Gracing the walls and football display cases at the New Orleans Museum of Art are original works of art in watercolors, self-portraits, sculpture and pastels.

The work is not of famous artists from around the world but right here in Jefferson Parish, students in the public school system’s Talent Education Program.

Established five years ago, the program recognizes talented students, nurtures their abilities and provides an educational environment to enhance the enjoyment and appreciation of the arts.

In addition to art, music and theatre are also studied.

“This is the first time the students have had their work displayed in a public setting,” said Cheryl Milam, an instructional programs consultant with the Jefferson Parish Public School System. “The response has been very positive and this is good for the students. It helps to validate and value their talents and enhances their self-esteem.”

In order for a child to be eligible for the Talent Education Program, parents can ask their child’s school to have the child screened and evaluated. Milam said applicants are accepted on the basis of teacher recommendation, auditions and/or portfolios.

There are more than 500 students in the program.

“As more and more parents hear about the program, more students will be referred to us through their schools,” Milam said. “Right now, we not only have more students than before but we also have gone from 11 to 22 teachers. These educators work with the students both during and after school, developing and nurturing their talents.”

Milam said she sees several important benefits of the public having a chance to see the talents of area students.

“The Talent Education Program gives a student an opportunity to explore areas of interest to them and to work with others who have the same interests,” Milam said. “In the future, whether these children pursue any of this as a vocation or as an avocation, we, as a community, will benefit.

“If some decide upon art, music or theater as a career, we can look forward to seeing more of their talents, maybe locally and nationally. And if some choose to support the arts through volunteerism and fund raising, they will be helping to improve our area’s quality of life through the arts. As a community, we win either way.”

Bobby Short and the dot.com world have one thing in common: They desire instant gratification. However, the ways in which that satisfaction is sought differs dramatically. In a world where often-detached social contact is referred to as "face time," Short is an anomaly: His interaction is exclusively face-to-face. The singer/pianist/entertainer, who has been performing for more than 62 years, obtains his delight through the audience’s response to his work. "There are theories about entertainers being lonely souls," says Short. "This is not the case for me. I enjoy what I do. I do it for myself I like making people happy."

Short has been dispensing his brand of happiness as the resident "saloon singer" at Manhattan’s Cafe Carlyle, where he is in his 32nd season. The entertainer, who describes himself as "intense, proud, and sentimental," has been credited with keeping the art and craft of cabaret singing alive. His repertoire of more than 400 songs includes a litany of tunes from Cole lamps made from handsome objects she’s found. Candles, she notes, are always apropos in dining rooms.

Moss stresses the importance of working a room in profile, as well as in plan, from the get-go: "I always say to my clients, ‘Picture yourself standing around a cocktail party elbow-to-elbow, when no one can see anything on a table top. What are they looking at? You’ve got to think about moving the room up. You want movement.’" Hanging an intricate chandelier, like the one made of antlers at the Oren-steins, is one way So is massing artwork to dominate a wall behind a bed or over a fireplace–she does both in the Roosevelt house. The use of commanding curtain treatments, at windows or to crown beds, also does this job for her.

Movement and mix are interlinked, and key to the success of her style. "I think there’s not a room I’ve done that doesn’t have mix, whether it’s country of origin, period, wood vs. painted finish…whatever. All those things that have come together from different places give a room patina, give it excitement," she says. The range of elements she assembles are consciously balanced by classic shapes, whether custom-made or antique. "A classic is something that has good lines. But it also works over and over again, no matter how you treat it, color it, or paint it." The trefoil ottoman in the Orenstein living room is one of her favorite examples.

One of her colleagues calls Moss "the new old guard." Her taste is refined, That she lives the life for which she decorates lends validity to her choices. She’s a contemporary woman who grants herself free access to a multiplicity of traditional styles (antique and reproduction) and the right to combine them within one house or within one room. "It’s all about the mix, not about the match," quips Moss. "You have to throw things off a little… by planting a simple geranium in an extraordinary 18th-century Limoges cachepot, or by standing a little American 1930s chair next to a Regency cabinet of great value."

The Jewish portable culture, suited to the Diaspora’s wanderings, is witnessing its own demise. No longer limited to perpetuating itself through traditional, site-unspecific rites, a new Jewish culture is being generated, cemented by way of permanently sited monuments, memorials, and museums. Understandably, most of this new hardware in Jewish culture has been dedicated to the Holocaust, due in part to the widespread belief that the preservation of its moral lesson will prevent future anti-Semitic onslaught.
The strategies applied for this purpose, however, have been for the most part misguided. For example, Washington D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum seeks to create empathy through assigning fictitious personal identifications. Each visitor is given an ID card, by means of which he or she may retrieve data from the museum’s computer and pursue the “real” story of a personalized Shoah-pal (a victim of anti-Semitic prosecution who, in 1939, was the same age and gender as is the visitor). Likewise, in a paramount example of politically correct sermonizing, the Museum of Tolerance in Beverly Hills (of all places) submerges you into flatulent environments of mock oppression so as to “make you aware” of how it feels to be on the side of the oppressed.
In aspiring to engender surrogate experiences of the horrors of the concentration camps–so that we who were born after the fact might be persuaded into following virtuous ways–the noble intentions of the people who shaped these museums remain just that. Their conviction that a kind of virtual reality will bestow a sense of presentness to a nearly inconceivable event like the Holocaust has had, for practical purposes, the very opposite effect. (It’s not incidental that similar technology has been developed and implemented by the entertainment industry, with usually banal results.) As it turns out, a virtual Auschwitz is no more tangible nor less surreal than Tomorrowland’s 3-D extravaganzas or those omnipresent aliens brought to life on the big screen.
Horror, truly life-threatening horror, cannot be experienced second-handedly, however true to life the representation might be. Indeed, prosthetic illusion should be neither the end nor the means of a memorial. How is a memorial, then, supposed to fulfill its moral and cultural responsibility, as the past’s lifeline to the public domain? Instructive in this regard is the fate of the mother of all Holocaust memorials, Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem.
Yad Vashem (in Hebrew, “a Monument and a Name”) was established in 1953 in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl following the establishment of the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority by the Israeli government, which summoned the creation of a shrine to preserve the memory of millions of Jews annihilated by the Nazis. Today, the site consists of an ad-hoc accumulation of monuments, sculptures, archives, token objects, and an historical museum as well as an art museum. Tourists and local schoolchildren are diligently bussed into these overwhelmingly solemn grounds for obvious didactic purposes–for Yad Vashem both defines and is defined by the land of Never Again, just as Disneyland defines and is defined by the land of Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Its directorate, having unveiled the last of its constituent monuments in 1992, recently declared it “complete.” However, as we shall see, the completeness of an effective memorial is not dependent upon the intentions of its creators.
To the average visitor, Yad Vashem is poignant and persuading, the weight of recent history still warranting its effect. Be that as it may, as a lasting testimony, Yad Vashem’s official aesthetics are hardly convincing. When it comes to art, it mistakenly assumes throughout that the content of an artwork amounts to whatever it is said to stand for. One paramount example is a large-scale bronze relief from the nineteen fifties portraying a group of brave, muscular men and women waving rudimentary weapons under the title The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It has been carved in the same epic mode that would have filled the bill for Mussolini or Stalin. Another relief, a composition of Picassoesque clunkiness, is said to signify From Holocaust to Rebirth, its iconography conveniently translated for the layman in a courtesy pamphlet. Minimal Art also becomes curiously handy for extorting such tropes: An elongated convex slab of stainless steel is no other than The Pillar of Heroism.
Yad Vashem’s creators presume that any work’s certification as “art” by itself will carry the edifying message. The site’s monuments are supposed to embody the dignified spirit as it overcomes its destiny. Instead, they demonstrate the capability of modern art to arbitrarily allegorize just about anything, while challenging art historians who are under the impression that style itself creates meaning.
More to the point, as if the documents gathered in its archives over the past fifty years do not suffice to demonstrate the magnitude of the Nazi-implemented genocide, Yad Vashem provides a troubling example of the all-too-common notion that artworks have intrinsic healing power: A rotating display of art produced by inmates at concentration camps is meant to express the rise of the human spirit even in the most humiliating circumstances. As might be expected, the works displayed are as saddening for their subject matter as for their unremarkable mannerisms.
Much of the problem posed by Yad Vashem has to do with its conflation of the aesthetics of art with that of monuments and memorials. The meaning of a monument or memorial is almost always clear-cut, at least on the surface; it is officially established and refers to facts that have occurred in the world. In contrast, an artwork originates within an artist’s subjectivity, and its significance is forged through complex relationships with the public domain. The Statue of Liberty, L’Arc de Triomphe, and the Monument to Vittorio-Emanuelle are intended to perform as stand-ins for the professed significance of a principle, an achievement, a group, or an individual. In this sense, “to monumentalize” means to distort and exaggerate for maximum glorification. Indeed, some subjects may try to spin history in their own favor merely through having a monument built (e.g., Saddam Hussein’s monument to Iraq’s performance in the Gulf War.) More often than not, whether the meaning of a monument is supported by its form remains largely a matter of interpretation–a condition that is corroborated even by artistically and intellectually sophisticated edifices such as Daniel Libeskind’s much-celebrated Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Sometimes, however, monuments are not just instruments of political or cultural advertising but the end product of a culture. For example, Pharaoh Cheops’s unparalleled power and the technological knowledge of ancient Egyptian civilization are embodied in the massiveness and advanced engineering of the Great Pyramid of Giza. In its presence, an awe-inspiring effect is engendered by the awareness that mere mortals were able to achieve such a magniticent feat. In this case, the monumentalizing agent is itself the monumental act of building it, and the monument thereby bridges the gap between the representation and the represented.
Michelangelo’s David is another case in point. The Medici declared it a monument to Florence, as they sympathized with its calculated balance of pragmatic strength and cultivated delicacy, or so the story goes. But while the huge arms and head of the David placed against his boyish body may well embody the Florentine’s fancies, the sculpture in fact monumentalizes their progressive and independent spirit, substantiated by their adoption of Michelangelo’s unprecedented aesthetics–his rejection of idealized classical proportion in favor of distortions that allow for expressive tensions in the work’s configuration. Apart from having become a milestone in the development of Western art, David is particularly interesting as a monument because it is simultaneously an allegory of Florence’s self-image, an instantiation of its progressive spirit, and a representation of the city’s most glorious epoch.
Memorials also attempt to anchor their subject’s memory to the public domain by concretely conveying some aspect of their bygone presence. A conventional gravestone is a metaphor for an individual in that it recalls, albeit subtly, the human body’s organically unified mass. (This may partly explain the otherwise senseless vandalism that takes place in cemeteries.) More elaborate memorials seek to materialize a richer gamut of the deceased’s attributes. In Ptolemaic Egypt, a coffin would be adorned with a faithful portrait of its inmate. In sixteenth-century Italy, a true aristocrat would have no less than his noble physique, along with his virtues and achievements, represented in detail on his tomb–not as mere symbols, but as indisputable testimony of his taste and sophistication. Even more assertively, Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square does not limit itself to depicting aspects of the political leader: It incorporates the deceased himself. Asceptically embalmed, Lenin is revealed to us in meatless skin and bone.
When it comes to effectively memorialize the Holocaust’s six million dead, the monumental void that Hitler’s perverse design produced can hardly be conveyed in concrete aesthetic form. Consequently, for this visitor, the most overpowering display at Yad Vashem is neither a monument nor an artwork–neither allegory nor metaphor. Amid the sea of multimedia shows in Yad Vashem’s historical museum stands an unpretentious glass case containing a small number of yellow stars, actual remnants and paradigms of Nazi stigmatizing. Having been infused with the Holocaust so completely, these almost ephemeral objects radiate all the pain Yad Vashem’s grandiose concoctions with to conduct. The effect of these scraps of cloth is like that of the ruins of the concentration camps. It is metonymic in the most direct sense, with no fanfare or explanation necessary.
Then again, in order to perceive them as I did, the yellow stars are somehow well-served by the monumental failures framing them. Yad Vashem’s most recent additions offer fresh evidence of the evocative limitations of monuments. The Children’s Memorial is an underground darkened hall covered entirely by mirrors. Five burning memorial candles at the center of the room are reflected into an infinite number of flickers, symbolizing the souls of children who perished in the war. Completing the theatrics, names of victims and their ages are recited through a sound system against spooky yet “meditative” new-age sounds. This patently manipulative and sentimentalizing technique is particularly repulsive when applied to a subject that, being so monstrously tragic in itself, demands the utmost solemnity in its commemoration. Indeed, through its mirror-images, one experiences only the illusion of millions of souls–an effect with which revisionists who bark that the Holocaust is a fabrication might sympathize.
The Valley of Destroyed Communities is Yad Vashem’s last official component. Spread over six acres like a high-walled labyrinth of Minoan-sized blocks of simulated rock, it gives the impression of manicured ancient ruins. Carved sporadically upon them are the names of the five thousand Jewish communities annihilated by the Nazis. While the Valley attempts to convey the magnitude of the atrocity through the appearance of massive devastation, viewers are taken much more by its creators’ grand showmanship and the exploits of its harmonious spatial play.
In order to assure the public survival of a memory, a memorial needs to be supported by rituals that members of a community share. Religion usually provides the framework for these rituals. Still, at times, the aesthetic effect of a memorial may actually do the trick. Washington D.C.’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial is notable in this regard. By listing each one of the names of the fallen chronologically on an otherwise austere, black granite wall, the memorial gives concrete form to the amount of bloodshed that the war produced, while acknowledging each individual life lost to it. Limiting itself to declaring a sorrowful fact without resorting to allegory or metaphor, people may perform their own little passions and leave unrequested offerings in front of it. These honest displays of grief infect those who didn’t lose a relative or acquaintance in that war, or aren’t even American, for that matter. If a memorial is to function successfully, it must fashion a relationship with the participating audience–and it must perpetuate through that audience a form of life.
Furthermore, a dynamic public response may itself produce a compelling memorial, as is the case with the tragically spreading AIDS Memorial Quilt. Its monumental size is directly proportional to the growing number of victims, and it thus concretely conveys the epidemic’s magnitude. Curiously, there is in Yad Vashem a little visited mini-memorial that works in much the same way. At the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in 1981, participants brought a few hundred memorial stones in honor of their murdered relatives and placed them in The Memorial Cave. Of diverse materials and sizes, the slabs are inscribed in different languages, sometimes stating a name or two, at other times indicating the country of their origin, and occasionally providing an elaborate text or dedication. Haphazardly mounted on the walls of a small cave, these stones express the individuality of the commemorated as well as the separate acts of remembrance of those who placed them there. Their differences invite us to inspect each one and participate in the Cave’s memorializing as we do so. Sadly, given its potential for growing into an ever-evolving memorial, The Memorial Cave today remains confined behind an iron grate, anticipating the troubling official promulgation of Yad Vashem’s completion.
Yad Vashem’s original aestheticizing attempt at honoring the victims of the Holocaust was fundamentally misconceived. Nevertheless, when understood as a quiltlike composite, Yad Vashem instantiates (in deed, if not in word) the unfulfilled desire of a culture attempting to convey what perhaps cannot be conveyed, to imagine what perhaps cannot be imagined, and to mememorialize what perhaps cannot be memorialized. As such, Yad Vashem had monumentalized our memory of the victims, and the moral imperative to fuel such persistence remains. Hence, declaring Yad Vashem “complete” turns out to be as immoral as it is aesthetically wrong. In fact–and this point cannot be made often enough–its completion is immoral because it is aesthetically wrong.

