We Gotta Get Out of This Place?

"J. Shimon & J. Lindemann: We Go From Where We Know"
 "Nash Corn Crib" and "Concrete Tear Drops" surrounded by portraits and postcards
at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin
October 13, 2013-February 23, 2014.
Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center

In early December 2013, our projects (in various forms) were on view at six Wisconsin museums (e.g. John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Racine Art Museum, Rahr-West Art Museum, and the Wisconsin Historical Museum). Can this work examining the idiosyncrasies of human existence in a specific place (Wisconsin) open dialogs and exchanges with other under represented places or are they destined to stay here? Portrait Society Gallery (MKE) brought our "Decay Utopia Decay" series to Art Basel Miami Beach to the Aqua satellite fair where its rurality was surrounded by the glamor and clamor of the international art world. Gallerist Debra Brehmer commented on the importance of bringing works with a seemingly finite audience in Milwaukee into the art fair arena with a diverse and international audience. Having worked for 30 years to produce a record of our time, we have managed to make our projects accessible at these various venues simultaneously this month. Our past anti-isolation tactics have included meeting with art people from New York to New Orleans to Los Angeles, mailing info and postcards describing our activities, exhibiting, and maintaining a website. Curators, writers, and artists have landed on our studio door step in Manitowoc and in time we ended up on national network television and in the Paris edition of the New York Times.
 
"Local" has gained cultural currency when it comes to food. T-shirt slogans remind us to shop the farmers market and support small businesses. Much like the philosophies espoused by Grant Wood and his artistic comrades in the 1930s, the local food movement looks to nearby sources for sustenance and inspiration. In the case of "Regionalist" artists (Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry et. al.), this meant focusing on the subject matter found in everyday life in the small towns and rural areas of America's heartland. We grew up in rural Wisconsin decades later in the 1960s-1970s, which is to say when local was a derogatory term. Who wanted locally made food or products when you could get futuristic Tang, Pop-Tarts, and Twinkies in modern cellophane and foil wrappers or posters of the Beatles by Richard Avedon to display instead of grandma's crafts?  "Local yokel" was used by small town people when referring to the rural indigenous folks in the outlying areas. Now it's the name of a holiday craft fair in Sheboygan. Back then local = provincial and naive. Rural folk were stereotyped as hicks on screen from Hee Haw to the Beverly Hillbillies. Is it even possible to be an isolated hayseed in the Information Age of the 21st century? Is a new regionalism or "Neo-Regionalism" based on information and exchange possible? People in remote areas read the same Twitter feed as their urban counterparts and hipsters in Brooklyn sport plaid flannel and burly beards looking like north woods lumberjacks. Yet. Yet. Seeking affordable work space, artists have long opted for the remote and the low rent, which today translates into living in caves and yurts or seeking endless artist residencies. Living like nomads or radicants, artists wisely avoid sinking roots while dipping their feet into the ever changing river as a means to open pathways to dialog, venues, and financial/moral support.

"J. Shimon & J. Lindemann: We Go From Where We Know"
"Nash Corn Crib" and "Concrete Tear Drops" surrounded by portraits and postcards
at the the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin
October 13, 2013-February 23, 2014
Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center

Art galleries increasingly indulge in cultural colonization in the 21st century with the most extreme example being the Gagosian Gallery franchising to London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Geneva; and the Guggenheim Museum with its expansions to Abu Dhabi, Berlin, Bilbao, and Las Vegas. Can artists, curators and art historians care about human existence (outside the spectacle and the lime light) in the remote hamlets around the world as meaningful subject or theme? It was with this question in mind that we conceived of our exhibition "We Go From Where We Know" examining our native Wisconsin and the specific mental space we have found here. Free to leave this frigid northern place on the 44th parallel, we chose to stay and look more closely--to make art about it and to teach. Our resulting research-driven installation at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (on view October 13, 2013-February 23, 2014) contains photographs, paintings, found objects, and works made of concrete--Wisconsin's medium of choice based on the numerous artist environments scattered about the state. We posted "found" vintage Wisconsin postcards on a blog not so much as an act of Wisconsin boosterism, but in an attempt to deconstruct the complex cultural messages contained in them and illicit a response using everyday social media. We wonder where it will go.

