What A Stupid Thesis

"My God Richard,what a stupid ridiculous thesis you presented in your last entry, the one titled 'The editing and Composition of Dreams'" What are you doing fantasying that you are Freud now, and going to broaden our understanding of the unconscious."

Actually, I am glad you brought Freud up. Because he was always one to state a premise, and then turn around and demolish it. But then, like Dostoevsky, nobody reads or talks about Freud any more. And even more to the point, Freud loved to read Dostoevsky. as a matter of fact, Freud is just Dostoevsky revisited. Freud's half-wit successors have dismissed him, even though he put the words ego, id, unconscious and Oedipus complex, into the language. He did all that, but his successors, are happy to just give people prosaic and call it a day.

But I am way off the point. I was saying that dreams employ foreshadowing and other literary devices, and therefore must be considered as composed, if not edited and embellished with an artistic devices. Earlier I used a dream of mine where seeing a puddle in the street leads to finding a building engulfed in a flood. But the problem with describing that as foreshadowing is that in real life a puddle may foreshadow a flood, and also in cinema or a movie. But in a dream, anything can come after the puddle. In a dream I may go to see what is causing a puddle and find, not a flood but a train car in the middle of the street in which a group of midgets are playing Mozart on Kazoos. The flood was only foreshadowed the flood because the flood happened to come after the puddle.

It is probably more likely that with dreams we are dealing with two things, stream of consciousness thinking and the connection of one image to another by association. Flood, Mozart, kazoo, and midget must be all connected in my mind in some way, unknown to me, for me to use them in one sentence. I dreamed it up, although I am awake.

But the problem remains that our dreams contain content that is beyond our meagre powers of invention, and we have to wonder where the skills of invention and composition are coming from. Personally I think that dreams are created in the mind for a reason, ( I have no idea what reason). Dreams are also important, so therefore there is a program in the mind which is in charge of constructing dreams. Not only does it construct dreams but it employs craftsmanship , and invention. All of the materials of dream construction are stored in our memory, and they are pieces of our actual experience. From this store house of images and occurrences, are taken snippets and segments and they are sewn together to create a narrative story. I think the story is trying to tell us something, in the most obvious and simple minded way. The dream perhaps is intended as warning, instruction, hopes, fears , that sort of thing. This is Malcolm's razor, such a purpose is the most obvious purpose of a dream.

But purpose does not concern us here, method is what I want to talk about. All the materials are stored in the brain as memory, and we use the snippets of pieces of it to build up the dream. A person who has never seen a monkey in real life or in a picture does not dream of monkeys. That is obvious.

But what about movies, do the images we see, and the stories we ingest watching T.V. become a part of our store of dream images. Actually, I don't think so. I can only use my own experience as an example but I will give this as a proof. My dreams never employ the "zoom" and they never employ sweeping "panorama" shots. Since my eyes do not have a "zoom" I cannot dream of zoom images. The significance, at least to myself, is obvious. The mind does not store movies, sitcoms, advertisements, photographs in books, etc. in the bin for creating dreams because they are IRRELEVANT. The mind knows that the billions of hours we spend watching television are IRRELEVANT. The program for dreams in out head is set up to process real stuff we have experienced, and to process and compose it with a definite purpose. The brain creates dreams with the same determination , singlemindedness, and careful devotion to detail as the kidneys do when they filter the blood. The heart goes about its business also, and never takes a break, never procrastinates. It has a job to do, and it does it from start to finish, lets say for eighty continuous years,and it never does anything irrelevant. All the functions of the body are like that, including the brain. It works its job, and does not give a good god damn how you feel about it. The brain is just as independent of your so-called will as your liver or your spleen. But your consciousness lets you go along for the ride. We are like the child in the toy car at the fair, pretending to steer, as the car runs around on its track.

But I would like to conclude this polemic by talking about Mozart. Do you remember in the film "Amadeus" that Salieri is jealous of Mozart because his manuscripts do not have mistakes and corrections in them. Now, "Amadeus" was a fictionalised account of Mozart, but was it correct in telling us that Mozart's manuscripts were usually without mistakes and corrections? Lets take a look.

