A Peek at Performance

A drawing by Paul Hall 

of a collage by Paul Hall

While training for and serving in the capacity of my service job in Washington, D.C., "information specialist" which the army codes as "71Q20", back in 1968, I had the chance to get a bit of artwork done.  When we were off duty, we had the time off.  I guess it's a little different from what I hear now, though I never really had the chance to look into it, but it seems that a large number of service men and women have to have other jobs when off duty in order to make ends meet.  A sad indictment on the establishment that they work for.

I had a job back in those days, too, but just on Saturdays in a bicycle shop owned by Mel Pinto, one of the foremost bicycle dealers in the D.C. and Virginia area.  Now, it's not that the pay was that low in the army.  It's understood historically that military salaries are lower than civilian ones and that those in military careers are there for altruistic reasons.   It's rather that the cost of living is artificially high.  We live in a world where people are allowed to charge whatever they think they can get away with.  

It is the government's responsibility to assure that it's service men and women are sheltered from the economic duress of the civilian world.  This involves the responsibility of ensuring that the spending power of the service personnel's service salary be totally commensurate with the cost of living environment they are in and that said cost of living be not more than one third of the individual's income after all deductions, such as monthly tax deductions and so on.

It is also the responsibility of the electorate to see to the termination of employment of any official that fails to do so.  Not that anyone's that responsible.  It's not entirely their fault, all such matters are obfuscated.  

In a civilized world, the census bureau and the department of weights and measures would have a mandate to measure accurately what the public can afford and enforce prices accordingly.  Freedom of enterprise would involve the ethic of fairness to the customer, said ethic from which any departing would meet with the teeth of sufficient enforcement.  Kind of like an economic F.B.I.   

In a stable society, in order for economies to grow, prices must remain fixed.  It would be an enforceable crime to be party to inflation.  Anyone caught price gouging would be imprisoned in low level security for the purpose of retraining and upon release from prison, forbidden to ever again engage in their former enterprise.

Not to do so would deny the possibility of some of the greatest minds and talent of any society emerging from the ranks of the poor and lower middle class, where they would most often come from, as was proven in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the United States, where a startling number of the greatest talent and leadership rose from the common ranks and not any aristocracy.   

Additionally, true aristocracy is nobless oblige, which means using one's privileged position to acquire the ability to more properly care for as many others as practicably possible on a multitudinal scale.  Seeing to the well-being of others.  Therefore anyone with such compunction is aristocratic, regardless of birth of station.  Another quality supposed to come to the fore in a democracy such as ours.  But it doesn't you see, because democracy is the weakest form of government.

So, anyway, back to the topic, a couple of days a week, I had the time after duty to go to art school.  And I found a good one, in conjunction with George Washington University, the Corcoran Gallery, the museum adjacent to the White House, had a school of art and I was accepted.  I was able to take a drawing class and a painting class.  

In the busy world of the mid twentieth century, when space was so expensive as to be prohibitive, as it is to this day, even more so, art school was a two-in-one thing for me, first it gave me the chance to get more art instruction, which was always handy, and second, it gave me a chance to use the space as I would a studio.  So I was able to get some work done.  

"Performance" was a title I would make up later because, I mean, you've got to call it something.  Oddly enough, the best art in the world is something that needn't make a statement.  Of course there's Picasso's "Guernica" and the protestations of Goya and so on.  Still works of art.  Still of renown.  But the best art is there without need of any story or statement.  It is a spontaneous visual event.  It takes the observer beyond the limited boundaries of literature or the trite extents of illustration.

You see, most people don't understand this because it isn't an understanding, it's an experience; an uplifting experience.  Once they catch on, and anyone can, they just have to keep looking for a while, then they understand the true value of art and many become collectors, willing to sometimes pay incredible prices for art proven to be able to deliver, such as Van Gogh's "Irises" which a few years back sold for, I forget the exact amount, but over several million dollars. 

Aha, you might now argue, and you think charging a dollar for a bottle of water was price gouging, how about millions of dollars for one little piece of artwork?  Hey maybe you didn't know but Van Gogh died early in life, a suicide, granted, but he was miserably poor, a victim of the price gougers of his day in another democracy.  Nobody bought his work while he was alive, except for one person of average means, a great individual.  As the song goes, when Iris eyes are smiling, they laugh all the way to the bank.

Van Gogh's brother subsidized his work, and he, Theo, was an art dealer.  That's why American Art has not seriously contributed to the global concept of true classical art.  There are no Rembrandts, no Michelangelo's, no David's or El Grecos and so on.  Oh, there are greats over here such as Homer, Whistler, and so on, but nothing the rest of the world is moved to acknowledge as truly classical world class great art.  And why do you think that is?  Because of the frontier lifestyle or something?

It's because the truly great talent, always there, has never had the opportunity to emerge.  Over here it's Rembrandt the stock clerk, El Greco the garage mechanic, Michelangelo the factory laborer (oh, I'm sorry, I almost forgot that most factory labor is going to the Michelangelo's of under developed nations where they can work'em on the cheap).  Each overqualified for menial jobs and therefore less adept at them than those qualified.

You see, I know this world.  I've been there.  And I alone am escaped to tell thee, as the saying goes.  So when I did this work, "Performance", we were learning about collage in the drawing class.  The assignment was to first do the collage and then to do a drawing of it.  This lent a legitimacy to the shaky medium of gluing bits of paper and pictures and other stuff together, developed by the cubists in the twenties; the nineteen twenties.

What's good about collage is that it can be so speechless.  The spontaneity so desirable in a successful work of art.  I've done collages before, and one of our best recourses was good old "Life" magazine, because of it's huge pictures and adds.  Man I really miss that mag.  But these days, it's not that good to use printed material because they fail to see that you're using it like you would a tube of paint.  The best thing to do is go out with a digital camera and shoot your own visual references and reprint them on the printer or maybe those big plotter printers they have at places like Kinkos.  Then stick pieces of those together.

So after piecing together my pictures and gluing them down, re-shaping them to suit my creation, I did the drawing using the collage as a visual reference.  But now I've come to separate the three areas of the drawing into details as shown below.  Oh and also it gave me a chance to give attention to the strength of combined gender;  the levels of greatness that can be had by unity of genders, each with unique abilities, no single gender having the capacity to act alone in a difficult world.

Just so, you cannot survive as a civilization without great artists.  That's why so much of our society is not surviving.  Go ahead and disagree if you want.  That doesn't change reality.  That's why.

Detail 1: The art of the performance.

Detail 2: The performer.

Detail 3: The audience.

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This series include the actual voice tour of works in the website by me, imbeded as sound in the background.  It should work on your browser, I know Internet Explorer will work.
In the first Intro you can hear me talk a bit more about "Performance"

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