DIE NIBELUNGEN: Edition of 474 of which 100 copies are signed.
April 5, 1974
Seven colors
12" x 24"
Revenge is a dish best served up cold. Tit for tat, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Hurt for hurt, pain for pain, and a death for a death. Pain festers and breeds after its own kind, birthing generations of vengance. Nobody ever forgets anything, and in the tooth-grinding small hours of the morning we luxuriate in the imagined agony of our enemies, and they in ours. Irish Alzheimer's they call it; whole peoples who only remember their enemies, sometimes waiting until a full generaton has passed to wreak havoc on children whose father's guilt pulses through their veins. Blood spilled calls for blood, and that blood cries out from the ground for more blood. After a while the original stolen cow, or insulted honor or murdered brother is entirely eclipsed by the cascade of dead Hatfields and McCoys, ambushed on their way to church, shot in the back as they draw water, horrors escalating with every turn of the knife. If Caen shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold. The quickest way to end a war is to lose.
Painting and sculpture are one-dimensional. They don't move or talk. They don't change. Silent black and white movies are two-dimensional, they move through time. Add sound, and they become three dimensional. The fullness of color adds yet another dimension. How many dimensions are there? We could flesh it all out and add seeming substance: a movie could become full and round and roar through the darkened theater of your head. Movies could become interactive: you are handed a stock of characters and a selection of plots and make up your own movie. Real life is pretty close to that. You have a stock of characters and they move in and out of your life, and when they're in it they interact with you, though you accept that they have real lives, too. How real would your interactive movie characters become? Would you fall in love with one of them? Would you cast your friends and lovers and when things didn't go right, or one of them went away or died, would you just keep on using their character? Here's where things went wrong, and I'll just go back to that point and do it right. Chuck that old footage, splice in the new. Rewind, replay. Let's start over. Caught in a loop.
What do you see when you look out your window? Do you see what's on the other side, or do you see an image of reality projected on, or re-created within, the glass itself? Renaissance painters initially conceived of a painting as a window. Is a window a picture frame placed around part of the world? Any painting is a snap-shot of a fragment of a universe. Through it, you can see a snippet of the strange and alien world that exists within another person's mind. One thing I've noticed; a really nice frame makes anything look good.
The Pacific Film Archive has from its inception specialized in showing rare and delicate footage, particularly films of which all have heard but few have seen, at least in good condition. The Eastman House archive contains many such, and selections from its treasures were often loaned to the Archive. The feature film in this case was G. W. Pabst's 1928 film Pandora's Box, accompanied by the surrealist Luis Bunuel's 1930 film L'Age d'or. The curator of the Eastman House, James Card, demanded, as a condition of allowing the Pacific Film Archive access to this rare footage, that his name be prominently featured on the advertising poster. His wishes were of course followed. Some years later, I was notified in the usual unpleasant way that James Card was suing me for one million dollars, alleging that I had damaged his reputation by tying his name with that of a banned motion picture. Shortly after it was made, L'Age d'or had indeed been banned for a brief time in Paris. Surrealism is not restricted to the cinema; apparently in New York you can actually get away with this sort of shenanigan. My insurance company attorney in New York inconsiderately died halfway through the case, and someone else took over but didn't do a very good job, and the long and the short if it was, we lost. The judge awarded Mr. Card and his attorney $1,500 dollars. A Pyrrhic victory, you might say. This art business sure is risky. I refrain from echoing William Shakespeare's suggestion concerning lawyers.
A prophet, it has been observed, is not without honor, save in his own country. This does not seem to be the case with Berkeley, which to its credit seems quite proud of the home-grown product. You do not have to leave, achieve renown elsewhere, and return again in triumph, to be accorded generous recognition in this town. I started out in Berkeley, with not much idea of what I wanted to do with myself, and through a chain of accidents and fortune came to be what I am now. Without the encouragement of friends and strangers, I would never have had the courage to persist. A man alone doesn't stand a chance.
There are some things Man was not meant to know. The legend of Faust, in all its historical manifestations, encapsulates the anti-science, anti-intellectual stance of all those who believe that faith is incompatible with learning, and in the essentially evil character of purely human knowledge. The notion persists that there is such a thing as a compact with the arch-fiend, by which the scholar obtains the summit of earthly ambition at the expense of his immortal soul. The moral of the Faust legend predicts the inevitable doom which follows the willful revolt of the intellect against divine authority. Perhaps I'll rewrite The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus, and call it Better Living Through Chemistry? or Earth First! vs. Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.
Pain makes us so self-absorbed. It's as though there were nothing else in the universe. It's all you want to talk about. It's all you think about. You become a bit of a bore. People don't want to be around old Johnny-One-Note. So you drive it down and paint it over so that nobody can see, and should the subject come up you dodge it. Hard disfiguring knot grown around, your skin puckers over the place where you hide it inside. A bit crippled, you get on with your life as well as you can, and if you're lucky, you may remember the good parts and realize that they outweigh the bad. Other people are just like you, and they hurt just as much and for the same reasons. We don't mean to hurt other people, but we do. Sometimes we realize how much we hurt them, and would like to ask their pardon, but usually it's too late. Pain,your own or someone else's,is utterly compelling. That's why it's such a good subject for art, literature and music.
There's nothing like being un-dead to assure immortality. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel about vampires and werewolves came out just in time to give a century of film makers grist for their dark Satanic mills, and there's no sign of their slowing down. Stoker was for many years the manager of the famous British actor Sir Henry Irving. Perhaps this exposure to the stage was where he got the basic idea of a bloodsucking ghost that preys on the living. The film should have been called Dracula, but copyright problems forced director F. W. Murnau to find another name, Nosferatu, meaning night-flying monster, fits the film's cadaverous star, Max Schreck, to a "T".
I was born on a farm. We had a cow and chickens and a horse and a dog and a barn cat. My job was to coax eggs out from under the broody hens and bring them into the kitchen. Chickens are not too ight-bray, and they'd wander off and leave their eggs any old where, and sometimes you'd discover them a bit late. Consequently, whenever you'd break eggs for eating or cooking you'd crack them one by one into a separate bowl and take a gander at them to make sure that they weren't busy turning into a chicken. Sometimes they'd be rotten, and that's a smell you don't forget. Even though I get my food at the store, I've always been just the littlest bit apprehensive whenever I crack open an egg. Maybe you will be, too.