At the height of Goya’s career, when he was deluged by demand for his brutal and profoundly cynical visions of humanity, the patron saint of young, angstful intellectuals and political revolutionaries painted a quiet and humorous work that has escaped much scrutiny. It is a self-portrait. Goya is working in darkness in front of his easel. He is wearing a large black felt hat, and on the brim blazes a halo of several dripping candles. He is looking out at us (at himself in the mirror, really), his expression one of wry and relaxed amusement, laughing no doubt at the paradoxes of his rapid climb to court painter and burning the midnight oil for the consumption of his less than flattering dark and apocryphal canvases. The painter encircles his head with the flickering flames of industry.
In prehistory, light, heat, and cooking were one and the same. You had your fire, you cooked up your meat, and you sat around in your cave (or wherever) to stay warm–the light from the fire drove back the hoards of hungry night predators. While cooking and heating stayed married for a great deal longer, light became its own entity early on. The discovery that any kind of oil (vegetable, animal, or mineral) with fiber in it could be lit and burn brightly led to the use of lamps, which were easily transportable.
The candle has most often been considered inferior to the lamp, due to its inconvenience and mess prior to the progressive changes made in its manufacture during the nineteenth century. Early candles were made of tallow, which could be any animal fat, though most often it was derived from mutton or beef. The fat was rendered before putrefaction had set in; nevertheless, it was difficult to thoroughly purify the tallow before it was made into dipped or molded candles, and the result was a smoky light, foul odor, and a candle that sort of collapsed into a puddle of hot grease rather than burned itself efficiently. Wax, either on its own or in combination with tallow, provided a cleaner light, but it suffered similar problems.
Candles made of either substance needed to be rigorously tended by the householder or servant, its wick needing to be trimmed (using a scissorlike device called a snuffer) several times an hour or else the candle would start to gutter, causing the wax or tallow to melt and drip instead of being consumed by the flame. The candle’s light would flicker annoyingly. Great occasions of state and church were always lit by candles (often several hundred or more), and it was common for these events to become overwhelmingly hot and smoky, with a constant rain of molten wax falling onto the spectators from chandeliers filled with guttering tapers. The invention of the self-snuffing, plaited wick in 1820 drastically revolutionized candles, eliminating the hazard, waste, and mess of the untended flame and pretty much bringing the candle into its present incarnation.
The ingenious but perversely gruesome use of “found candles,” if you will, abounds. Candlefish (a relative of the salmon) were used as bizarrely decorative lamps by Native Americans of Vancouver who caught the fish, dried them, propped them up on Y-shaped sticks, and lit one end at nightfall. On the Shetland Islands, the population caught a little bird called the storm petrel by the thousands, and after drying the bird threaded it with a wick, stuck its feet in a lump of clay, and lit its beak. In the West Indies, fireflies were caught and placed in small wooden boxes, and were adhered to the big toe with a gumlike substance to illuminate the path at night and spot any deadly snakes that may be lurking in the shadows.
The eternal struggle and expense to keep a light going before the modernization of illumination with gas and electricity cannot be exaggerated. Getting and keeping a light was almost as critical to survival as was food and shelter. Indeed, the choice between food and light was a constant for the poor–many lamp oils also being edible. This fact was duly noted by an increase in shipwrecks along the coasts of England in the nineteenth century, when lighthouse keepers used their surpluses of tallow candles for food instead of as warning signs for dangerous waters ahead. Being able to burn a candle anytime you wanted meant that you were rich, and probably literate. It signified freedom, order, and privilege. It also provided protection from the unseen chaos and the debauchery of the night.
Up until the latter half of the twentieth century, the candle was a necessary and sensible object, used thriftily and with reverence, for the most part because of its ability to turn night into a somewhat navigable situation. Its shape and color changed little over thousands of years, varying marginally from the cone to the taper, each dictated by the wick to candle-diameter ratio, and its color a result of the raw materials at hand. The candle gained symbolic significance within the spiritual realm as well, where its use in religious ritual has been prolific and widespread. The early Christian church discouraged the superstitious and pagan use of candles in services or in the common practice of guiding the dead to their final resting place. By the late third century, the church gave up this losing battle and embraced the candle. It then became a trinity of meaning: beeswax, the pure body of Mary; wick, the soul of Jesus Christ; and flame, Divinity.
Of course, candles served a sinister and lucrative role as a votive for fearful and guilty petitioners who wished to whisk their loved ones away from the jaws of purgatory and through the pearly gates. But more fanciful, empowering, and interesting uses of the candle as a sympathetic object can be found in fourteenth-century France, where a town, during pestilence or war, would make a taper the length of the town’s perimeter (which might be several miles), dip it in wax, and wrap it around a wooden barrel; the protective votive might burn for a couple of months or more. Similarly, a taper would be stretched around a sick animal and brought to the church to burn for the beast’s recovery. In both instances, the candle is thought to attain metaphysical power through the believer’s will and imagination. Magical practices have always employed candles, as literal and figurative constructions of reality through which the mind operates on an unseen level. Blowing out the candles on a birthday cake while making a wish originates in this transmutation of reality via a little bit of wax and flame.
In the mid eighteen hundreds, gas was beginning to replace the lamp and the candle in factories and homes. It was centrally supplied, required almost no maintenance by the householder, and provided bright and constant light that certainly revolutionized the dark and dangerous workplace. But there was a mysterious resistance to the use of gas light in the drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie. People clung to their candles and lamps. For decades, they refused to allow family meeting rooms to be converted to gas, though hallways and kitchens had gas installed almost immediately. Gas was accused of being poisonous and eating up too much oxygen! But the real reason was that gas did not have a mellow, warm flame that emulated the gentle, poetic, and hypnotic character of the hearth. The gas flame was harsh, and too bright. It did not do for the psyche what the flame of the candle or of the lamp could do: It provided no reprieve.
Nowadays, candles reside as blurred relics to their forgotten spiritual and domestic functions. They have lost their critical necessity, and in so doing have been given the time and luxury to expand from their tried-and-true modest singular form into the most fantastical, horrific, hilarious, and kitschy forms imaginable. Springing up and spreading like wildfire in the nineteen fifties through the seventies, the populist arts and crafts movement derived its momentum from a revolution in domestic life, whereby labor-saving devices and the sudden availability of inexpensive, factory-made goods altered the role of women in the home. As an adverse reaction to the modernization of housework into bland consumerism, the craft boom was in no small part a nostalgic re-creation of childhood memory, as well as a collective and unquenchable desire for individual creative activities that required skill, attention, and care. As a consequence, candle-making, along with macramé, ceramics, braiding, crocheting, quilting, rug latch-hooking, and decoupage, became hugely popular handicrafts in the postwar era, spawning specialty stores, books, magazines, television shows, classes, societies, and fairs.
Novelty candles flooded the marketplace, appealing to all tastes and embracing the bohemian counterculture’s aspiration for a chilled out, homespun, eastern-flavored, artsy, incense-burning exoticism that has seeped into every nook and cranny of the culture. Who does not remember making the hippie (or sand) candle at school or as a stay-at-home project? Or how about the multicolored drip candle, which, when placed in an empty wine bottle, would develop the counterfeit patina of a rich kaleidoscopic past of love-ins, happenings, and consciousness-raising sessions? The Hari Krishnas adopted the psychedelically patterned candle as their trademark and money-generator. And there are the gigantic trophy candles bought by upwardly-mobile suburbanites, those elaborately poured, dolloped, dripped, and sculpted forms–always a god-awful wood-brown color whose wick never tastes the bite of the match: a final footnote on the candle’s road from service to ornamental home décor.
Less swingin’ your-pad-or-mine candlealia is perhaps even more glorious and unbound: note the Santa Claus Winter Wonderland candle, the pressed-flower candle, the ice-cube candle, the head-shop skull candle, the layered candle, the fake-rock candle, the fake-woodgrain or brick candle, the pop-confection ice-cream-sundae candle, the little boy and girl candle (you light their heads), the many assorted animal candles . . .
Perhaps only artists have clearly understood our complicated relationship to the candle, or the vast possibilities of narrative, allegory, and pictorial promise of a candlelit space. Yet, surprisingly, representations of the candle in art are slight in number. In making Barry Lyndon, a 1975 film set in the eighteenth century and shot entirely in period lighting, director Stanley Kubrick was obsessed with using only candles and natural light in order to visually recreate the tone of Romantic-era paintings. When told that filming would be impossible without fill lighting, he adamantly made his own camera lenses and specially developed all the film. The technical difficulties facing painters have been similar; the challenge even more onerous. Candlelight is not stable: The flame changes continuously, shuddering palpably under the slightest air current, while expanding and contracting at will–moving like water over all it touches. Many artists just haven’t bothered, painting during the daylight, then adding a few candles here or there, hoping that their addition would be enough of a clue that the depicted scene occurred at night.
Postmodern resurrection of seventeenth-century French painter Georges de La Tour is a notable exception. His late portraits of Magdalenes–born through a demand for trifling voyeuristic portraits of morally repentant and anonymous women of clandestine reputation–are exquisitely reverie-inducing and brilliant studies of lighting. The object lesson of the fallen is overridden by the sheer transformative wonder of de La Tour’s technical virtuosity. Likewise, Gerhard Richter’s photobased paintings of skulls and candles critique Romanticism, while delivering a healthy hit of sensuous swoon. They recontextualize the dichotomous versions of the candle as both soulful reflection of the vanities and as parabola of sensorial seduction. Furthermore, the spiritually and sympathetically symbolic effects of Robert Gober’s candle pieces–a stubby, white candle with pubiclike human hair growing out of its base, or a truncated and formally clothed human form with candles sprouting from its limbs–mine the well-submerged but unconsciously recognized powers of the candle as a vehicle of wish fulfillment on the physical plane. Nam June Paik’s technological translation of a single candle into a multitude of variously scaled and colored video projections in One Candle of 1988 meditates upon the transition of our attention from the flame of the candle to the glow of the monitor. And picking up the thread of the nineteen-seventies aesthetic candle explosion is Jorge Pardo’s extravagant avocado, yellow, and orange drippy chandelier.
Just about the time that art was taking a major nosedive in significance as the main game in visual communication, the candle was being replaced by gas and electric light, and its significance in religious life was being devalued and forgotten. (Today, the Catholic Church in Rome has converted to electric votives; you pay and then hit the switch). With similar persistence–in the face of humiliation, debasement, and criticism leveled at its frivolity, self-indulgence, and lack of substantial meaning–the visual arts and the candle soldier on. As a consequence, they have become more ridiculous, exaggerated, inventive, and grand as time goes on. Indeed, the existence of the visual arts today is a testimony to a kind of faith, endurance, and desire for an illusionistic experience of life. The line between fact and fiction is wherever you want to draw it; undeniably, for the imaginatively evolved, the distinction is moot. Still, like the individual efforts of the artist, a dim candle burning in a darkened room continues to assert its right to blur, dream, trip, disguise, and pull the rug out from under everything else.

