis: both second tier artists with fading reputations. Degas and Morandi? odd.

The Bush White House was filled with functional art not unsurprisingly since WASPs have an aversion to culture unless inherited. That Obama chooses contemporary art, and makes news doing so, shows how desperate any sign of visible change seems to be needed.

Joe Wilson, is that the guys name? The fratboy wearing a suit, french cuffs, and boring necktie? His outburst during the President's speech , he yelped " You lie" was widely considered a breech of civility. His apology the same night was carefully unapologetic and he blamed it on the heat of the moment. He was seated mind you with several hundred other people some, next to him, of his own party. In fact the two men next to him and on either side looked uncannily like twin brothers.

All this will accomplish is a Rahm Emanuel steamroller. They rationale? Look, they are rich but uncouth. Disrespectful, unworthy of engagement. They cannot even remember where they are.

The depraved antics of contract security guards at the Kabul Embassy serve as a closing visual parantheses to the failure of American righteousness that first showed itself at Abu Ghraib. Between these two points, the United States has lost any claim to the high ground. Americans know the Bush Admin lied and cheated. We have accepted the notion of a war of choice and we accepted War Capitalism.

In the war of ideas, of the soi-disant liberal democracy fueled by bigger markets well-served manned by a well-educated work-force, a civil society protected by laws and tolerant of adaptation to change and difference... this is nowhere to be seen. Well, not entirely, President Obama has pitched USA=beacon as the feeling his administration will revive. He claims this is an extension of existing promise.

But with any myth the retelling of the retelling becomes absurd just as all those Greek gods turn into animals or plants for Romans puzzled by Ausgustus' pomposity in the face of his daughter's hedonism. For us, those same gods became rockets or, better still, stars: distant and all their light already dead.

The moslem world's zealots are confirmed in their assessment of Occidental rot. The pictures speak for themselves.

Thanks for responding, please keep it if you like.
I stopped making things. Then, one silver day I thought I would bind a book of the first pages of 100 novels published in the 19th c with the sequel of a hundred last pages from books published in the 20th. At the end of the day, I couldn't bring myself to do it. Too epic, too obvious a gesture.

I began to feel my way towards drawings that were simple with words that relied on some conventions- left to right reading- ( imagine saying to a docent please gaze upon Young Communards in Prison from left to right top to bottom?) and offered a grid without much conviction. The horizon: enough already.
The advantage of using letters and words is that there is no question the viewer will get it, but then what?
I don't know.

(letter to curator, 08.15.07)

Panetta at CIA was nominated for two good reasons. The first was that he knows how Washington's brahmin bureaucrats work and the second was that rather than lead the Agency from within its culture he would avoid ideological turf wars. Instead he would starve its most dubious operational branches by killing funding. He could do this because he knows how money gets shunted around from his days at OMB. There are probably few accounting tricks he has not seen a dozen times before. A secret budget holds no fascination.

The CIA has a number of problems. There will be no benefit in excoriating field officers who tortured-if they did. My money is on contractors: untraceable off the books types. aSince Colby, the pros likely demanded there be a paper trail to those who believed torture was the best way to get actionable intelligence in a hurry for the rainy day testimony to Congress. There is a trail of responsibility for torture however it was glossed and rubbed by John Yoo, James Feith and Dick Cheney. None of these men faced anything more violent than a closed door and yet they took a hard line. Others did the dirty downstream. Why were they so certain? Testosterone. We will prove or mettle by being brutal: this is what the arab street respects.
Perhaps we should videotape mock crucifixions. Would this work on our homegrown terrorists?

The militarization of the CIA, eviscerating the Directorate of Operations in favor of Special Activities Division or whatever its current incarnation is (who thinks these names are anything other than ridiculous sham fig leaves?) promotes expediency: reaction instead of planning.
The reliance on mercenaries, contractors, and foreign free lancers is without question a result of a fear of accountibility. While the legal status of those acting on behalf of our national interest is murky and unclear, what they are doing is equally dodgey. Our foreign policy is being run by unknown subcontractors. Our professional spies content it seems with talking to their counterparts in other agencies and all within a 2 mile radius of dry-cleaning. So little does the CIA matter as a source for HUMINT that in the warzones it is refered to as "OGA": other government agency. No-one knows who these guys are anymore.

The Bush White House must have gambled that the use of torture was so vile no subsequent President would reveal what actually had been done in the name of the people. The Attorney General will reveal some, call it a dark chapter, and fold the tents.

So Panetta's job is to starve and prune the CIA to what it should be. Shut down use of Triple Canopy and Xe, cut loose the contractors, hire some officers who will stay officers, defund the dubious operations like the rendition air force and black sites for torture in shit countries.We are diminished by using these methods: we harm ourselves by losing the reasons we fight the wars we fight. Which is why there are torture memos: someone made sure there was an executive decision behind these repulsive practices.

