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I think I am going to save Counterforces for the essays of interest primarily to Atlanta, or essays so completely devoted to visual art without implications for literature or sociology that the joculum readership would find little of interest to them. An essay on the fate of Atlanta’s rammed-earth site sculptures, if I ever write it, will be on Counterforces. That blog will eventually morph, I hope, into something more substantive, but.

That also means you will not get to read any further reflections here on Sang-Wook Lee’s site sculptures made out of ramen noodles. They are brilliantly done, but you will just have to look them up for yourself.

I have written before in this blog about my hypothesis that cultural complexity and outright eccentricity thrive in sites where contending cultures occupy the same territory, more or less in a condition of tolerance or at least of successfully suppressed violence. Unfortunately, it means that large parts of the cultural production of these places is of interest only to those who share its creators’ odd preoccupations, or is of interest for the wrong reasons: because that which is not our own appears charmingly naïve, quaint, or pleasingly crazy.

On the other hand, tolerant amusement as a reaction is preferable to contemptuous refusal to pay attention.

The high-low dichotomy and artistic bridges between the two have been the topic of more than one exhibition in the past ten or twenty years, beginning with “High/Low” itself and going through successive examinations of, often, southern California culture and the artists who, when not being called Pop Surrealists, have been called Lowbrow, with a capital L to make sure we understand. But the term isn’t an ironic reversal; these artists really do admire lowbrow culture, and so do the curators who exhibit them. Tyler Stallings was fired from a California art center and hired by a California museum because he devoted critical surveys to such figures as Edgar Leeteg, the father of black velvet painting. (No, really.)

So there actually is a case to be made for a coherent cross-media investigation of places such as southern California, uniting the topics that currently are divided according to genre: Chicano political murals, Vedanta temples, extravagant museums, Pop Surrealism, the pop culture machine itself as a local industry. It would have the same absurd juxtapositions as Szeemann’s “Visionary Belgium,” and would have to feature rooms comparable to his memorably titled “Pigs in Belgian art,” which featured, with no other obvious connection, artwork including images of pigs. It would be a typology of the sources and distortions of the regional imagination, and would probably be as incomprehensible as Szeemann’s exhibition was. I am not sure if even the Belgians knew what to make of it.

Actually, it is an exhibition best kept as a conceptual possibility. To dream of a final theory, in this case, is both more fun and more productive than to attempt to produce one.

There was, at Fay Gold Gallery twenty years ago, a show called “Southern Artists of the Visionary Traditions,” but it had nothing to do with Szeemann’s cultural hypotheses.

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Further speculations, probably specious, on Harald Szeemann’s hypotheses, and mine:

We know from a whole host of biographies from many cultures that the innovators and the creative misfits tend to leave static and strongly hierarchical societies and smaller places, for obvious reasons. They end up in the big cities of their respective parts of the planet not only because that is where the jobs are, but because cities are invariably the locales that replicate on a restricted scale the conditions that I am hypothesizing lie behind Szeemann’s oddly named visionary cultures: incompatible social orders co-exist in uneasy tensions, urban anonymity allows sufficient freedom for the same types of individual results. People who don’t really belong in the urban aggregations where they end up nevertheless develop and sometimes flourish in the interstices that such collisions of cultures and economies create. The freedom of city air outweighs the incompatibility with the dominant identity of the particular city, and the same types of subcultures arise in the most diverse of global urban circumstances.

(Lots of cool novels have been written about these themes, of course. So have far too many incredibly unreadable academic treatises.)

When entire regions or sovereign countries exhibit the characteristics more commonly encountered in the big cities, the various sorts of misfits discover that they have kindred souls and allies among the other contending cultures. With these, they have far more in common than they do with the mainstream folks in their own social pecking order.

This is a sociological commonplace, of course: people of similar education and professional interests, these days, have more in common with people of similar education, et cetera (including such factors as annual income) who come from far distant societies than they do with their neighbors whose circumstances are different. But this tends not to be noticed except in the social classes whose jobs and travel budgets result in frequent contact with their peers elsewhere, though the internet is revolutionizing these circumstances for all but the least computer-connected of societies. In Szeemann’s so-called visionary cultures, the points of contrast and commonality were already in physical proximity, and it didn’t take the internet for folks to discover that the strata of their personalities were arranged differently from the way their particular provincial elders said they were. Not to mention for folks to discover that their economies were arranged differently from the way their provincial elders said they were; but that is an overlapping yet distinct history that I would prefer not to go into at this moment.


Except by offering the image of a postcard apparently from the late 1930s that has recently come into my possession via eBay. It connects to several of the themes and subthemes I have been exploring lately: Being an artist-signed illustration from a still-existing shipping and passenger line, it may be under copyright restrictions that I am cheerfully violating. The message certainly is not mine to quote without permission, but since the writer is unknown I am treating it as part of the public domain, which once it would have been considered beyond question.



