Category Archives: General

My Whole Street is a Mosque

I live on Lispenard Street just south of Canal Street in Lower Manhattan, fourteen blocks North of Ground Zero. From my corner I saw with my own eyes the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center and I lived downtown through the scary nights and the many rough months after September 11, and I am here to say that my whole street is a mosque. Several times a day, small groups of Muslim men, mainly African street vendors who peddle carvings or fake Vuitton bags and Rolex watches on Canal Street, pull out prayers mats, often just rolls of cardboard they store in the nooks and crannies of the buildings around, they take their shoes off in all weather, wash their feet with water from bottles, kneel towards the East and pray, fourteen blocks from Ground Zero, on ground they’ve spontaneously “hallowed.” And the only thing one can say, in the words of my Holocaust refugee Polish Jewish mother, is “Only in America.”

Or, at least, only in New York, where these outdoors rituals take place on the street surrounded by crowds of Chinese vendors, NYPD cops, business men, rich men’s children and their nannies, and busloads of women tourists from the American South who have come to buy those fake Vuitton bags from those vendors (nice Christian ladies who have no problem breaking New York City’s tax laws by buying fake label merchandise). Every day I pass these men praying on my street, across the street from my front door, and on corners throughout Lower Manhattan. It is an example of the religious freedom and tolerance that makes this country truly great.

Politicians like President Obama should be wrapping themselves in the American Flag, waving the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights and hollering about Freedom of Religion, the Mayflower, the Founding Fathers, Ellis Island, Land of the Free, at the top of their lungs, throwing every righteous trope in the rhetorical book of the myth of America at those who would destroy “the better angels of our nature,” not getting all wimpy and conciliatory in the face of people who pander hatred and bigotry and who are cynically manipulating Ground Zero Families and using the “hallowed ground” of Ground Zero as this week’s battering ram against America’s true greatness.

The first 10 Amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, as important a document as the writing is faint

Abraham Lincoln's draft of The Gettysburg Address, delivered Thursday, November 19th, 1863, "in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

Thinking about Daniel Schorr

The journalist Daniel Schorr died today at age 93. I wish I could claim him as a landsman — the Yiddish term for someone from your hometown or shtetl — and it is within the realm of possibility that there is some distant genotypic relation since my family name was sometimes spelled the same way back in the same general geographical area (Belarus in his case, Galicia/now the Ukraine, in mine). But I note his death on A Year of Positive Thinking because my work as a painter and a writer is not only marked by various art influences but also by the models for political courage that I witnessed and heard about over the years (I do not place myself in the league of such figures but that such models existed helped form my political focus just as such figures today help me get through moments of political despair).

The presence of principled journalists is a necessity for the survival of a democracy. The transmission of political memory through the living presence of such individuals as they remain percipient in our time is a great resource and thus it is sad to lose this particular individual’s political memory and conscience. That all sounds pompous, so let’s just say how interesting it could be to watch TV network news when a certain weight and trustworthiness attached to TV anchors and reporters in a smaller, more centralized but less polarized media environment (the past). It was fun to watch as some mainstream reporters got a kick out of engaging with political outrage: I think of seeing Dan Rather being assaulted on the floor of the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 by Mayor Richard Daley’s thugs during CBS News’s live, gavel to gavel, coverage. Despite what was taking place it was a treat, even a moment of a kind of sheer political joy, let me tell you!

[I get that sense of joy from Jon Stewart’s inspired comedic riffs on The Daily Show but there is a dark undercurrent to my pleasure because Stewart’s existence is predicated on the utter failure of much TV “news” media to engage with facts and pursue injustice. Daniel Schorr was part of a generation of journalists with high standards in that regard. Thus, during Watergate for example, our Democracy still seemed fundamentally sound even when the President was undermining the Constitution– as people used to say, “the system worked,” even though paradoxically it had nearly failed. To be fair and not to totally lapse into unquestioning nostalgia for the past, Schorr, his mentor, Edward R. Murrow, and even Dan Rather, eventually lost the support of CBS when corporate fears of political retribution overwhelmed journalistic principles].

So I enjoyed Schorr’s pride at being on Nixon’s enemies list (here’s a link to Nixon and Colson talking about “putting the screws” to CBS and asking for the network to put pro-Nixon commentators on in order to have a more “balanced” point of view, in December, 1972; also link to the transcript of an interview with Schorr on PBS in which he discuses the “most electrifying moment” of his career, when he got hold of the enemies list and read it out loud on live TV and discovered that he was on it, #17) and admired his courage at risking various jobs on principle as well as his good-natured sense of humor about political ignominy and folly. There was a certain buoyancy to his view of the world that was great to hear. Today we do have people with a passion for justice who take great risks to expose uncomfortable truths that threaten power, and likely such people have always been rare. However, thinking of a recent example of the leaking of key information relevant to recent American history — Julian Assange of Wikileaks— it would seem this is a function of our society that has been globalized but, speaking as a citizen of the United States, one could also say that it appears to have been outsourced.