Perhaps he should give the CIA a new name one that will reflect what it would do best for long-term success: Cultural Warfare Office.

Any abstract art forces the equivalence of representation.

All artists, as all humans, must somehow deal with the limitations of mortality. It goes without saying that all great art is a metaphor for being as Aristotle suggested. Guesswork is not reliable. For Truitt, art historical theory concerning her is an asynchronic swirling around her by a few writers, well-known critics, from 1962 to 1969 and then until recently nothing. This seemingly huge gap, a lifetime or two, presents some difficulties that cannot be papered over with gossip and biographical assertions. If only validation in art was a question of continuous exposure, as if whatever once happened survives by being repeated in some form. The echoes then the repetition then point back to an original significant event before which there was nothing. This favors the art industry because every valued thing has a provenance a line connecting time, place, and person.

1962. Interesting because something was changing about how how sculpture was being made and what it referred to and many thoughtful people were thinking about this change. It happened at an interesting, even, violent time in American history. That Anne Truitt made the sculpture she made when she did is notable because it bridges Abstract Expressionism (color as expressive force) and Minimalism ( structure as immutable stuff everything else shit) and stands in the seam between as a rebuke to the commercial pieties and representational simplicities that followed.

Taken to the Eastern Shore, to Easton, which after years as the magnetic center of a network of grand waterfront houses hidden down oyster shell roads suddenly faced a social interest in visibility. Whereas the estates were previously insular there was now a sense the roads were connected to other roads as well as places. Roads were no longer directions but maps. Easton established a small art museum across the street from the inn with the three star restaurant. Her house, white clapboard, three stories, black shutters, brick steps to entrance, severe or maybe plain. Not grand.


The problem really is whether the sculpture that Truitt made is something more than what is experienced by a viewer. Do they somehow meet everything that viewer has to bear upon them? The titles are really irrelevant because they are signs themselves pointing to still more distant references, many unknown to anyone. A street in Asheville means what exactly more than a street in Paris? Any discussion of the meaning of a specific street already takes the viewer far away from the sculpture. The sculpture is very plain. It can be described simply. Narrow painted wood boxes taller than the average person. Not enough? OK then, when were they made and who saw them and what did they say?

What was she doing? Her titles are opaque, clearly referential, possibly historical, rarely expository. Perhaps they were signals, flags that claimed territory, ultimately unlike what they claimed but interesting because a human, Anne Truitt, put them there and not elsewhere.

Truitt wrote three books about her life and they are carefully exact and carefully patrician but they are not about her life. What she could not efface with evasions she ignored and her style seemingly simple had only one purpose: to resolve her version of her life as the recording of simple fact. This produces in the reader, over time, a trust with the writer, and of an inevitability of her heroic honesty in the face of tribulations. She is almost Roman: always moral, always correct, always polite, just so. Like any disappointed romantic she conceals her ardor for the wreckage it has swept along with her.

Material change is a process whose result is always a rebuke for being inevitable.
The primary form, a rectangle say, is always a rectangle no matter the material, although in sculpture having the material like steel both surface and support unifies the reductionism: the surface is also the core is also the form. The problem is that paint is applied to the surface of the form. And while a rectangle participates with all rectangles, all colors are specific and refer only to themselves. Color is not a signifier. Is red always a sign for blood? Which red? a deep crimson? It stands for blood when identified as blood. Blue for ocean. Blue for sky. Blue for a whale’s eye.

In Truitt’s case she uses wood which was a living thing, now dead, shaped, flattened, made geometric as it never was in life. Wood of course shows the narrative of its life in the grain only visible when dead. This natural narrative is smothered and concealed by application of layers of thin artificial skins of paint.

Despite the frequent bifurcations of a plane by colors either on a side and sides of a sculpture or a painting. A line separates. Colors separate. Simply standing in front of sculpture, on equal footing so to speak, cannot force that the line at bottom is somehow a representation of something also seen elsewhere. Is the thin line a horizon line seen at a distance? A critic once declared all her works landscapes. It is notable that he was seemingly impelled to declare the natural world and its relationships if seen formally as sections of color very much present in a sculpture which in almost every instance is experienced indoors in a controlled environment.

If these sculptures are landscapes we are far far way from nature as experienced by more than one sense. It is more likely they are works of art cleaving first to themselves with titles that cast elsewhere like seeds, full of promise, but nonetheless barren.

1981. At a dinner when asked her well what about trees then! when the discussion went to the meaning of concealment and balance in art being a reflection of nature where so much was influenced by what was unseen. She replied, scooping a pile of mashed potatoes from a blue bowl in front of her, slightly sternly, “When I see the tree I see the roots which extend equally underground as the leaves do above.”