It isn’t as aesthetically evocative as the visual sources that captured Alex Gross’ imagination as they captured mine, but it encapsulates conditions of enforced cross-cultural comfort that were to break down, rather spectacularly, within a very few years’ time. This is historical reality as experienced by someonewho had the financial wherewithal to travel cross-Pacific by steamship in the midst of a global economic slump, and to do so comfortably on the liner of a foreign power:

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The Interconnectedness of All Blog Posts

Serious cultural-studies people must be annoyed with my tendency to summarize and revise well-known theories in five hundred words or less. Everybody else must find it intolerable to be subjected to summaries of things they know already without having to read books about it. After all, street smarts elucidate the process of doing what comes naturally.

Anyway, I’ve just now begun reading Glenn A. Mullin’s The Flying Mystics of Tibetan Buddhism, the extraordinarily Mullinesque catalogue of his exhibition of a neglected subtheme of Tibetan art. (The show premiered at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta and went on to its chief funder, the Rubin Museum of Tibetan Art in New York, which eventually produced this book.)

I define “Mullinesque,” above, as participating in the paradox of the Cretan liar with a Tibetan-Buddhist spin on it; Mullin leads off with quips that lead us to believe that much of the account he is about to relate should be taken with a veritable block rather than grain of salt, but at the same time should be taken completely seriously --- at least as seriously as really good jokes should be taken. (Little jokes are another matter.)

Mullin’s scholarship and command of the languages and the art history are, at the very least, impressive. He just happens to present them in the guise of a trickster figure, which makes him eminently readable.

After describing how the presentation of the Dalai Lama’s personal art collection in Atlanta in 1996 was a substitute for the political gesture of entering flying Tibetan lamas into Olympic events, Mullin presents the accounts of flying, noting that in order to perceive such events, one must have acquired the right karmic circumstances oneself.

In like fashion, a mystic who had spent a lifetime determined to see the Buddha Maitreya finally beheld Maitreya in a dog when he treated the dog’s wound with extraordinary compassion. He then put Maitreya on his shoulders and ran through the marketplace shouting with joy at the accomplishment of his life’s mission. But all that everyone in the market saw was a madman carrying a bleeding black dog on his shoulders.

For such reasons, the Dalai Lama asserts, Tibetans mystics have frequently called themselves “mad,” because what they have perceived directly is as alien to ordinary consciousness as the delusions of a madman are.

Or as Salvador Dali once put it, “The difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.”

Oh, those crazy artists.

Now, anyone who has read Oliver Sacks or his serious precursors knows that our ordinary perceptions are not always to be trusted. We have experiences accompanied by great emotional certitude that are the result of brain lesions, or fatigue, or simple mistaken categorization of a half-glimpsed object in the world.

And this holds true as much for mystics as for mathematicians or any other category of human being whose title alliterates prettily in rhetorically-based epigrams.

So how would we ever be certain that the difference between a madman and a mystic is that the mystic is not mad? We couldn’t just appeal to perceived areas of emotional stability, because psychological dysfunctions can be very localized, with the rest of the personality being quite in connection with everyday social reality.

In fact, psychological dysfunctions tend to be defined in terms of everyday social reality, so that yesterday’s personality disorder is today’s preference for socially disapproved modes of behavior.

This allows people with rock-ribbed common sense to make declarations like, “Why, if you say that folks who put whipped cream on their cornbread aren’t crazy, just, y’know, ‘cu-li-nar-i-ly misguided’…well, you let folks say fool things like that, first thing you know, ever’body will be eatin’ tractor parts for breakfast!’

Those of us of greater sophistication still know self-delusion when we see it. It consists of believing those things that no sane person would ever, under any conceivable circumstances, believe to be true.

Such as that there is a faculty called Imagination that survives after bodily death just as the soul does.

Well, we can’t check up on that one, can we, so let’s leave that one aside and focus on your flying mystics. If we can’t see it because “we aren’t ready,” how do we know that something like that hasn’t taken place? Luckily, the onus is on those who say it has taken place. Paintings and personal accounts don’t count, and photographs are presumably under the same karmic restrictions as people, if not more so, cameras’ karmic condition not being the subject of any treatises I have read recently.

So those who say that such flight occurs would have to show us something inexplicable by more reasonable hypotheses: such as having us put a distinctly marked object atop a flagpole and then showing us, a minute or so later, that the object is now inside the shoebox where the flying mystic placed it after retrieving it when we couldn’t witness the act.

But anyone who knows the tricks of stage magicians couldn’t be fooled by that one.

No, it would have to be things that weren’t set up by anyone else for our benefit, but that we found sufficiently inexplicable by any other hypothesis. And I have not encountered such a concatenation of events myself, nor do I know anyone who has whose word I would trust unequivocally.

But then, I am not sure I would trust even my own word unequivocally. Sometimes I lie to myself.

So we would have to set up empirical tests that will overcome our own tendency to self-deception, eliminating as many variables as possible, and not depending on eyewitness testimony or philosophical taken-on-faiths. And we wouldn’t bother to do that unless we had already experienced concatenations of events which we could not explain satisfactorily by more reasonable hypotheses.

The hypothesis of the existence of flying mystics is only a theory, and should not be taken as proven scientific fact.

I am delighted, Freud-wise, by the accident that for a moment, my word-processor rewrite of the preceding sentence transformed the phrase into “lying mystics.”

Anyway, print out that sentence and paste it into the inside front cover of Mullin’s book before you put it in a school library in certain parts of America.