Serious fireworks turn something into nothing, very suddenly, and do it repeatedly until (only) nothing is left. Life should thereupon feel scrubbed and new. Socially, fireworks are a generously wasteful gesture–a potlatch–like publicly burning one’s money in a sincere way. Audiences must feel that the event honors their presence. Of course, they are stunned, overmastered, blitzed, sent. Such is the fireworker’s humble ministry. I love setting off fireworks, which I do for less than twenty minutes once a year, after thinking about it a great deal.
I seldom enjoy professional displays, which are academic. They expect to be admired. You know: ooh, ahh. Forget that. Think sob, scream. When doing fireworks, never consider beauty, which will take care of itself. Contrive only intensity. Fireworks should not be something that people watch, but something that happens to them.
My wife Brooke Alderson’s and my annual Fourth of July party began about fifteen years ago at our country place (a third-hand trailer at the time) with a few friends and some bottle rockets that I’d scored in Chinatown. It grew, last year drawing over 200 friends and neighbors. For a while, I bought in bulk from a Midwestern outfit that ships to interstate-trucking depots. Today, I patronize a savvy, passionate dealer named Joe. My partners Eric and Kate and I make a road trip to Joe’s cinder-block bunker in a bucolic field each spring. Joe has taught us different uses of “black match” (gunpowder-impregnated cotton fuse wrapped in waxed paper) and electrical “squibs” (which, with wiring, enable battery-powered instantaneous mass firings at a distance). There is so much more to learn, but we’re taking it gradually.
I haven’t tried to get professional-grade ordnance. We use the “C”-class that is legal in some states. Except for forget-about-it “A”-class complexity, the main difference is size, which can be compensated for by grouping units, exploiting features of the terrain, and, above all, keeping the show close to the audience–which contributes a bonus frisson of fear.
The main types of display fireworks are rockets, fountains, and tubes (mortars). “C”-class rockets, which we launch from PVC pipes stuck in the ground, are generally unsatisfying. Most sacrifice bang for color; some do the opposite. (All share that lovely takeoff, whoooshh.) We use them for filler. Best are “cakes”: bulky bundles of tubes that shoot “flaming balls,” as it says on their labels. At different altitudes, the effects include many-colored banging, whizzing, darting, showering, corkscrewing, shimmering, and whatnot. We like to pack the air with cake phenomena–sort of all-over sky painting–for a long spell. Some of the cakes we use are named Oriental Thunder, Blinking Dragon’s Breath, 37 Shots Shining Star, Millennium, Wild Boar, Insanity, Magic Whirly, Vendicator [sic], Star Gate, Drinker of the Wind, Black Cat Warp Speed, Super Stallion, Gold Strike, Dagger Falls, and–most mysteriously–Dayton Night.
Our nine-year-old house tops a slope that descends, from the porch, through a distance of one hundred feet in tiers and across a lawn to a stream which, for the past few years, has been swollen into a virtual lake by beavers. (The beavers surely loathe the Fourth; living on our land rent-free, they can jolly well put up with it.) From the stream, a meadow extends one hundred and twenty feet to the base of a wooded mountain. We do most of our show on the lawn–with, this year, six front-line all-purpose crew members, a rocket man (hi Seamus!), three reloadable-tubes people, and Eric supervising. Last year, we involved a nearby big willow (more about it later) and the stream itself (a homemade barge loaded with fountains for a curtain effect); this year, we expanded further to small cherry trees and the entire meadow. Next year, the mountain. The offered loan of a gut-quaking gunpowder cannon has been accepted. You can’t beat a narrow mountain valley for acoustic enhancement, by the way.
Reloadable tubes include the exuberantly flashy Critical Acclaim and the indispensable Violence Ammunition, which produces very loud, hard bangs. Applying lessons from Joe, we have learned to remove the propellant from VA projectiles and to fuse the warheads for use on the ground.
The largest “C” tubes are preloaded, one-shot mortars, pretty expensive, that launch with heavy thumps, “break” (explode) impressively, and yield the high, colored blossoms and cascades that most people think of when they think of fireworks. Joe despises them as uneconomical, but if you don’t give folks some of what they expect, what kind of host are you? We used to finish with large tubes. Now I like them as a false finale, relaxing the audience into the ooh/ahh mode, and thus setting up the knockout that I’ve lain awake for months scheming.
Saturns. Everybody who knows any small fireworks knows the bricklike launchers of twenty-five or one hundred little plastic rockets that scream upwards erratically and go bang. Rule of life: You cannot have enough Saturns firing simultaneously. It feels crazy every year at Joe’s, loading up on so many of one item. But I’m girding to really go for it next year: a colossal, shrieking wall of ripping fire that gives an intimation of satiety–too many Saturns. My friend Mark’s auteurial dream of a show is just, say, fifty thousand Saturns and good night. That would be quite cool. We might need to call two hundred ambulances from the nervous hospital. But I bet Mark that we can get a heartwarming, though brief equivalent with a mere three thousand. We’ll see.
Now and then, I sense our use of fireworks crossing a line into art. I try to suppress the thought, which threatens crippling self-consciousness. I keep reminding myself of my earliest and still perhaps only insight into the pyrotechnical sublime: “Shoot off everything you have as fast as you can.” A no-bidding corollary: “Absolutely no dead time.” A half-second pause between fireworks is an abyss in which is glimpsed death by boredom. If art can handle the pace, bully for art.
The arts that fireworks are closest to are music and painting–the pure structuring of time and the optical field–both of which operate automatically on any perception we have that is susceptible to them. I made an instructive, arty mistake this year, expending many person-hours of wiring and splicing to prepare a ten-second effect in the meadow: ranks of Critical Acclaim and Violence Ammunition warheads detonating in the grass from the mountain to the stream. Mark and I crouched in the dark as, keeping the beat, he handed me wire leads and I touched them to a battery. I had envisioned a barrage rolling toward the audience. The percussive aspect was gratifying–and would have been more so if I hadn’t missed connecting one of the ranks. But people didn’t much get the visual idea, surely because their gazes composed the explosions frontally, in pictorial space. Middle ground (between near and far, and properly the domain of sculpture) is a headache in fireworks as in landscape painting. Only Van Gogh ever did major things with it, by accounting for its every dip and veer with cobbled strokes. Give me a ton of money, several miles of wire, and a huge crew, and I’ll do you a Van Gogh.
The finest fireworks tour de force I ever saw (only on TV, alas) was the Eiffel Tower on Millennium Eve. There had to be hundreds of thousands of charges set off in geometric patterns and syncopated rhythms: classicist. (As a northern type, I’m a romantic, but teachable.) I mentioned that masterpiece to Joe. He tensed up. “Fuckin’ French,” he said bitterly. “The best. We just think we do it.” The example gave me the idea of loading our big willow tree with cakes (Niagara Falls–white balls and spark showers) fused in overlapping sequence and aimed to bounce around in the branches. The tree appeared to disintegrate in concatenating fire. This is the one stunt we do that I am perfectly happy with. This year, we duct-taped Snow Storm fountains into two hawthornes near the mountain, to enchanting effect. Look for more of those next year.
I recently heard an eyewitness account of New Year’s fireworks in Naples: how the city blazes with amateur stuff for hours, then the official show erupts all over the magnificent bay. I am proud that this fits my own instinctive pattern. At Brooke’s and my party, inexhaustible heaps are set out of small and medium rockets, firecrackers, minor tubes, Roman candles, flying spinners, sparklers (the multistage, spitting kind), and novelty items (such as little boats which, afloat on our pond, putt forward, shoot cannons, and launch helicopters). People may help themselves all day. Age restriction: ability to use a Bic lighter. Small kids radiate bliss that disarms leery parents. O.K., ten-year-old boys can be a pain (vide Lord of the Flies). This year, I passed one who was twisting rocket fuses together for a multiple launch and heard him growl, “They will feel my power.”
How much does all of this cost? I was tickled last year when some people formed a pool to guess, and their low figure for the show alone was $5,000. Three of us, splitting the bill, had spent a total of $1,300. Never underestimate Chinese productivity. Of course, we must escalate each year. Maybe someday I’ll hit the reset button and begin again with bottle rockets on the porch.
Isn’t it dangerous? (I hear you, reader.) I eschew cherry bombs, M-Sos, and anything else paramilitary. Fireworks should destroy only themselves. Slight burns are the worst peril with what we use–barring extraordinary misfortune which, in fifteen years, has yet to occur. Well, during the show this year an outsized Roman candle, brand-named Brilliant Envoy, fell over and fired into the crowd. That was sobering. Observing with horror from across the stream, I marveled at the alacrity with which human beings can remove themselves from the flight paths of flaming balls. Whew. And once, years ago, my sister Mary was soldiering in the front line as usual, when her hair caught fire. Someone whopped her about the head until the flames went out, and she returned to duty almost without missing a beat.
It’s incredible in the front line: infernal fire, smoke, noise, and scampering bodies. Fireworks condense the fun parts of war, without the bad. Occasionally, a rookie freezes up or skedaddles. Few of us, including me, have ever seen our show. I’ve viewed a couple of volunteer videos and some photographs. I was interested, but for anyone to step back and record the event seems to me misguided. Fireworks are a participatory experience, like sex. Be there or be square.
People who think they’re being funny call me a pyromaniac. I resent that. Refer to me and my kind as pyrophiles, if you please. Or else, Pyro-Americans.
The political content of the Fourth should be kept freshly in mind: kicking English ass. Every rocket is targeted spiritually at old George Three. Last year, atop the bonfire that instantly follows our show, we flew a vast Union Jack painted on muslin by Hannah Harvey. Seamus dug that. English guests at the party took it a mite queasily. I assured them of our benevolence. I quoted Winston Churchill: “In victory, magnanimity.” And Ulysses S. Grant: “If we have to fight, let us do it all at once and then make friends.” (Notice: all words of one syllable. Amazing writer.)
I suppose that, psychologically, a defiant devotion to something illegal, morally woozy, or just foolish–fireworks no less than drugs or art–is neurotic in a particular vein. It may express stubborn loyalty to the person or persons who, when we were children, conveyed to us that we were, or even perhaps ought to be, bad. I have ideas about myself in this regard.

