Going to the store? But we live on a farm!

While living in Austin, one of my favorite activities was to scour the Chronicle (free weekly), pick a day with a number of art shows or gallery openings (usually Thursdays and Saturdays), and hit the town. My motivation, as I've explained before, was largely corporeal: to consume the greatest variety, the highest quality, and the largest number of free food and drink items. The art was a pleasant byproduct, at best. Dessert for the eyes, with the stomach already full.

So when I come across an art show in Boston, my mind is in the same place. Sure, I'll look at some paintings... while I'm eating my dinner. But whereas the warm weather and art-hubbed design of Austin are conducive to gallery crawls, Boston's art scene is more spread out. And in the winter, the idea of hitting multiple galleries is much less appealing. But I'll still give it a shot. Especially if I'm hungry.

Two Thursdays ago, I made it a point to head to Maverick Square in East Boston for a show at the Atlantic Works Gallery. What a unique neighborhood - located on the harbor, with streets named after English soccer clubs (I like to think that, but I'm guessing they're really named after the regions and cities that existed long before the clubs), and a smattering of old churches and warehouses amidst very new apartment buildings. It's changed quite a bit in the few years since I'd last been there, and by all accounts, so much more in the last two decades. Now I can go and hang out at Eddie C's - where the "house wine" is a jug of Carlo Rossi and the customers change the taps in the basement when they mysteriously run out of whatever cheap beer is on tap - before going to an excellent white-walled, cafe-sized Pakistani place with the best naan ever. Or to a huge moonlit warehouse on the water, with Atlantic Works housed on the third floor.

Up the stairs, in the door, and straight to the food... ugh, I was expecting more. Mixed nuts, crackers and a couple of cheeses, something like a pate, and a can of High Life for me. I'm still gonna need dinner when I leave here.

Despite multiple visits to the cheese table, Atlantic Works was not the satiating experience I had hoped for. But - in an unexpected and slightly ironic twist - the art quite made up for it. The exhibition, called "All Works Guaranteed Stolen," carried out this subtitle/mission statement: "celebrating the natural right of artists to 'steal' the intellectual 'property' they need to create their art." I saw a version of the iconic tri-color Obama poster, "Yes we can" replaced by "Maybe, we could've." Shepard Fairey was also the target of other biting artistic juxtapositions, as were Warhol and Time Warner, the latter claiming to own the "Happy Birthday" song, much to the chagrin of all the copyright-infringing birthday celebrators on YouTube. I even saw a mobile hanging from the ceiling, a word generator for artistic conversations like, "I appreciate the way the red splatter across the landscape represents mankind's eternal need for forgiveness." Funny stuff.

But my favorite was a take on Edvard Munch's classic The Scream (some times called The Cry) with the mask from Wes Craven's Scream films superimposed over Munch's anguished subject. I chuckled at that one. And even better, it allows me to segue into what I had meant to do in the last post, in which I attempted to describe the opera of alternately stifling and promising conditions embedded in a simple commute into the city. In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem does an excellent job of portraying the more nightmarish aspects of the daily roller coaster ride, but he spends many pages doing so. Before my last post got so long, I had meant to excerpt some of his words to help define those nightmarish aspects. This post is now also quite long, but I'm gonna go ahead with the excerpts anyway:

"The endless minuet of humiliation and its response gives human relationships an obscene hobbling rhythm. In the ebb and flow of the crowds sucked in and crushed together by the coming and going of suburban trains, coughed out into streets, offices and factories, there is nothing but timid retreats, brutal attacks, smirking faces, and scratches delivered for no apparent reason. Soured by unwanted encounters, wine turns to vinegar in the mouth. Don't talk to me about innocent and good-natured crowds. Look how they bristle up, threatened on every side, clumsy and embarrassed in enemy territory, far, very far, from themselves. Lacking knives, they learn to use their elbows and their eyes as weapons[...]

"Remarks, gestures, glances tangle and collide, miss their aim, ricochet like bullets fired at random, killing even more surely by the continuous nervous tension they produce. All we can do is enclose ourselves in embarrassing parentheses; like these fingers (I am writing this on a cafe terrace) which slide the tip across the table and the fingers of the waiter which pick it up, while the faces of the two men involved, as if anxious to conceal the infamy which they have consented to, assume an expression of utter indifference[...]

"Malaise invades me as the crowd around me grows. The compromises I have made with stupidity, under the pressure of circumstances, rush to meet me, swimming towards me in hallucinating waves of faceless heads. Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Cry, evokes for me something I feel ten times a day. A man carried along by a crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out in an attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself, to get back inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgments, fixed smiles, lifeless words, listlessness and humiliation sprinkled in his path suddenly surge into him, driving him out of his desires and his dreams and exploding the illusion of 'being together'[...]

"Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus: All beings are together though each remains separate. But we only need to hold out our hands and touch one another, to raise our eyes and meet one another, and everything suddenly becomes near and far, as if by magic."

So that's the bad part, with a hint of the possibility for good at the end. As I said before, I believe in that possibility. But achieving it is not a simple matter. The simplest idea that I can ascribe to the journey toward achievement is that I think the good must be created at the same time as the the bad is rooted out. Ah... if only it were that simple.