Portrait Society Gallery (MKE)
 Aqua Art Fair installation at Art Basel Miami Beach
J. Shimon & J. Lindemann "Decay Utopia Decay" series cyanotype
displayed on back wall, December 4-8, 2013

The World of Paul (1912-2013 )

Paul J. Hefti playing his Casio keyboard in his La Crosse living room, 2002

We visited Paul Hefti once at Meadow Wood Assisted Living after he left his lifetime home at 515 Adams Street in La Crosse, Wisconsin in 2004. His sculpture garden made of pop bottle whirligigs and red brick house were razed by city order. Still, he managed to transplant the atmosphere to the bland institutional environment of the nursing home. He gave us a tour using a nifty black walker and it was much like those he'd given us at his house. He highlighted recent sculptural works hung about the place peppering his commentary with limericks and giggles. We'd attempted visiting him at his house in the summer of 2004 after we'd completed work on our film and book project documenting him and three other older Wisconsin men titled, One Million Years is Three Seconds. It happened to be the last morning he lived at his old house. The soil was still damp from his watering his geraniums for the last time on that hot summer day. We met his neighbor and friend Susan about then and she kept us posted on how Paul was doing via an annual holiday card. He lived to be a hundred and had commented to us even way back when he was 90 that "Boy, that time goes fast. It seems like I just started." His art like all of life was ephemeral.

 One Million Years is Three Seconds 

Paul Hefti excerpt (2008)

The Last Time We Saw Bob (1925-2012)

Bob Watt at home, Milwaukee  (12.23.2010)

Jon Reilly, Bob Watt (standing/seated), Milwaukee (1.23.2010)

Bob Watt's friend, publisher and DPOA, Jon Reilly taped a note to the front door of Bob's Dousman Street house the day before New Year's Eve. It said Bob had been taken to hospice in Mequon, but welcomed visitors. Hours later, we learned Bob soon would "cash in his chips"--a slogan Bob used often in his letters when reporting that another of his friends had passed on. Bob's heart was failing and a morphine drip eased him out. He died on January 2, 2012. It took awhile before an official obituary ran in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the daily paper Bob and his friends (known collectively as the Breakfast Club) read religiously. They'd gather at McDonalds, the only place in Milwaukee that hadn't kicked them out for loitering, for coffee and discussion before heading out on a "rummage run". First came the blog accounts of Bob's passing. Matt Wild wrote "Watt leaves behind a thorny but colorful legacy, as well as friends and loved ones to make sense of it all" in the Onion's A.V. Club Milwaukee (1.4.2012); Michael Horne called Watt "A true character" in his InsideMilwaukee.com post (1.5.2012); Molly Snyder wrote "Watt helped keep Milwaukee weird and for that, I will always appreciate him" for  OnMilwaukee.com (1.6.2012); and finally Tom Tolan's obituary summed up Bob's "outrageous persona when he was a Beat poet and mainstay of 1960s Milwaukee counterculture" for the MJS (1.8.2012).  Since 2004, Bob wrote us letters sometimes daily filling eight file boxes with his commentary on the Milwaukee art scene, his childhood, global politics, the Packers, the Badgers, as well as a poems, numerous copies of his will (which we always read ase a poem), original 35 mm slides of models, collages, and newspaper clippings passed along from Breakfast Club discussions. We received the last letter from Bob on May 3, 2011 after he'd recovered some from a heart attack that kept him in the hospital a number of days where he dictated a letter that ended with reportage of his hospital stay. While in the hospital recovering, he'd write us, "It's Friday, we missed all the rummages. We don't know how long we'll last. But the bloody vampires have gone crazy with all their needles. I wonder why the IV is so slow? Well, I guess they know what they are doing.." In his last letter he wrote, "We need more people in the arts in Milwaukee, can you send some this way?" After his spring 2010 heart attack, we didn't get around to visiting him until December 23 when we made a digital panorama in his parlor surrounded by paintings. We watched the Playboy Chanel with him and talked about the news. It had been more than 20 years since Dean Olson, co-founder of the Wright Street Gallery first brought us over to Bob's house (1987). We photographed him a few times that day and then in the 1990s before deciding to include him in a 16 mm film we were making about the creative process, progress, and time called "One Million Years is Three Seconds."

Bob Watt excerpt from our One Million Years is Three Seconds film

Fear No Art: Bob Watt segment by Paul Cotter
as aired on MATC/Milwaukee Public Television on February 19, 2012.
Photographer Francis Ford, publisher Jon Reilly, artist David Ruel
among others are interviewed.

Herman (1920-2009)

Herman died last night (12.28.09) in a nursing home a week before his 90th birthday. We've been photographing him since 1986 and he was one of the four subjects of our One Million Years is Three Seconds film and book project. In 2006 we attended a funeral with him in St. Nazianz and a few years later went in search of the giant rocks he remembered from his childhood that were distributed along the fence line of his property. He wanted to find them again, to touch them, to sit on them, and was able to describe them in detail. He was living in senior housing in the Village of St. Nazianz and his old farmstead was slowly collapsing all the while he told township officials he would repair it soon. It was razed in November 2009. We've been working to add subtitles to One Million Years because the thick Germanic Wisconsin dialects of a couple of the men were somewhat difficult to decipher, especially with the low-fi sound recording methods we used. We were almost finished with Herman's section of the film when we heard the news of his passing.