The Editing and Composition of Dreams

In my dream of the flood in the studio building, first I see a puddle in the road from a distant vantage point (see previous post). After that I continue to talk to Lauren but the puddle in the distance gets larger, and finally my attention is aroused and I must walk down the street and see what is causing the flood. What I find on investigation is that the water is coming from a broken water line in the building I have my studio in. The ground floor is flooded up to the joists of the second floor, and the water threatens to damage my goods. Now this is a dream, all well and good, it doesn't have anything strange, or shall we say, un-dreamlike in it. But I find it extremely puzzling that the dream seems to have a sort of foreshadowing in it. That is to say, the detail of the water in the street foreshadows the image of the flood. This raises the question, "whose dream is this anyway?"

If it is my dream, and I am making up the parts of it in my own mind, then how can the dream contain foreshadowing? How can there be a question (where is the water coming from) which has to be answered later in time, (from a broken water pipe). If it is my dream then I made it up in my mind all by myself. This seems perhaps like an obvious and dumb question, but it isn't. Even if we postulate that the dream comes from the unconscious, what is this crude, and primitive unconscious mind doing employing literary devices like foreshadowing?

There is another device in literature and screenwriting which to my knowledge has no name but I would call it, "riddling." Riddling is where the composer of the story places an object, an occurrence, or a situation in the narrative, which raises a question which is not answered. The question then remains suspended in the narrative. For example, we are watching a movie and at the beginning a woman opens a dresser drawer, takes out a box, out of the box she unfolds a note, and as she reads it her face clouds over. We are not told, nor shown what that note contains, but we think that it must have something to do with the plot. We don't know. The character knows however, but more importantly, obviously, the person who wrote the story knows what is in the note, and they are not going to let us know till they are good and ready, as the story develops. This is riddling. Some movies begin with a series of riddles, so many in fact that we think, oh come on now, let's get into the story, and stop setting up these confusing puzzles.

But what if it is not a movie or a book we are reading, what if it is our own dream that has presented us with the riddling? We are dreaming the dream so how can we not already know what is to come?

But we don't. We absolutely do not know. Now I do not dream other people's dreams, ever, so I must reason about this dream structure entirely from my own memory. I cannot trust other people's descriptions of their dreams because there is no way to know to what extent someone else's description of their dream is edited, embellished mis-rememberd, or artistically modified to sound either more impressive, strange, or interesting. Indeed, I don't even know if my memory of my own dream is accurate, or retouched with the artist's skills for more pleasant consumption.

This, however, doesn't matter. We dream millions of dreams in our lives and often they have composition, drama, quirky and amazing details, which all exceed our meager creative abilities in waking life. In my dreams I compose music that moves me to tears, make dramatic speeches, and escape danger with unheard of cunning and brilliance, so that it sometimes happens that I wake up trembling, my heart pounding, and I ask myself, "How did I ever dream that up?"

Flood In The Studio

My studio is in an old mill building on the Housatonic River. The wall of the building goes right down into the waters of the river. It is a remaining building of a complex, and many of the other buildings have been swept away by floods. My building also has been often flooded, and been in danger of being swept away. But either because of luck or strength, it remains. Here have a look at it: My studio is on the second floor. In a flood it is the entire first floor that is under water, right up to the joists of the second floor. But before the water could engulf the second floor, it would need to submerge the whole county, I think.

The first floor is a huge open space, where trucks used to load and unload. Now it is empty and unused, dirty and abandoned looking. With or without floods the ground floor is no stranger to water. There is a large artisan well there, in big cement vats, in which water is running all day long. Here you see a cavernous hundred-year-old room all coated with dust, old cars and car parts, windows covered with leaves and mold, a rotted ceiling giving a view through to the next floor, no lights on, just pale green light through the mold on a few windows, high up, and the sound of running water in the artisan wells. Here have a look at that: And in the main room there was a plumbing leak for two month so that when you entered you could hear water dripping into a bucket, the bucket overflowing onto the floor, and a large puddle like a little lake, spread out on the cement floor amid the gloom, beer cans, trash, old rags, rusted tools, wet plaster, and cheap sheetrock walls covered with black mold, and full of holes punched in them by teenagers.