The history of sculpture is the history of making things that push against gravity and rise away from the earth. Doing that, which all sculpture to a certain point in time did, became simple enough when stone men as Gaudier-Brzezka said were only just that. Why not something else, then, in stone? From that point on, was it 1916? and until a sculpture could be any act in relation to another say, 1963 the question of representation was depolarized, finally made irrelevant, except for portrait busts. Something did not after all have to be a substitute for something else. For the crude, modality replaced synthesis. A case could be made for that. Truitt, after all, either eliminated the base so common for sculpture’s presentation as a sculpture or made the pedestal the sculpture itself, in a neat bit of formal reversal. What she made was new sculpture.

If abstraction in art is only about itself why the disavowal of hierarchy? A hierarchy simply isn’t enough unless it it paradoxical and the only way it can be that is if what is up is as what is down. Truitt in this way retains a tinge of the spiritual or at very least something post-materialist. Everything she does hints at what is not present in a measure sufficient to register as uncanny sometimes and as grasping others. When she is uncertain, she piles on allusion.

It takes a special kind of damaged aristocrat to become an artist. There are, after all, so many other avenues available that the self-relevatory is slightly too much the trade, too causal, too much a public exchange. Robert Lowell, Lord Weary, understood if he was of two minds about it, it was permitted. He wrote far too much. Simply wasn’t done. Truitt was pulled in the direction of the flinty yankee but her own loves were far too extravagant and reckless to be fettered. For many years proximity to power occluded and fuzzied deep corruption with speed and glamour. Nothing like a rake as president who knew so much, took so much, and cared so little. They died around her like flies, some buried.

Traveling across Canada with a photographer who drove mile after mile she hewed to a line across a map and off they went to the blue patch at left, the pacific. In the middle of the wide flat empty middle with nothing on either side for miles, a purity, a living desolation as can be walked upon, there was a loud crack and the windshield cracked in every direction but held. John pulled to the side of the road. Dust. Silence. A rock from the highway he said looking at Anne in the passenger side, white faced, who said “ I thought I was shot.”

Her large scale and small sculptures were fabricated according to her specifications for many years by the same man. They were delivered wrapped in butchers paper which when untaped spilled sawdust along the seams to the floor of her studio. The concrete splattered with the jar rings, brush tips, splashes, drips, spots of a hundred works of art, ten thousand hours, most before dawn.

Because a color floats above the surface, and is only a single tone, without reference to anything but itself, words themselves signifiers are stripped of their representational range when talking about Truitt’s sculpture. You cannot relate her sculpture to anything else except, possibly, what you feel in experiencing the sensation of the color and form. Even a description seems inadequate for the more that is said the less the sculpture resembles the description.

Truitt cultivated an enthusiasm for Cicero which would be surprising only if her skill as a courtier were overlooked. She managed influence, except in commerce, exceptionally well. Her proximity to real power when she was a young woman made other forms of social dominance, like piles of money, met later in life, pale. This arcane knowledge of power especially real power, folded in nicely behind the disarming gentility she projected. Political power forces everything around it. In that world, what is used is privileged and what isn’t, is discarded.

Truitt was comfortable in a world where almost everything was understood by those who understood whose credo was never complain, never explain. More to the point, as a result, in that world emotional accuracy was private.

Any thing, especially man-made, is auto-referential. Sometimes, a thing’s utility overshadows that thingness. In a work of art, however, especially one that purposely denies direct associations, there is some solace in simplicity. It is all you can see.

What to make of titles then? Words make the associations where the art cannot. At this remove, how can the words, whatever they are, be anything but cryptic?

It is no longer necessary that an artist draw an object that resembles in two dimensions what exists in three. This was the real benefit of cubism: it untethered the artist from having to resemble what was and instead the artist could make what is. It would be hard to say when artists reached that point but surely Conceptualism comes very close. Even so, those artists required their significant acts be recorded rendering the evidence as a commodity while making that object simultaneously historic. Marked.

Truitt never made her work. The structure was built for her, the surfaces were prepared, and even using her roller kept her from working the material the way say Saint Gaudens would have. Her clothes and her floor splattered with paint but not her hands.  The multiple layers effaced the means of paint application. The acrylic paint dried fast as it was applied... no contingency there! The clay macquette replaced by a drawing of specifications. There always was something mediating between her and the object she was making and made. That something between, I think, is more than literal.

Locations of meaning. When we drove around the city she would say ecgh time we were anywhere close "I remember that was where X lived or that street corner, there, I saw a man hit by car as he crossed. He lay there on the asphalt as I passed, his brown paper lunch next to him."(that was 13th and I St, NW). This was the house of X she was the wife of x, but was invloved with x. Shge had teh most beautiful hands." The city filled with transparecies overlaying structures.


For all intents and purposes, Truitts signature, applied by her hand under every sculpture, is the only terminal line in her entire oeuvre.

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