Fairyland is every man’s dream of perfection, and changes, dreamlike, with the mood of the dreamer. For one, it is a scene of virgin, summery Nature undefiled by even the necessary works of man. For another, it is a place where there exist no codes, conventions, or moral laws, and where people love or hate at sight, having their virtues and vices writ large upon them. For another, it is a champaign dotted with fine castles, in which live sweet ladies clad in silk, spinning, and singing as they spin, and noble knights who do courteous battle with each other in forest glades; or a region of uncanny magic, haunting music, elves, and charmed airs and waters. For still another, it may be an anarchy of the beautiful touched with terror, tenanted by spirits who must be propitiated with cakes left on the window sill and soft words spoken up the chimney at night. No two minds see fairlyland alike or demand like gifts from it, and to the same fancy it alters from day to day, as the winds change which blow about a house, and with as little apparent reason. Nevertheless, it gives by contraries so accurate a reflection of life that the spirit of an age is more essentially mirrored in its fairytales than in the most painstaking chronicle of a contemporary diarist.
The visions of what is called idealism are only reflections of fairland and its experiences; they share with the scenes of that wonderful domain the merit of telling the truth about those who see them, and of telling it the more clearly because unconsciously. Yet, there have arisen in the last half-century, more or less, certain long-faced, earnest, intent, and seemingly very daring people, who inform us sadly that we must look dull facts in the face if we would see truth, that we must not delude ourselves with rosy dreams or golden castles in Spain. By way of showing us how to proceed, they rake over the rubbish heaps of humanity in its close alleys and noisome slums to find fragments of broken moral crockery, to nose out the vices of unfortunate people, to set upon them the worst possible interpretation for the social system, and, by the simple process of multiplication, to construct from them what they consider typical human beings.
Determining to hide nothing, and to show every side of life impartially, they forget that the things which necessarily strike them most in their impartial survey and appear most emphatic in their work are mere offal of the senses–as a man with a delicate sense of smell would find unpleasant odors the chief feature of life in a hovel of disease. Boldly declaring that they will cast aside all factitious optimism, they automatically choose the dark aspect of all things in order to be on the safe side; as a result, unpleasantness becomes associated in their minds with truth, and if they wish to produce a faultlessly exact portrait of a man, all they need do is to paint his weaknesses and then, for the sake of propitiating the instinct of kindness left by some oversight in their hearts, to explain that his shortcomings are the inevitable consequences of a mistaken scheme of life. There remains only to set down the man thus portrayed in a milieu, the dullness, sordidness, and stuffiness of which is “reproduced” with a monotonous and facile elaboration hitherto unknown in art, and a masterpiece of realism is obtained. It is hardly surprising that when such stuff is given to tired and overworked men and women with unsteady nerves as a study for their leisure hours, it is apt to cause a certain flavor of despondency and pessimism to become characteristic of the time, with the social result that if any difficult problem of life clamors to be solved, those best equipped for solving it have utterly lost all youthful hope and cheer and have no energy for the labor. They pass on with sighs, leaving the task to bureaucrats and party politicians.
It is an old sneer, no doubt, that realism is a picker-up of life’s refuse, and it may be just that any point of view which belongs to a large class of people should find representation in art. But it has never been proved to the satisfaction of the most reasonable and easily convinced visionary that the realistic is a definite point of view. For, in truth, it is only the mood of every man’s dull and depressed hours. We are all realists at times, just as we are all sensualists at times, all liars at times, and all cowards at times. And if it be urged that for this very reason, because it is human, realism is essential to art, the obvious answer comes that this claim entitles it, at most, to a niche in the temple, not, as at present, to a domination of the whole ritual. Truth in art, as in other things, should not be sought by that process of exhaustion encouraged so fatally in our age by the pedants of science, and by their fallacy that it may be discovered by considering all the possibilities: a method which surrenders intuition and all the soul’s fine instincts to receive in exchange a handful of theories, which, compared with the infinite forms of immortal truth known to the gods, are as a handful of pebbles to a thousand miles of shingly beach.
Faulty as its philosophy is, however, the realistic creed that dominates our literature is not due so much to bad theories as to bad art. To be an idealist, one must have a vision and an ideal; to be a realist, only a plodding, mechanical eye. Of all forms of art, realism is the easiest to practice, because of all forms of mind the dull mind is commonest. The most unimaginative or uneducated person in the world can describe a dull scene dully, as the worst builder can produce an ugly house. To those who say that there are artists, called realists, who produce work which is neither ugly nor dull nor painful, any man who has walked down a commonplace city street at twilight, just as the lamps are lit, can reply that such artists are not realists, but the most courageous of idealists, for they exalt the sordid to a vision of magic, and create pure beauty out of plaster and vile dust.