Last night I had a dream about this building. Here is that dream:

I am standing on the porch of Lauren Clark's gallery talking to her. Lauren Clark is two buildings away from my studio. Out in the street I see a large puddle of water, but it is a dry day. It is one of those big puddles like you might see when a hydrant is being cleaned. I continue to talk to Lauren, but then I notice that the entire road has become flooded, and it can't be coming from a hydrant. The studio building is blocked from my view by another mill building, both in my dream and in actual life, so Lauren and I walk down the street to see where the water is coming from. What we find is that a huge water main has burst in my studio building, and the entire structure is engulfed in a flood. The ground floor is completely full of water all the way up to the joists of the second floor, but since there are windows high up in the structure, the flood is exiting these windows, and not ascending to the second floor. I say to Lauren, "It looks like my things will not be damaged."

Next, I am on the roof of the building amidst the swirling torrent of the river in full flood. The water is now right up to the roof, and Carrie Haddad, an art dealer from Hudson, New York, is trying to deliver a huge piece of sculpture to me, from a little boat. There are other people involved, and everyone is screaming and shouting, as I am trying to haul a very heavy window, which is also a painting, from the boat to the relative safety of the roof of the building, but suddenly the tide of rushing water sweeps Carrie, the boat and the window away.

Now having had a dream like this, I think most people would be expecting that I would be self indulgent, and proceed to analyze what this dream might mean, as symbols in my life, and indications of my situation. But, not a bit of it, I want to talk about structural elements of the dream, its characteristics as a work of literature, or as a film. I intend to treat it as a film critic might treat it, for, indeed it is a film, composed and screened for me, in my head, by a self of mine, a very unknown self.

Like a Woman

Lauren Clark Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of small works by Richard Britell, titled “NY, NY”. All of these paintings have as a subject, details of the architecture of New York City.

Mr. Britell says of this exhibit, "I am not a New Yorker. This came home to me the first time I ever entered a gallery to show my portfolio. It was a large room in which were eight foot square black and white photographs of woman's heads. In the corner was a beautiful woman talking on the phone in a German
accent. I said,'I would like to show the director my portfolio.' She said, "I'm sorry sir, this isn't a gallery, it's a hair salon.' "

Later that same day I did acquire gallery representation. Four years later I had my first one man show which was sold out, and reviewed in the New York Times. All of those paintings back then were of the architecture of Pittsfield. New Yorkers bought them all up. Now New Yorkers are buying up the city
of Pittsfield itself, go figure.

Hilton Kramer, in his review of my work said, "If there is an element of nostalgia in these works it is not too bothersome..."

Of these current works I would say, if there is an element of nostalgia in them , it is entirely the point.

I learned to love New York, and I realized that it is possible to love a place in the same way that one might love a woman, in the same way, and with the same consequences.

Fake Money and The Duomo

A one hundred dollar bill is worth one hundred dollars. No one would question that. It is worth one hundred dollars until the instant that someone discovers that it is a counterfeit one hundred dollar bill. At that moment it does not begin to depreciate in value, and drop say to a value of fifty dollars, but it just plummets right down to zero. Since a counterfeit bill may involve its owner in some difficulties, you might say that as a counterfeit bill it is worth considerably less than nothing.

The fall from grace of some one hundred dollar bill, however does not call into question the monetary system because all of the so-called “real” hundreds retain their status.

But if a piece of artwork is found to be fraudulent, or a forgery, does it call into question the value of all the other works by the same artist, thought or known to be authentic? Does it even necessarily render the object valueless?

If it was discovered that the dome of the Duomo was not designed and built by Brunelleschi, but, through some bookkeeping error was attributed to him, when actually it was designed and built by someone named Brunelleschky, an itinerant Russian architect, would the dome suddenly have no value in our eyes as a work of art? No, the dome would retain its grandeur and the Russian Brunelleschky would be added to the history books as a great architect; and Brunelleschi’s fame would be diminished. The dome supports Brunelleschi’s fame, and not the name the fame of the dome.

I was visiting an art dealer’s home one time, and in his collection he had a painting by De Chirico. It was a very good painting and I asked him how much it was worth. He named a figure which I thought was modest, but he explained, “Unfortunately it is unsigned. If it had a signature it would be worth a lot more.” So, in that instance, the work supported a certain value, and the dealer was not tempted to give it to "good will” just because it had no signature.