When I heard today that Schorr had died, the first thing I thought of was a fairly recent broadcast on NPR where he recalled the Great Depression as he has experienced it as a young man. The end of that broadcast, from July 6, 2008, when Schorr was 91 years old, was deeply touching. Asked if he remembered any songs from the period, he sang, a capella, the first few verses of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” I hope you will listen.

Looking for art to love in all the right places

I’ve fallen in love with many more artworks than I have men and without giving anything away I’d have to say that I’ve had better luck with the artworks I’ve loved and even the ones I’ve hated. No painting I’ve ever seen was married or loved someone else, or got in the way of my need for independence or solitude, and if I’ve tired of a work, having taken from it all that I needed and then outgrown it, the parting has always been amicable with the possibility of hooking up again always open to me. Meanwhile, and you can fill in the personal analogy or not, I pay a lot of attention to works I really dislike and get a lot of energy for my own work as a result.

Because the basic premise of A Year of Positive Thinking is to counterbalance my proclivity for “negative thinking,” I decided that for my first posts I would set out in New York City to find art that I love. I can’t be any more sure that I’ll find an art work I love on any given trip to galleries and museums as I would be to find a person to love at a cocktail party. But seeing art is always useful to something that I do: teaching, writing, or some aspect of studio practice. Bottom line, if I remember two shows I’ve seen in Chelsea by the time I get back to the E train or to coffee and a pastry at La Bergamote Patisserie on Ninth Avenue, I’ve had a good day. If I remember it the next day, better. If I find it useful in teaching a week later, the person’s up to something.

But here I should step back and try to tease out some of the categories of “falling in love” with an artwork.

There are many ways of falling in love with an artwork, or many gradations. When I first entered the artworld as an adult, I realized that I had to have two scales of judgment: one for the great artworks of history that had made me want to be an artist but which I didn’t have much expectation of ever equaling and the other for artworks of my workaday current artworld by whose rules I had to function and might be judged myself.

There is another relation to art that is not exactly the same as love, but has inestimable value, and I’m not sure it is something a human relation can give me: some works contain something in them that stops me in my tracks and propels me back to my studio. I see something, something clicks in my mind and I think, OK, I can work, in fact I must work (I sometimes literally shield my eyes as I get out of the gallery or the museum so that nothing mediocre or hideous will erode the generative impulse).

It can be a whole work or it can be a detail in a larger work. The most extreme example in recent years because it was the most minimal was a drawing by Philip Guston at the Morgan Library which I saw in the late spring of 2008. Among a group of very simple charcoal line drawings, this one consisted of a single vertical charcoal mark about a half-inch wide coming down about an inch from the middle top border of the sheet of otherwise blank paper. That was it. A whole summer of my own work in the studio was spurred and enabled by that one stroke. It was enough for Guston, and that was part of the gift to me: he knew it was enough and left it so. It was more than enough for me. Was it a great drawing? Did I “fall in love” with it? No, not exactly. But its justness and lack of compromise spoke one word to me, an empathic “Yes.”

Unfortunately for me as a writer, the nature of this experience is largely beyond words and words are unnecessary to its instrumental effect because what I feel impelled to do is work, not write. Not that writing isn’t work but when I say my work I mean my painting and drawing – even more curious because it is the one thing in my life that I do for myself and with total pleasure – I really knew that my mother understood who I was when, one summer as we were settling into our house in Provincetown, I overheard her telling Wally Tworkov on the phone, “Mira is very busy, she hasn’t started working yet.” That pretty much sums it up.

So in sum:

Falling in love with an artwork:

1. pole-axed by an artwork greater than me. Hugo Van der Goes, Giotto, Chartres, the Stendhal syndrome, one can weep: their ambition, piety, brutality, beauty, form, matter, is a cause for wonderment, gives you food for the arduous journey of a lifetime of artmaking and being a person.

2. creative energy generated by work you dislike strongly: why do you dislike it? It must have something to do with you (there’s a lot of bad work that doesn’t bother you). Work that seems antithetical to my practice and in the end may still be so but because I don’t care about hurting it, gives me a lot of freedom to answer it.

3. the distinction the French make between je l’aime – I love him – and je l’aime bien, I like him well enough. There is much art you can like well enough: it doesn’t rock your world, still one must respect it for the valiance and integrity of its effort.

4. uncompromising works or even moments in a work to which you respond, instantly, deeply, “yes,” that make you want to go home and work. Maybe this is a form of falling in love, because the response to some people is also simply, yes, that’s it.

Mira Schor, notebook sketch of Philip Guston's drawing, "Clearing the Decks", 2008

The next 2 or 3 posts will be on art currently on view in New York.