One of the underlying contemporary beliefs in the West regarding the creative process in individuals concerns the unlimited potential for human achievement, through the will of the individual and the fictitious reality of opportunity for all: a democratic and leveling faith that is both liberating and daunting. This has evolved, during the past fifty years, into a philosophy that considers the artist to be an impartial, skilled professional. The beginning of this conviction might be marked by the dramatic, drunken death of Jackson Pollock in a car crash with his mistress, and it is exemplified by time-clock punching, it’s-all-about-work Andy Warhol, whose serialized production revolved around the life and times of his gorgeously seedy, decadently tragic Factory denizens.
Of course, the shift from the nineteenth-century cult of the genius–the belief that there are a chosen few fated from birth for greatness, along with the now-embarrassing romantic notion of the artist as semi-autistic, alternately lying on the studio floor paralyzed with depression and indecision, then struck by the bolt of ecstatic vision–to the twenty-first century belief in the artist as an enlightened cultural producer is not altogether a bad thing. The truth, we now understand, lies somewhere between these two models, the artist being neither wholly a self-defined visual technician nor a super-gifted destiny’s child.
The mathematically-based art of astrology has paralleled this historical revisionism, evolving from its earlier fatalism regarding human existence to a kind of humanistic view, which can be attributed to the influence of Carl Jung’s theories of synchronicity, archetypes, and the collective unconscious, which were themselves founded in the unscientific practices of the tarot and astrology. Astrology asserts that a thing or person born at a particular moment in time takes on the characteristics of that moment. Today’s humanistic version also asserts that this planetary blueprint can undergo additions and modifications–that someone born with the signature chart of a serial killer may live a happily peaceful life as a Kansas City clerk, with only undercurrents to the contrary. Thus, its popular appeal.
While it appears to many–believers and skeptics alike–that we are in a revival of astrological interest due to our new-age melting pot, astrology has seen better days. The Depression-era Hoover Dam is testament to this fact: The public monument of engineering extravagance and art-deco grandiosity includes a marble and stone star map, showing the trajectories and positions of the celestial bodies on the day of dedication, and Zodiacal wheels. Likewise, a radical thinker such as Jung, whose ideas were so clearly based upon the paranormal and occult, would have a difficult time existing in today’s academic circles.
Nevertheless, astrology is hinged on the now-universally accepted belief that everything is interconnected, down to the smallest atomic particle. So, I’d bet that you, even if you are a die-hard unbeliever, have secretly scanned astrological descriptions in your daily newspaper. This, therefore, is my version: the twelve signs of the Zodiac within the visual arts. (I would like to emphasize “visual,” for I do not intend to comment on creativity in general.)
ADDED MATERIAL
Christine Siemens, a Capricorn, is an artist living in Los Angeles.
ARIES “I am”
March 20/21-April 19/20
As the first sign of the zodiac, explosive, impulsive Aries is a crusader, and given the proper arena, the Ram will battle with chivalrous bravery on the field of artistic competition. Arian artists are at their strategic best when they can corral an army of willing assistants and corporate donors to move a few tons of earth into fancy patterns or heave around some metal.
Fast and furious describes macho Aries’ aesthetic approach: a kind of rough-and-tumble flamboyance and childlike enthusiasm for discovery. And, if the rich patron does not show up to throw in the bucks and take care of all the mundane, trivial details–or recognition isn’t instant or is too easy–then Arians need for a larger-than-life, fast-forward, action-packed, turbo-speed adventure may lead them to seize their piece of the pie elsewhere.
MATTHEW BARNEY, ROSA BONHEUR, MAX ERNST, JUDY FISKIN, AGNES MARTIN, JEAN FRAGONARD, VINCENT VAN GOGH, FRANCISCO GOYA, JUAN GRIS, RAPHAEL, VICTOR VASARELY, LEONARDO DA VINCI
TAURUS “I have”
April 20/21-May 20/21
The Bull seems to be the most unlikely of all the signs to scurry off to the big city in pursuit of the big shimmering dream, for when the blood sugar drops Taurus will be none too pleased with frugal packages of ramen and rice cakes. And Taurus has little desire of the limelight, the intangible, or the unknown. Nevertheless, art history still is loaded with these placid, hedonistic traditionalists. One reason is that Taurus has the most highly tuned senses of the signs and its reality is molded into a deep physical intelligence that becomes impatient with the overly cerebral.
Taurus folk are, at heart, ardent romantics whose raison d’etre is simple: If it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it. They transmute their direct, earth natures into bodily-based rhythms, materially grounded work with a good amount of curbside appeal and archival permanence. Taurus is also the sign of the collector.
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, GEORGES BRAQUE, DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD, EUGENE DELACROIX, ALBRECHT DÜRER, KEITH HARING, JASPER JOHNS, WILLEM DE KOONING, JAMES TURRELL, CY TWOMBLY, ODILON REDON, BRIDGET RILEY, FRANK STELLA
GEMINI “I think”
May 21/22-June 20/21
Nonlinear and disparate, the innately androgynous Twins are roving journalistic wordsmiths and sly satirists whose intellect resides in the quick-firing nervous system of informational connectivity and the flux of polarities. Specialization is not their bailiwick. They prefer to live within airy quicksilver heights of mental activity, disliking boring routine or frightening introspection of their interior selves, which may lead to encounters with the messy theater of emotions and the psyche, which they quickly deflect with a well-aimed quip or clever mimicry.
Most visual artists who are Gemini natives find a way to bridge the gap between their limited appreciation of the visual and tactile with an art practice that is most often conceptual, language and/or system based, and provides a flexible container capable of processing their total mental sphere.
LAURIE ANDERSON, JOHN BALDESSARI, CHRISTO, GUSTAV COURBET, M.C. ESCHER, PAUL GAUGUIN, DONALD JUDD, FRANZ KLINE, ALEXIS SMITH, DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ
CANCER “I feel”
June 21/22-July 21/22
Water is most intrinsically creative, filled to the brim with fathomless churning oceans of emotional energy that, if not allowed to drain regularly, will lead to self-destruction in the Pisces, cruel power plays in the Scorpio, and pathological martyrdom and self-protection in the Cancer. The Crab is ruled by the fast-orbiting moon, and this sign is buffeted with the cosmic fallout of unremitting lunar shifts that leads them to take cover in long periods of private cloistering and domesticity, which in turn nurtures their imaginary autopilot.
Cancers’ nerves are often frayed, and they are calmed by intimately absorbing activities that are intuitively expressive and do not necessitate any reasonable explanation. Cancers are not attention-seekers in the conventional sense; as artists, they steer clear of hefty displays of bravado, focusing their attention instead on familiar subjects close at hand. Their creative output is hampered by instability and rejection.
MARC CHAGALL, JUDY CHICAGO, CHUCK CLOSE, EDGAR DEGAS, JEAN DUBUFFET, DAVID HOCKNEY, FRIDA KAHLO, KÄTHE KOLLWITZ, CHRIS FINLEY, REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, PETER PAUL RUBENS, ANDREW WYETH
LEO “I will”
July 22/23-August 22/23
This sign has been compared with the medieval legend of Parsifal, a hero’s journey forever looking for the enchanted castle (read: individuation) that vanishes after he or she fails to answer the question: What does this all mean? Leos see the world in the vacillating stark contrasts of perfect greatness or tepid deficiency. The latter they will try to redeem at all costs. Like the other fire signs, there is a tendency to mythologize life in the Leo, and then contextualize it into orbiting signs and symbols that define the quest for identity and meaning of the self.
Leo artists tend toward deconstructing semiotics within advertising imagery, slogans, words, and all manner of propagandist persuasion. Unlike Cancer’s small-scale, down-home dedication, Leo craves a colossal centerstage extravaganza, coöpting whoever and whatever else is around into their drama of fairytale proportions, making sure that only their name is in lights.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, MARCEL DUCHAMP, JENNY HOLZER, EDWARD HOPPER, HENRY MOORE, JIM SHAW, ANDY WARHOL
VIRGO “I analyze”
August 23/23-September 22/23
Filled with silent hope, but the mind is in control: For Virgo, the sterile, Christian overhaul of some of the Zodiac’s symbols has dealt it a cruel blow and forever denigrated and maligned these honorable natives. The present image associated with this sign is the Virgin–which has created an erroneous view of Virgos as frigid neat freaks. Older, more apt images were of fertility or harvest, like the Sumerian corn goddess. Virgo is the sixth sign of the Zodiac, where personal desire is sacrificed for service, and where the gathering and bundling of information for useful purpose supercedes the individual ego. The Virgo’s deals and dreams are buried under the fretful worry of laying down enough supplies for the upcoming cold winter, and wondering why others are irresponsibly out there still having fun.
Virgos are found within the visual arts most often working behind the scenes as technicians, curators, cataloguers, and collectors, and in related occupations, such as designers and craftspeople. As characteristic of an earth sign, they are deeply aware on a sensory level (necessary for primary creative production) and are highly discriminating and open to the untraveled. But they most often forfeit their abilities and secret desires in the line of duty and in their practical pessimism regarding the self-absorption and impractical scheduling of the artist. Virgos may in turn demonize and inhibit these behaviors in themselves and others. Think of the academic neoclassicist Ingres, who, in fierce opposition to Delacroix’s Romanticism, developed a cool formal meticulousness, and his mentor, Jacques Louis David.
CARL ANDRE, JEAN ARP, R. CRUMB, JACQUES LOUIS DAVID, JEAN AUGUSTE INGRES, JIM ISERMANN, GRANDMA MOSES, MAN RAY, BEN SHAHN
LIBRA “I balance”
September 23/23-October 22/23
Libra is ruled by Venus, planet of love, harmony, and the arts, and these natives are naturally disposed to artistic endeavors of all kinds, due to their tremendous need to communicate ideas, their desire for context within a social sphere, and their inclination for romantic love and partnership. If there were one period in art that exemplifies Libran energy, it would be the Rococo, and perhaps Watteau’s theatrically-inspired paintings get top marks. His fetes galantes–charming, frothy, airy scenes that depict elaborately costumed couples of leisure in fanciful outdoor settings–demonstrate his and his fellow Libran’s obsession with “all that is beautiful!” with equal parts sentiment and practicality. Librans have been nicknamed the sign of the interior designer (and the lover), but certainly their ability to provide distractions from dreary, mundane sufferings of daily life with harmony and beauty is not a virtue to be scoffed at.
This seventh sign in the element of air marks the delineation of the individualistic inclinations of the first six signs. The latter six begin the move toward the public sphere. Libra, then, is that force that brings forth civilizations, a move from the survivalist to entertainment, pleasure, and persuasion. Librans are limited creatively by their procrastination and temperamental periods, fueled by the pain and frustration of making decisions in inequitable situations. Fairness and seeing both sides of an issue are hallmark traits of this sign.
FRANCOIS BOUCHER, CARAVAGGIO, THEODORE GÉRICAULT, ALBERTO GIACOMETTI, TIM HAWKINSON, JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET, LOUISE NEVELSON, MERET OPPENHEIM, FAITH RINGGOLD, MARK ROTHKO
SCORPIO “I desire”
October 23/24-November 21/22
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven: Scorpios are power-driven, sex-crazed substance-abusers, violent, vindictive, cunning, vain, slothful, paranoid, jealous, and manipulative. And this is only the short list. Scorpio has more adjectives applied to it than any other sign, and not very many of them are particularly positive. (And, well, all of them pretty much have a basis in truth). Scorpio has two images associated with it: the better-known Scorpion and the lesser-known Eagle. It is said that the Scorpion embodies the shadow personality (it’s the sign of the religious fanatic), while the Eagle, a more highly-evolved Scorpio, gains wings along with generosity and compassion–and the ability to transform and create society, rather than destroy it.
The ability and need to transform and understand the watery mysteries of existence make those born under this sign gravitate to self-expression. Their facility to probe, uncover, and expose, as well as their tremendous pride and relentless drive make them unstoppable forces as creative entities. Fear them.
LYNDA BENGLIS, JEAN BAPTISTE CHARDIN, WILLIAM HOGARTH, MIKE KELLEY, ROY LICHTENSTEIN, RENÉ MAGRITTE, ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, CLAUDE MONET, GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, PABLO PICASSO, ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, AUGUSTE RODIN, PAUL SIGNAC, JULIAN SCHNABEL, RICHARD SERRA, JAN VERMEER
SAGITTARIUs “I see”
November 22/23-December 20/21
The fiery archer has got to be the happiest and luckiest of all the signs, and it is amazing that any of these restless, routine-hating, talkative partyers would ever have the inclination to turn their energies to the solitary, meditative life of the artist. Generally, Sagittarians more often are located in the fast-moving world of ideas, where their far-roaming intellects may turn to writing, research, and superb multitasking.
Those born under this sign fear success and have difficulty adjusting to the limitations of reality. Their fantasies of potential genius (this makes them great actors) often undermine their discipline. Besides common aesthetic slights imputed upon them (badly dressed and poorly groomed), they are, like Aquarians, intuitively able to anticipate trends, which, along with their gregarious knack at making contacts and their natural linguistic abilities, can be enough at times to produce a revolution in art.
WILLIAM BLAKE, CAMILLE CLAUDEL, HELEN FRANKENTHALER, SISTER CORITA KENT, PAUL KLEE, BRUCE NAUMAN, DIEGO RIVERA, EDWARD RUSCHA, NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE, GEORGES SEURAT, HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, WILLIAM WEGMAN
CAPRICORN “I use”
December 21/22-January 19/20
If the previous sign’s population resides in the manic, then Capricorn hits the opposite extreme, as the most melancholic and depressed of all. It is no wonder, when you consider that their planetary ruler is cold, wintery Saturn, the patriarch of the Zodiac who makes sure that everyone learns their lessons and pays full price. The Capricorn myth is the sun god who chooses to incarnate into this hard world of suffering.
Gloomy, yes. But despite the heavy restrictions and rigidity of this sign, Capricorn’s desperate need to escape impels them toward isolated acts of expression, as does their need to move and manifest the physical in structural ways. Form, as an earth sign, is paramount, as is pragmatic endurance and getting every job done, no matter what the cost, inertia cut with aneurysm-inducing amounts of stimulants. While Capricorns are incredibly pathetic at being the life of the party and making the social rounds, their chilly, withholding, and enigmatic personalities can create interesting art and generate new possibilities.
LEE BONTECOU, LOUISE BOURGEOIS, PAUL CÉZANNE, JOSEPH CORNELL, BARBARA HEPWORTH, EVA HESSE, ROBERT LONGO, HENRI MATISSE, BERTHE MORISOT, JOHN SINGER SARGENT, CINDY SHERMAN, ROBERT SMITHSON, ALFRED STIEGLITZ, JENNIFER STEINKAMP, YVES TANGUY
AQUARIUS “I know”
January 20/21-February 19/20
As the last of the air signs on the star wheel, Aquarians are also the most complex. Humanitarianism is a trait of this sign, yet Aquarians seem to love humanity but hate people. Indeed, they love ideas, but do not particularly relish emotions and are queasy at anything seamy or unpleasant. While liberally eccentric, advocates of change, and rebellious toward authority, they themselves often are fixed in their habits and viewpoints. These conundrums make for great art.
Stylistically light years ahead of the times, Aquarians are the most unpredictable of all, valuing novel gadgetry and can-do ingenuity over practical solutions. They want a revolution, and they want it now! Their impatience is legendary, and their free-wheeling and impulsive wiring make for the stuff of-isms. Their secret weapon has always been their little-publicized work ethic.
ANSEL ADAMS, ANN HAMILTON, MAX BECKMANN, MARTIN KERSELS, BARBARA KRUGER, ROBERT MOTHERWELL, ALICE NEEL, BARNETT NEWMAN, CLAUS OLDENBURG, YOKO ONO, JACKSON POLLOCK, NORMAN ROCKWELL, ADRIAN SAXE, JEFFREY VALLANCE, BILL VIOLA
PISCES “I believe”
February 18/19-March 19/20
Blank, shape-shifting Pisces is the twelfth and final sign of the Zodiac. As such, Pisces have absorbed all the lessons of existence and choose to inhabit the murky subconscious. Nicknamed the mystical dustbin of the Zodiac for their pursuit of humanity’s disdained and discarded wreckage, they are less a type of person, than a rendition of human nature.
Pisces is everyone and no one, their boundaries blurred with empathetic identification and an egoless urge to disintegrate and disappear. Like Scorpios’ dual creatures of higher and lower consciousness, Pisces symbol is two fish: one swimming downstream toward abject derelict despair, the other upstream toward a less than ordinary charting of unknown waters. Either way, the burden of merging with all of humanity’s suffering must be dealt with. Emancipated from the laws of time and space, and possessing a deep wisdom of the futility of human desire, Pisces focuses on the greater work. This multiplaned dreamlike sight, when catalyzed by belief, is soul to the brilliant artistic visionary.
ELEANOR ANTIN, DIANE ARBUS, HONORÉ DAUMIER, HANS HOFFMAN, WINSLOW HOMER, LARI PITTMAN, MONIQUE PRIETO, PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR, GIOVANNI TIEPOLO, GEORGES DE LA TOUR, DAVID WILSON
This brief tour, like all readings of sun signs, is intended as a thematic portrait painted with large brushstrokes and does not account for other key influences within a chart.