In the news there was a piece about a Pollock painting which was unsigned. The owners of this painting wanted to prove that a fingerprint in the paint was Pollack’s fingerprint, therefore authenticating the work. Here was a situation like the hundred dollar bill. If the painting could be proved to be by Pollock it was going to be worth millions. But if not, it would be worth nothing. Because unlike Brunolescki’s dome, the name supports the value of the work, and not the work, the value of the name.

In ancient Roman times, fires would sometimes burn down entire large neighboorhoods. During these fires, real estate agents would roam around the threatened houses and offer the owners small sums for the purchase of the threatened buildings. Then, if by chance the wind changed, the new owner would possess a building for a pittance. But if it was engulfed in the fire, then not too much was lost, at least by the agent.

It is interesting to wonder how people would bid on an object which was about to be analyzed, to establish if it is a fraud. If the Pollock was offered up for sale before the thumb print was analyzed, then we might expect that people would not bid in the millions, but perhaps only ten thousand.

Now, let's imagine that there is some old friend of Jackson Pollock’s who was present in his studio when that exact painting was painted. The friend knows for a fact that it is authentic but unsigned, because he engaged in a discussion about the piece, and even knows that the stretchers used in this painting were different in some way. So with certainty of the painting’s authenticity, he bids ten thousand dollars, buys the painting, and the fingerprint turns out not to be Pollock's, but someone else's.

The fact that the fingerprint is not Pollock's, does not prove in any way that he didn’t paint the work. It could still be authentic.

Some unknown work claiming to be by the hand of some master is like some person, before the age of DNA testing, claiming to be related to some wealthy person. “I am actually the bastard son of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.”

Pollock and Frankenthaler

But we know that the next chapter in Janson's History of Art was about people like Helen Frankenthaler. Although I would never have doubted the logic of a person like Jackson Pollock becoming famous in his decade, in this country, I was extremely suspicious of the fame of Helen Frankenthaler. It struck me that she was another person who was reading the art history books, and she laid out a plan of how to theoterically fit her paintings edgewise into the existing rhetoric about abstract expressionism.

Pollock had a place in our society, just like a prize fighter. Millions of people, fat ugly people who have long ago gone to seed, sitting in their Barcaloungers overflowing with fat around the edges of their chairs lay back watching their TV and they see the prize fighter and they think, "Thank God there is somebody who is fit, and can fight."

And Jackson was to out society of the fifties like that prize fighter. And all the bankers, dentists, accountants, and businessmen go to the grind of their hated jobs, in their hated lives, and yet they think "At least there was someone who was great just because he threw things, and was always out of control." He was a Janis Joplin. And thank God for the Janis Joplins. If the Janis Joplins didn't exist, God would certainly have nuked the entire planet long ago in desperation saying, "What is the use of these boring, God forsaken drones?"

But then we have to consider Helen Frankthaler with her townhouse and her lap dogs. How does she fit in? Was she a passionate, suffering individual bleeding for her art? Or was she a person who purchased a paragraph in Janson's History of Art book with about five million dollars and some well connected friends? I think her fame was purchased and paid for. So was Jackson's, but in entirely different and more respectable coin.

I went to an opening of Helen Frankenthaler's once. She was there, and I met her, and I got to talk to her. Her paintings were huge. They consisted of colors that had been poured out onto the raw canvas. When you pour paint out on a canvas it tends to run, so, when looking at these paintings on the wall one involuntarily begins to wonder how is it that these big puddles of color didn't run down the canvas in big streaks? And one thinks, probably the color didn't run down the canvas because, like Jackson Pollock, her paintings were done stretched out on the floor of the studio.

So I asked her. I said, "How do you do these large paintings?"

She must have been asked this question many times because she gave me a prepared answer of which she was obviously proud. She said, "I have a large scaffold built in my studio that I can walk around on that hovers over the canvas which is stretched out on the floor."

"So," I said, "that means when these paintings were painted they were laying on the floor, and when you were looking at them, and planning them out, they were laying on the floor. And when you finally brought them to completion they were stretched out and laying on the floor."