Coming of age in the heyday of punk, during the late nineteen seventies, I believed that we were living at the end of something–of the American dream, Modernism, the industrial economy, or a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was all around us, in the cities, which were literally in ruins: the South Bronx, Detroit, downtown Oakland, South Central Los Angeles. Modernist housing projects across the country were in a state of collapse, and the shipping piers that had once been key to New York’s economy had been abandoned, as had the once-great Southern Pacific railyard, Mission Bay, in San Francisco, along with the city’s two most visible breweries. Vacant lots, like missing teeth, gave a lopsided grin to the streets we haunted; ruin was everywhere. Indeed, the ruins of America’s great cities were the emblematic places of this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic. Like most aesthetics, punk too contained an ethic, a worldview, with a mandate on how to act and how to live.
What is a ruin, after all? It is a human construction abandoned to nature, and one of its values lies in its similarity to the wilderness: a place mysterious, slightly dangerous, full of the promise of the unknown, with all its epiphanies. Cities are built by men (and, to a lesser extent, women), but they decay by nature, from the incremental processes of rot, erosion, rust, and the microbial breakdown of concrete, stone, wood, and brick. Nature takes over when, for economic or political reasons, maintenance is withdrawn. Sometimes, ruins are created by active attack, by the vandalism, arson, and war in which humans run wild–or by terrorism, a devastating fact of which we recently have been reminded.
A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, regulate, and earn. As such, ruins are the unconscious of a city, its memory, darkness, and lost land. In this, ruins truly bring the city to life. The act of eradicating ruins from the city often functions as an urban lobotomy, erasing its ability to dream. This kind of rationalist amnesia is a current mental illness for American cities, as the Disneyfication of Times Square or the generic developments of Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco or Horton Plaza in San Diego bear out. An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and, as such, it is an ideal home for art, which also is an activity that falls outside ordinary production and consumption. Art, though it may enter the marketplace, needs to be born outside of it–someplace more weedy, wild, unregulated, and erotic–or at least so needs the romantic art that I, who came of age in the ruins, identify with most.
For example, the performance trio Survival Research Labs staged at least one of their mechanical extravaganzas of violence and entropy in the ruins of the brewery in San Francisco’s South of Market, when that neighborhood was still made up mostly of small industrial sites and leather bars. The abandoned beer vats–I think it had been a Hamms brewery–stood like ominous giants amid chunks of cement ringed by a cyclone fence. We stood around and watched, as ingenious machines destroyed each other and menaced the audience in a baleful setting. At the time, we thought SRL’s performances were about the future, just as we thought the apocalyptic film Road Warrior was about the future. But, in reality, they exemplified the concept behind the 1985 Oakland Museum exhibition “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”–depicting only how the future looks from a now-historic point in time. It was the era of Reagan’s nuclear brinkmanship, and postnuclear ruins figured in every anxious imagination. “The living will envy the dead” was the phrase Nuclear Freeze activists recited like a mantra.
SRL was describing what was breaking down, but their industrial aesthetics were already nostalgic, for the great industrial cities were becoming something else entirely: San Francisco and New York were losing their ports to suburban locales, and the small industries of the inner cities were being replaced by artists, along with the smooth affluence that sometimes follows upon the heels of artists. New silicon-based life forms were sneaking into every interstice, without setting off alarms that all would be utterly changed. Nuclear apocalypse was more readily imaginable than was the coming digital revolution. Things may have looked bleak, and we were dressed for it, in sensuously tactile leather, boots, spikes–and lots of black. “London is burning,” called out The Clash, “But I, I, I, live by the river,” as Jacques Reda published in Les ruines de Paris. We young preferred to imagine ourselves dying rather than becoming middle-aged, and apocalypse was the planetary equivalent we anticipated.
Punk’s godfather Iggy Pop–who once sang about “walking down the street with a heart full of napalm”–is today a no-longer-beautiful, golf-playing Republican. A big-box Costco stands where SRL once performed, as generic, efficient, and quotidian a place as could be imagined, a place that shoves urbanism into suburbia. In many ways, suburbia has become urbanism’s middle-age, a blander, safer, more sequestered version of hectic city life. It was only in the intermission between the original Modernist city era of production and today’s era of consumption that the playful anarchy of punk culture could emerge from the ruins.
This all came back to me last year, when I walked into a Chelsea gallery full of the photographs of Peter Hujar, who died in 1986, during the heyday of this lost sensibility. I had been looking at a variety of contemporary art in the several galleries that preceded my momentous visit, art that was sleek, shiny, designed, fashionable, and disaffected. This art, which implicitly referred to the smooth surface of the new city, had replaced the bleak cityscapes that so moved me in Hujar’s work. The very texture of his work was different. In Hujar’s saturated, black and white prints, the world was rough in every sense; its surfaces were porous, decrepit, sensuous, full of age and an ability to absorb–whether light, meaning, or emotion. The city of Hujar’s art had a mystery and danger of the sort urban renewal pledges to remove. Indeed, not far from the galleries is Chelsea Piers, and the history I am explicating is encapsulated there as neatly as anywhere. Chelsea Piers is now a “family place,” a high-end sports and exercise complex, pricey, regulated, safe, and predictable. Full of healthy people simulating activities like golf and climbing, it is in a profound way synthetic–a synthesis of purposes and a simulation of places, though it may yet yield to ruin again. (In the wake of the World Trade Center attack, I was told that it was to be used as a triage center, except that there was no triage: only the ambulatory and the dead.)
Chelsea Piers lies where the Hudson starts to become an ocean (and, by extension, where the American insularity of the Hudson River School became international Modernism). The piers officially opened in 1910, the year about which Virginia Woolf famously remarked, “On or about December, 1910, human character changed.” One can imagine it as Modernism’s own port: immigrants, like those in Stieglitz’s famous 1907 photograph Steerage, landed there, as did luxury liners. The Titanic was headed for those piers when the iceberg intervened, and the survivors docked there a little later on the Carpathia. From those piers, the Lusitania embarked, and its bombing by Germany brought the United States into the First World War. One imagines the Modernists embarking for Europe there, and some of them, fleeing the Second World War, disembarking there, too. So, high culture was in transition at the piers, and continued to be so as late as the nineteen sixties.
Today, the Chelsea Piers’ website steers clear of its history between 1976 and 1992, when its current phase began. “The Chelsea Piers just sat there, rusting in the harbor air, until destiny called them back,” is all it claims. But they didn’t just sit there, of course. During those years, every kind of sexual outlaw and riff-raff made itself at home in this temporary, autonomous zone. On or about 1977, as attested to on the piers, human character changed again with the birth of punk, as thousands bore witness throughout the country, the voices of what now, in the shrinking vision of hindsight, look to be a generation.
While Peter Hujar photographed the Chelsea Piers, his protégé David Wojnarowicz cruised them: “Paper from old shipping lines scattered all around like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture; three-legged desks, a Naugahyde couch of mint-green turned upside down, and small rectangles of light and wind and river over the far wall. I lean towards him, pushing him against the wall, lifting my pale hands up beneath his sweater…. In the warehouse just before dark, passed along the hallways and photographed the various graffiti on the walls, some of hermaphrodites and others of sharp-faced thugs smoking cigarettes….” The emotional, erotic, aesthetic, and ethical intensity of Wojnarowicz’s words seems inseparable from this kind of place. If he–queer, punk, desperado, activist–was an artist of his time, it was because the time in which he lived was exemplified in places that are ruinous and bleak, but somehow still imbued with a romantic outlaw sense of possibility and freedom, even the freedom to be idealistic–in the bitter vein of the Sex Pistols’ “No Future,” perhaps, but idealistic all the same.
To read Wojnarowicz on his travels through the city’s ruins is to read a description of the city as a forest in which its inhabitants, like wild animals, meet, rut, fight, and vanish again into a thicket of pillars and rubble, strange creatures that seem to walk in leather pants with racks of antlers casting streetlight shadows on old brick walls. Walter Benjamin, writing of Paris a century earlier, mused, “But to lose oneself in a city–as one loses oneself in a forest–that calls for quite a different schooling. Signboards and street names, passersby, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a crackling twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its center.”
Ruins are the city gone feral. The photographer Francesca Woodman knew this when she explored her body and sexuality in a series of self-portraits in ruinous interiors, from about 1977 to 1981. In some ways, the ruins served formal purposes for her artworks. Their roughness and patina of age contrast with her young flesh. But they do more. The stains and scrapes and wear are signs of a history, of the passage of time. They speak of sadness, experience, and the eternal imbalance between the tangible length of past and the utterly intangible, unimaginable future before it arrives (as it never did for Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981, at the age of 22). They whet the appetite for the present, for the moment of consummation and destruction, risk and decision. In these old ruins, Woodman lost herself in erotic reverie, self-invention, and the spaciousness of a half-abandoned world.
That kind of age was not only sensuous, but explicitly sexual. Perhaps, in spanning vast amounts of time, it put quick acts of passion into perspective; perhaps it offered the melancholy that is so close to eros. In recent years, the painter Delmas Howe returned to the subject of the Chelsea Piers in its outlaw heyday, painting them as homoerotic Stations of the Cross, in which leathermen and other naked guys cruise, suffer, embrace, and generally stand around the industrial setting. His Chelsea Piers (reconstructed from slides taken by a friend dead of AIDS) have the spaciousness and majesty of classical architecture and magnify the dignity and drama of the buff figures in Howe’s paintings. But this neo-Acropolis burns and crumbles, as though the place itself and that heroic, pre-AIDS era of sexuality were what really were crucified, never to be resurrected.
Cities were reborn in the nineteen eighties and nineties, and most of their ruins have been redeveloped. Our new cities have no room for unproductive places; everything abandoned has been reclaimed as income-producing real estate. The ruinous trainyards of Mission Bay soon will be biotech facilities. I think of an old boxcar I saw out there, on which someone graffitied the word “dream.” This apparition gives weight to the photographer Susan Schwartzenberg’s assessment of the loss of ruins and vacant lots, what she calls “dreamspaces,” or the urban unconscious excised. I remember well the furious punk concerts in the vacant lot facing the 1984 Democratic Convention at Moscone Center, a lot that had been created by tearing down working-class residential hotels. That lot is now the shiny Yerba Buena Gardens, which always makes me feel as if I’m in an airport. Where Survival Research Labs once gleefully destroyed the machinery of Modernism, Costco sells in bulk to its members and can only be entered through the parking garage. This, too, is part of a suburbanization of the city that characterizes not only class and cleanliness (thought as well as deed), but an erased, homogenized sense of place and a shift from production to consumption. If the beer vats were the face of the local, these big boxes are the face of the global–or rather, its facelessness.
The ruins are disappearing, not only literally in the cities, but conceptually, in the aesthetics of our time. Disappearing with them is a romantic sensibility that may have looked like desperation in the nineteen seventies, but looks swooningly luxurious now. The task of the young today is radically different: to face the future, to come to terms with or subvert this brave new world of the generic. It shows not only in the subjects of their art, but in its very texture. Decay itself has been stopped and replaced by growth. As my era was defined by its relationship to the past, this one is defined by its relationship to the future. New technologies signal the beginning of a new sense of time and place, and this alone marks those coming of age now as faced with profoundly different questions than those of us who thought we were living at the end of the world, a quarter of a century ago. To be sure, the nineteen seventies have been aggressively, but selectively revived in the past few years: We got the glitter rock and disco, the polyester and platforms, all part of an official nineteen seventies. You have to look harder at underground music and grungier kids fighting globalization and sweatshops–the industrial jobs that went over the horizon in the remaking of American city life–to find any reference to that other nineteen seventies, the one that asked, as the Avengers put it, not what you can do for your country, but what your country’s been doing to you.
American ruins are something comparatively new, at least in the cities. Although the ruins of the rural South and the Dust Bowl had been documented by Walker Evans and the WPA photographers in the nineteen thirties, the American city for the most part has been the site of a Modernism that is utopian, industrial, and urban. Until the late nineteen seventies, they mostly signified a Marxist fantasy that avant-garde and proletarian aesthetics would unite in some unimaginable redemption. Of course, there was no redemption, only decay, and this decay, more than all the books of postmodern theory, was postmodernism itself, the other face of suburbia, with its white flight, vanishing industrial workers, and endless consumption. Ruins spoke of nonintervention, of places that were neither maintained in their original uses nor redeveloped. They remain a kind of free space, liminal, between roles: an ideal site from which art may emerge. For a brief moment, in one intermediate era, the city’s ruins constituted a dark playground for those of us who felt ourselves to be something like ruins–out of place, not of use, belonging nowhere, open to definition, engaging in noneconomic, nonproductive activity, imaginative, and erotic.
In clinging to the ruins as icon and actual space, the artists and writers of my generation were clinging to what was left of Modernism’s sense of a heroic mission. For the late nineteen seventies and early eighties were heroic, perhaps foolishly and vainly so, but we possessed a belief that art could change the world, that its subjects were justice, truth, and history. Since then, the culture we created has died so quietly that nobody has bothered to write an obituary for it, though we may consider every Starbucks in America–and Beijing, and Glasgow (where the coffeehouse has replaced the Romantic poet Robert Burns’s bookstore)–its tombstone. We are now at the beginning of an era whose constructions are far scarier than ruins. “Eat your heart out on a plastic tray,” sang the Sex Pistols. Now, we know where to buy the tray, and what the heart tastes like.

At the end of the war–WWII–a lot of American men came home with a new vision of just how bad life could get. While most of the population fled to the suburbs and Organization Man anonymity (those that landed jobs, anyway), a segment decided to take the spiraling, anarchic experiences of Prohibition, the Depression, and the campaigns through Europe and the South Pacific (and, as the news sank in, the liberation of the camps) to the next level. Thinking globally and acting locally, taking the brutal coercion of war as the constantly visible endpoint of any social negotiation, they continued to behave by the pared-down, existentialist rules of trench warfare: They had seen a lot worse than anything the Great Satan’s domestic wing could dish out. Many of them had lived, some for years, in a kill-or-be-killed culture, scavenging for food and shelter, surviving–no thanks to the brass–by their wits and the skin of their teeth. Now, they were expected to step into the antiseptic, paranoid sit-com of postwar Americana, a grotesque, emasculated, management-heavy, frozen-pea confabulation being dished up as that for which they had so bravely fought? Sorry, Charley. Instead, men congregated in nervous, anarchic packs. Some of them found, in the surplus of war-issue Harley-Davidson motorcycles, a perfect vehicle for their deep restlessness.
Cheap and unregulated, the Harley of the late nineteen forties was at a peak of utilitarian engineering. The company had garnered official government praise for the quality of their wartime production, and its side-valve WLA was a rugged, easily repaired, mechanical warhorse–planned obsolescence and strict manufacturing codes for street legality being things of the future. Easily repaired meant easily modified, as well, but that’s getting ahead of the story. Demobilized in California, and not particularly eager either to return to their parents’ Midwestern farms or to study painting on the GI Bill, the ex-soldiers ranged across the state on their bikes, regrouped and unprecedentedly mobile, looking for ways to keep the adrenaline rushing.
This dispersed energy came to a head in 1947, in Hollister, a small California community known as the garlic basket of the nation. Locals were puzzled and frightened when their annual Fourth of July motorbike scramble drew a staggering 4,000 participants from across the state. The bikers basically took over the town: sleeping in the park, guzzling beer at Johnnie’s bar (and everywhere else), fighting, pissing in the gutters, pitching woo with the Miss Garlic Queen contestants, and racing up and down Main Street at breakneck speed. Fifty men were arrested for drunkenness or brawling or indecent exposure, and the rest moved on. A journalist-come-lately from the San Francisco Chronicle smelled a story and concocted a more outrageous version of the weekend’s events, posing a woozy straggler–a member of the Oakland area motorcycle club called “The Booze Fighters”–on his Harley Knucklehead in front of the litter-strewn Johnnie’s. The wire services gleefully picked up the story; the posed snapshot made the cover of LIFE, and a new American mythology was born.
Still, it took seven years for the seed of the “motorcycle outlaw” that had been planted in the American collective unconscious to erupt in pop culture as The Wild One. Though the Actor’s Studio would deny it, Marlon Brando’s performance in the movie as bike-gang leader Johnny seared his screen presence into the contemporary pop canon far more than did his institutionally celebrated role as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. The archetype of the black-leather-clad, misunderstood, faintly androgynous, anti-authoritarian, deep-but-inarticulate, postadolescent male on a motorcycle is among the most important icons of American lore, and it cemented Brando’s near-mythical status for the rest of his checkered career. Indeed, not only Brando, but a core group of pop-culture luminaries–James Dean, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and Lou Reed, as well countless lesser talents–owe most of their ongoing iconic significance to their association with biker aesthetics. While the shiny leather and insolent posture count for much, the potency of this icon derives from its reference to that throbbing, snarling robot monster between the protagonists’ legs, and the machine’s ability to transport its master, plus one passenger, to the Shining Land.
This icon eventually found a perfect organization to promote it in The Hell’s Angels, a loose-knit, on-again, off-again string of motorcycle clubs that originated in the early nineteen fifties in San Bernardino or Fontana, just east of Los Angeles. It was made up of a slightly younger generation of misfits who had come of age at home, younger brothers (and even sons) of the original cultural misfits who had tasted social ataxia firsthand. This subsequent generation had to orchestrate its own theater of chaos, inevitably over-compensating in the arenas of public spectacle and vehicular extravagance.
The outlaw bikers’ allegiance to Harleys was originally motivated by availability, Harley being the only major American motorcycle manufacturer to survive into the nineteen fifties (and the explosion of Japanese imports still a mere glimmer in Soichiro Honda’s eye), but it was cemented in the war-production honed mechanical flexibility of the machine itself. William Harley and the Brothers Davidson arguably had invented the motorcycle as a distinct entity from the motorized bicycle in 1903 and regularly pioneered subsequent technological innovations for it, including the sprung fork, magneto ignition, mechanical inlet valves, and the chain drive. But it was the distinctive bifurcated v-twin engine that minted the Harley’s visual identity, and determined its characteristic low-riding profile.
The gorgeous 6IEL Knucklehead of 1936 is an early masterpiece of American industrial design, wedding form, function, and streamlined art-deco elegance in a package that undoubtedly haunted Walter Gropius’s Harvard dormitory wet dreams for years to come. The vernacular variations on this stock cycle were to become synonymous with the frontiers of idiosyncratic extravagance afforded by American design, as well as a particularly American form of psychedelic libertarianism whose influence continues in a number of youth subcultures, from Deadheads to posse militias. The “chopped” hog–a stripped down Big-Twin Harley with modifications made to its forks, handlebars, rear suspension, gas tank, and sundry details–is an extremely successful example of a collectively designed public art form redefining a collective cultural ideal. Unfortunately for the Hell’s Angels, such anonymous and poorly documented intellectual property isn’t defended with the same vigor as, say, the songwriting of boy bands, and the outlaws found each of their design innovations regularly appearing in the next generation of factory output. The choppified Harley was chosen as the epitome of American design for a recent exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, but Oakland Hell’s Angels’ President Sonny Barger wasn’t invited to the vernissage. The company itself, however, has gone so far as to file for trademark protection of the distinctive v-twin rumble.
The Hell’s Angels rode a turbulent drug-fueled cultural wave through the nineteen sixties that took them from has-been greasers in the Epoch of Fabian to psychedelic, postapocalyptic, Viking revolutionary warrior daddy-o’s who fucked with anyone who got in their way. From the renewed tabloid interest in their early-sixties’ revels, through their uncharacteristic canonization by the acid underground as models of liberated action, and up until their embarrassingly bourgeois scapegoating in the wake of the violence and murder at Altamont in 1969, the Hell’s Angels received an unprecedented amount of mass-media attention for what was essentially a bunch of rowdy blue-collar hobbyists. The Angels were lumped together with Charles Manson and the Weathermen as just having gone too far. Reeking of urine and motor oil, it was often believed, they roamed the countryside, raping and pillaging. The Harley-Davidson Company, whose market share had been shrinking continually during the nineteen sixties, watched horrified as their increasingly leaky and temperamental machines became linked with these violent avatars of the American id.
Later, William Burroughs took the aesthetic to its logical conclusion in his novel Place of Dead Roads, whose cowboy-gang Wild Fruits rolled in rotting livestock so they could intimidate the Shits with their Stink of Death. But it was Burroughs’s friend Terry Southern, in his role as screen-writer for Easy Rider, who first drove the wedge between the Angels and their machines. Easy Rider’s Captain America, played by Peter Fonda, was the template of the clean-cut college dropout taking the summer off for a road trip/identity crisis on his parents’ dime. The aura of danger that had accumulated around the Angels’ decades of alleged lawlessness now came as a stock accessory with the bike, and the machine became the symbol of freedom itself.
It took the Harley-Davidson Company awhile to recognize this shift, but when they finally did, it resulted in one of the most spectacular corporate recoveries ever, a textbook case of late twentieth-century brand-name marketing. After a series of mergers and structural reconfigurations, Harley-Davidson finally found a friend in Ronald Reagan, who imposed a major tariff on Japanese imports, which resulted in the company regaining its feet. It bought them enough time to reconsider their approach. Harley-Davidson limited its production, emphasized quality control, and began to nurture and listen to its customers. The most visible result was its Softail series of bikes, designed to trigger nineteen-fifties biker nostalgia, while referring visually to the outlaw choppers with their gang-rape connotations intact, but now tamed. This was a neat bit of semiotic sleight-of-hand, but nothing compared to the grand scale of redirection that was to follow.
Beginning at the same time, Harley-Davidson began a massive licensing campaign to secure their already considerable branding of the public imagination. Focusing at first on establishing the Harley’s identification with the titillating outlaw innuendo, the company authorized HD cigarettes, beer, and leather jackets. The public response was surprisingly powerful, and the company began to aggressively pursue merchandising deals and product placement in movies like Terminator 2 or the Superbowl halftime program, all the while reducing their actual advertising budget considerably. As a result, you can now purchase Harley-Davidson playing cards, watches, coffee beans, stickers, train sets, Christmas-tree ornaments, eau de cologne, welcome mats, piggy banks, pool tables, beanie babies, and figurines in pewter or porcelain. There have been three limited-edition leather-clad Harley-Davidson Barbie and Ken dolls, as well as a whole line of Harley-themed fine art, much of which is indistinguishable from the landscape art of Thomas Kincaide, except for the chopped hog in the foreground.
Harley-Davidson Scratch & Win is the most successful lottery promotion ever, selling over 100,000,000 tickets in the United States and Canada since 1998. Harley-Davidson Cafes have opened in Manhattan and Las Vegas. Harley dealerships have been transformed from greasy outlaw hangouts to cluttered boutiques, and the company’s official line of motorclothes has expanded to a $200,000,000 line of couture, including faux-Victorian lingerie for the ladies and pink and blue terrycloth bath sets for the l’il bikers.
The company has posted record profits every year since 1987, and there is an up-to-two-year waiting period to purchase a bike. Harleys increase in resale value the minute they leave the showroom. The Harley-Davidson name was recently repositioned as one of the top five most recognizable brands in the world, after Coke, McDonalds and Nike, all in spite of the company’s limited advertising and its having only last year surpassed the 200,000 mark in production. Another of the company’s marketing innovations is the Harley Owners Group, or HOG, a string of dealership-centered clubs that go on weekend rides and do high-profile charity work with celebrity bikers like Jay Leno and Billy Joel. Twenty-eight people appeared for the first HOG event in the mid nineteen eighties; today, the group claims close to 500,000 members. In April 2001, Harley-Davidson was elected to the prestigious Marketing Hall of Fame by the New York American Marketing Association, who noted that “Harley-Davidson means an ‘attitude’ toward living that is both uncompromising and rooted in freedom, individualism, and adventure.”
Throughout, Harley-Davidson has managed to detach the dark mythological significance of the outlaw bikers from the scruffy anarchism of its originators and the full-bore freak show of their sixties counterparts. It has successfully transferred this mystique onto patently bourgeois tchotchkes and ludicrously Rotarian good works. The company has been instrumental in transforming rebellion into one of today’s chief cosmetic lifestyle choices, with a predetermined set of incremental steps of understanding and levels of acceptance, all measurable by your commitment to consumption of the brand. And while this is nothing new in the art of advertising, the amorphous values usually ascribed to a product perhaps have never before been rooted in such a negatively perceived or clearly defined subculture.
In Harley-Davidson’s hands, the symbol of freedom finally refers only to its own publicly ratified designation, and not much else. Indeed, the only freedom most Americans want is the freedom to describe themselves as “free.” The only rebellion they want to participate in is the rebellion against hypothetical strictures against declaring yourself to be a rebel. While there are pragmatic reasons for the Harley’s latter-day success, and doubtless ethological explanations for the appeal of shiny black leather, chrome, open-air speeding, and club emblems, the real reason for the deep marketplace penetration of Harley-Davidson is a masterful trompe-l’oeil aesthetic effect: making a powder-blue bib refer to a very particular, narcissistic, postwar angst–or providing a donation to the Jerry Lewis Telethon with a frisson of rape.