"That's right," she said.

"Then if that is the case, shouldn't we really be looking down on these paintings?"

Well, I left the gallery and walked out into the night air of Manhattan, and I was feeling so smug and so proud of myself that I had said such a mean and insulting thing to a great artist. And I have to say, soon after that I began to feel guilty and ashamed of what I had done. Because it was a proud criticism, and it cut deeply to the quick which I saw in her face the moment i said it. Because it was the truth. The truth is that Pollock's paintings should be unstretched and put out on the floor, and so should Helen Frankenthaler's. The moment they took stretchers and stretched their work out to be hung up on the wall, they declared that all that they had done had to play second fiddle to presenting the entire output as product for sale in the market.

But I felt ashamed because I saw in an instant that Helen had listened to an astute criticism, the type that can damage a career. Because life can sometimes be brought to a stop at the utterance of three of four words.

And she, and Jackson were in agonies in their day, wondering if they were, when all was said and done, really artists at all, and not just victims of an elaborate market hoax.

This is why Jackson would get drunk, sit late at night on the curbs of Manhattan and say to his drunken friends, "I'm the greatest artist. The greatest artist. I am, aren't I?"

Waiting for the police to come

Please forgive the long delay in continuing this story. On September 30 I decided to move my studio from Housatonic back to Pittsfield. All month long I have been packing up my things and telling everyone that I am moving. But yesterday I decided to remain where I am and not move. I have received some wonderful compliments in my life. My most favorite was said to me by my sister Romy. She said, "You know that song by Simon and Garfunkel caller 'The Boxer,' where it says 'I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains?' That's you, Richard"

Perhaps I couldn't go on with my story at this point because the next chapter is hard to write, so I will continue on a different track — the art world — if there is such a thing.

When we were students we read Janson’s History of Art. We were filled with awe when we read about Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Franze Kline. It didn’t cross our minds that what we were reading was just advertising copy, not art history. It may have been advertising copy, but we knew that they had done something exceptional, something worthy of being remembered for and written about. We were willing and anxious to give them the credit if only that next paragraph in that history of art book would begin with our name; if only we could start the next chapter.

Never mind that we had no ideas what sort of works that fame would be based upon, we were young and we would have time to figure that out later. It was a matter of making the reservation.

But we were not alone. There were thousands of us, and we all wanted to be in the beginning of that new chapter. And now that modern era’s history is being written and it is a Baroque era. What do I mean by that? A Baroque era is a time when there are so many famous and important people that you can’t keep track of them all, their names and an account of what they did would read like a phone book. And though they are all famous, actually none of them is really known, and none of them actually matters.

In this age, famous artists are like the peas in a huge vat of boiling pea soup. The peas appear on the surface of the soup and then disappear again. That was their career, that was their moment, and that was their fame. Now we long to be one of those peas that appears for a brief instant. In short, we want to have a show in New York.

The last person to become famous in the art world was Andy Warhol, and that was over forty years ago. He was our last famous artist, and the first to understand that the art itself was irrelevant, it was theater, showmanship, and media coverage that were the building blocks of fame, and not works of art. Since then there have been many artists whose works have been considered important, but none of those people are thought of like Picasso was, like Pollock was, and like Warhol.

Now it is Damian Hurst. Damian Hurst is the most famous artist in the world at this time. But look around. No one knows who Damian Hurst is. He is famous, and yet he is completely unknown. But everyone knows who Thomas Kinkade is. He is considered a lumonist. He is the most famous artist on Ebay — the richest, most successful artist in America.

It is two o’clock in the afternoon and I am sitting in an art gallery talking to friends. By five o’clock I can be a famous artist, talked about around the world. I cross the street to the hardware store and buy ten feet of rope. Then I go to the dog pound and adopt a dog. I go back to the gallery, throw the rope over the sprinkler pipes and I hang the dog. I leave the dead dog hanging from the rope in the middle of the gallery while people come and go, and wait for the police to come and arrest me and for reporters to arrive to begin my rise to stardom as an artist.

“Why did you hang the dog?”

“Why are we allowing the war in Iraq to go on, and on. You care about this dog. Then why don’t you care about...?”

I no longer believe in the concept of “The History of Art.”