The hoax is the sense of soilidity of I and other. In the beginning is open space, zero, self-contained, without relationship. But in order to confirm zeroness, we must create one to confirm zero exists. We create two to confirm one’s existence, and then we go out again and confirm two by three, three by four, and so on. This is what is called samsara, the continuous, vicious cycle of confirmation of existence. –CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA
(GOOD DL’BOY OR TRANSGENDER CYBORG?)
If there’s a final frontier in the land of questionable taste with which I have yet to establish communications, it would be the frightful valley of contemporary Country Rock. Not country music in general, of course, but that highly successful mutant substrain that emerged over the last decade and a half, distinguished by such artists as Wynona Judd, Shania Twain, and the Dixie Chicks. Something about its pounding, overproduced homogeneity brings to mind the recordings of Jefferson Starship after even Grace Slick bailed out. That bad. Head and shoulders above all the other “New Nashville” performers, both in terms of sales and impact on the public imagination–or at least public attention–is a balding, lumpen, good ol’ boy with a wee streak of outlaw who goes by the name of Brooks.
Garth Brooks is by any standard a cultural force to be reckoned with. His carefully constructed sports-fan, regular-guy, suburban-cowboy persona, with its peculiarly soft masculinity, strikes a chord among baby-boomers, who often identify with his middle-class stories of decent, hardworking, Christian folk minding their own business. He’s certainly the best-selling country artist ever, and (if his record company’s tally is accurate) the most successful solo recording artist of all time, ranking third in total all-time sales below Led Zeppelin and The Beatles. While this enormous commercial success would seem to be the usual result of talent, timing, and a powerful marketing machine, I have recently begun to suspect that there is something radically different about Brooks’s stardom.
The question about actual sales figures is raised in part by the blatant marketing frenzy with which Brooks has pursued album sales over the past few years: withdrawing his first three albums, then rereleasing them as a box set with a handful of bonus tracks; producing a Greatest Hits package available for only one year; donating partial profits from the slow-selling Sevens to Oprah Winfrey’s charity Angel Network, on the condition that she plug the CD every day for a week. These actions may have moved units, but it left fans and industry insiders scratching their heads. Indeed, Brooks seemed desperate to reach the 100-million mark before the turn of the Millennium. Rumors of his megalomania and bullying behind the Nashville scenes surfaced, at odds with the artist’s “shucks ma’am” disavowal of any savvy self-management. A couple of years ago, I started hearing odd rumors about Garth–that he was retiring, that he was trying to switch careers by attending spring training with the San Diego Padres, that he had begun speaking of himself in the third person. Dude’s cracking, I thought.
Then, in the fall of 1999, Brooks announced his next project: an album by a fictional Australian/Angeleno grunge-rock star named Chris Gaines, to be performed and otherwise depicted by Brooks. The album was a prequel to The Lamb–the first feature-length film that Brooks’s production company was to release through Paramount. The Lamb was the story of an obsessed fan’s attempt to sort out the mystery of Chris Gaines’s death. Brooks was writing the screenplay, and would probably star as Gaines, recording a soundtrack full of new material, to be followed, if it seemed appropriate, by several more experiments with the Gaines persona. Creating a remarkable conceptual alias, Brooks had finally got my attention. Yet, I heard nothing about it until one year later, when In the Life of Chris Gaines finally began showing up in droves in CD store cut-out bins. I picked up a copy for $2.99, and set about trying to discern why the project was so arresting.
It wasn’t the music. In spite of a couple well-crafted pop songs, and the truly bizarre medley of The Youngbloods’ nineteen-sixties anthem “Get Together” with Cheryl Wheeler’s rap “If It Were Up to Me,” In the Life takes Brooks’s successful middle-of-the-road formula only slightly off its well-beaten path–into the territory of The Eagles or Bob Seger or, most strangely, former Fleetwood Mac frontman Lindsey Buckingham. Much of the Gaines LP replicates Buckingham’s distinctive sound, and even some of the biographical details of Gaines’s life are cribbed from Buckingham’s. An intriguing choice of prototypes, but rather than follow Buckingham’s example of risky musical adventurism at the peak of commercial success–a brilliant album’s worth of highly idiosyncratic post-punk pop songs set among the dross surrounding it on Tusk, followed by an increasingly quirky solo career–Brooks altered his generic AM radio instrumentation only slightly and poured his energy into manipulating the packaging and media relations.
In spite of various high-profile precedents of creating artistic aliases, such as David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, Brooks claimed, “It just happens to be something nobody has ever done before.” At least in terms of orchestrated hype, he has a case. Working with superstar pop producer Don Was and impresario Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, the Chris Gaines LP was cooked up as a greatest hits package. It included artwork for an entirely fictitious back catalogue, featuring a slimmed-down and toupeed Brooks with a soul patch and black leather pants, in which he looks for all the world like Trent Reznor. In one photo, Gaines even poses in a pair of black and white Pierrot leotards, basket bulging–a parody of the checkerboard suit worn by Brooks on the cover of his early hit The Chase. Both a one-hour special on the project for NBC and a “Behind the Music” episode on VHI exploring the fictional rocker’s tragic life were somehow finagled. Brooks appeared on Saturday Night Live as Gaines, and drew SNL’s highest ratings in five years. He made himself available for press and radio interviews and did the talk-show rounds.
And the record bombed. The media were particularly vitriolic, most often speculating facetiously about Brooks’s mental stability before putting the whole affair down to an aborted attempt to cultivate a mainstream pop constituency. Although Brooks’s people claim multiplatinum numbers, Soundscan figures indicate less than a million copies actually sold, in spite of a desperate last-minute retail price reduction. Brooks had effectively committed commercial suicide. A hastily thrown together Christmas album, released only months later, reeked of spin control, and fared even worse at the checkout counters. In the year following, Brooks announced (not for the first time) his retirement from the music industry and scrapped plans for The Lamb, replacing it with a made-for-TV Christmas special featuring Whoopi Goldberg. His wife filed for divorce. On the surface, we were witness to the crashing and burning of a star who misunderstood his fan base and made a big, wrong move. But surfaces can be deceiving.
For the key to the tremendous fan and media backlash is rooted not in the music’s stylistic deviations but rather in Brooks’s violation of the tacit agreement that his performative identity as a good ol’ boy, one of the people, would remain the one real identity around which his relationship with his audience was to be enacted. The inevitable corollary of Garth Brooks saying “I could’ve been Chris Gaines” is “I chose instead to be Garth Brooks, but it is an equal and equally fictional personality.” If Brooks indeed views “Garth” as a fiction on the same level as “Chris Gaines,” then Brooks’s oeuvre instantly becomes an extremely interesting experiment in aesthetic manipulation. Where Ziggy and Sergeant Pepper were mere exercises in fiction by their respective creators, Chris Gaines essentially dislodges both his own and the GB persona from the anchor of a fixed, generative personality. Once we ascribe this kind of intentionality to the work, as I believe we should, then the Chris Gaines project becomes a retroactive time bomb that explodes and reassembles an entire decade of significant cultural production to mean approximately the opposite of its initial public reading. No longer a good ol’ boy, Brooks is now a sophisticated conceptual artist, with an audience of millions, at that.
Famous for his alternately flamboyant stage antics and chillingly smooth “Howdy Neighbor” patter, the GB character was pegged as an artifact early on. The patent diva theatricality of his repeated retirement threats, the almost constant jockeying for headlines, the obsession with breaking show-biz records, and the relentlessly uncreditable playacting of “sincerity” all stand as uncontradicted testament to the micromanaged artificiality of Brooks’s public figure. Additionally, Brooks has repeatedly made statements distancing himself from his persona, culminating in his notorious deadpan usage of the third person to refer to his creation’s activities.
Alternately, if “Chris Gaines” is Garth Brooks’s “other,” it’s a horrifying testament to the narrow spectrum of options accepted by the greatest consensus of cultural consumers in history (100 million records sold). He might as well have gone in blackface. As a dislocation of the real in an attempt to prove the relative authenticity of the Garth Brooks persona, Chris Gaines is an utter failure. The only interpretation in keeping with Brooks’s track record of canny manipulation of the mediascape is that Brooks was deliberately undermining the same mechanisms of fixed, essentialist identity that he had played off of in order to tap into the public’s desire. He was, in effect, ringing down the curtain on the Garth Brooks character, while pulling out the rug from his public’s conviction that the celebrity persona of the white, Christian, monogamous, heterosexual male was in any way less of a performative construct than Marilyn Manson or Ru Paul.
Although Madonna has been touted as the embodiment of feminist scholar Judith Butler’s notion of subversive contemporary disruption of imposed identity, the character of Chris Gaines amounts to a more radical destabilization of the relationship between media identity and the consumer, and does so in a way that doesn’t identify white, suburban heterosexuals as a distasteful option, let alone a ratifying “other.” There is no winking acknowledgment of “I am enacting a discourse on performative identity,” as evidenced by Madonna’s generally ostentatious stylistic about-faces, and particularly by her association with “vogueing.” Vogueing ultimately reinforces the concept of an essentialist personality underlying the charade, and attributes mutable performative identity only to those “in the know,” finally functioning as mere stigma management. Likewise, “passing” implies a doomed liminal transition into a mythic overworld of unselfconsciousness into which the flawed may emerge transfigured by their masquerade. Neither vogueing nor passing, Garth Brooks appears unsatisfied with any level of authorization, recognizing no normative threshold of authenticity.
Much of the surprise factor in Brooks’s shifting persona is due to the quarter from which he emerged. Country Music has long been a traditional stronghold of racist, sexist, and homophobic standards, and the concept of performatively constituted identity remains the domain of queer and feminist studies. Brooks’s career nevertheless exhibits a marked openness to these Nashville taboos early on: He risked alienating his fans in 1992 with “We Shall Be Free”–a single and video that overtly condoned homosexuality–and 1993 saw the benevolent outing of his sister and bass player Betsy Smittle during a Barbara Walters interview. Drag kings are reported to have a particular fondness for portraying Brooks, favoring “Friends in Low Places” for their pantomimes. More recently, Brooks received a GLAAD media award, bracketed his SNL performance as Gaines with skits alternately featuring Brooks in drag as an old French whore and as his GB persona, hopelessly infatuated with male exotic dance-troll Mango. In April 2000, Brooks headlined a benefit concert of out stars including k.d. lang, The Pet Shop Boys, and Melissa Etheridge. For the highlight of the show, he performed a duet with George Michael, stating afterwards that he was “here to tear down these fences we put around ourselves.”
Whether or not Brooks is aware of the reality-shredding implications of his actions is moot. To be aware necessitates having a stable reference point from which to weigh the success of his imposture, thereby attributing authenticity to an imitated other. Nevertheless, Brooks certainly is aware of the stakes involved, as he apparently wanted to build the biggest damn house of cards he could, before pulling out the tablecloth. His career was orchestrated to reach the maximum number of people, before destabilizing their common ground. Brooks’s surprise at his audience’s perturbed reaction to his fracturing the omerta of celebrity authenticity, and the trickle of GB products that has found release since In the Life, suggest that Brooks is acting intuitively, and lend a convincing organic curve to the dynamic of his career.
Artists seldom know in advance what the theoretical exegesis of their work might be, and the evidence points out that Brooks’s career, fiscally structured as it has been, is driven largely by instinct. Brooks forged his vision of art and identity in the midst of the Reagan-era shift in the popular understanding of reality–from the unchanging ground of existence to a tacit consensus for hire. While fine artists like Jeff Koons, Eleanor Antin, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine continue to provide interesting and entertaining commentary on this paradigm shift, their revulsion for the narrow Rocky or Rambo parameters of popular symbolic vocabulary (not to mention their suspicion that the greatest practitioners in the medium aren’t from the world of fine art) keep them from plunging fully into the murky broth of free-radical signifiers. While academics are talking about the possibility of performative identities, and less immersed artists have been constructing demo versions thereof, Garth Brooks steadily has been incubating the real thing.