#2

Julie's Kindness Project: Support the Unexpected, August 29, 2015

After reading through a friend's post seeking funding I went against my instinct and contributed money to help reach their goal. This individual had done so much good for the community and is a person of integrity. He made the humbling choice to ask the community he served for so many years to return the favor. It made me feel better as a human being to make the donation. Everyone needs a little help sometimes.

#1

Ali Scattergood

Its been a little over a week since Julie’s passing and I haven’t until now felt I was in the right head space to share anything about it publicly. Frankly, I still can’t wrap my mind around this, but I firmly believe its better to share your thoughts of gratitude and appreciation rather than worry if the words you use to share those feelings is perfectly articulated. So here it goes…

I still clearly remember one of my first major interactions with Julie and Johnny. It was my freshman year and I had wiggled my way into a tutorial with two juniors led by J&J, we titled it “The Art of the Documentary”. Well, technically they titled it that; I had nothing to do with the content or syllabus. I was just an enthusiastic and curious freshman. In 10 weeks we were to study the ‘masters’ of the documentary medium; Werner Herzog, Maysles Brothers, Errol Morris, and Ken Burns. This was my very first professor-student impression of them. The impression that if I or another student was eager to learn and pursue something in film or photography, they would go out of their way to provide and support us in those academic and artistic explorations.

This experience was the launching point for my career at Lawrence and my professional career after Lawrence. That tutorial reaffirmed my eagerness to study film, and after that point I went on to request and be granted J&J as my academic advisors, to take over 15 classes with them in my four years, and have Julie be my honors in the arts independent study project advisor.

Being an honors project advisor means they literally guide you through each step of the honors thesis process at Lawrence. This is a year long process where you write up a proposal for the project you believe is above and beyond the ‘senior experience thesis’ that all senior art majors are required to do. She guided me through the proposal, my project development of creating a 12 photo, one short video and a book as my solo show for this project, and supported and guided me as I wrote the 25 page supplemental paper for the work. Supporting me while I wrote the supplemental paper means she literally edited around 20 drafts. I’m sure most would have given up hope in me after 2 or 3. I then went on to defend this in front of 5 faculty members all through different departments of the University. I would not have been awarded honors without her. Frankly, I would not have stayed at Lawrence without her.

After my years at Lawrence we continued to swap emails about good books to read about contemporary photography or Werner’s most philosophical outlook on filmmaking; keeping me motivated and passionate about film even in some of my hardest times right after graduation.

I received the message that she had passed while I was on location for our current film project. It was a very surreal moment getting the news while in this situation. Julie had introduced me to the Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and now I was Assistant Producing a documentary for the man. After reading the email on my phone, I looked around the car with a heightened awareness for my surroundings. I was surrounded by some of the most talented filmmakers in history and I was a respected part of their team to create this film. Reflecting on my years with Julie and where I am now my heart filled with joy. This joy is the kind of feeling that I wasn’t sure ever existed. The type of joy in your heart where you know you’re living your dreams, with no regrets for the decisions you’ve had to make along this journey.

Thank you Julie. Thank you for giving me this gift. I would not be where I am today without you, and would not know what it feels like to push my passions in life to their limits. I will take you with me on every artistic adventure I pursue, holding joy in my heart knowing that maybe one day I’ll be able to pay it forward.

With love,
Ali

P.s- Julie- I know you’re reading this somewhere and I’m sorry for all my run-ons.

Hello All,

The following is a somewhat unconventional approach to a Memorial for Julie, in which you may choose your level of involvement. Know that after a retrospective, a monograph, a lifetime achievement award, tributes, and testimonials she found the idea of a memorial gathering a bit excessive and embarrassing. In her last months she was interested in the notion of kindness and the power of being kind in a thoughtful and intelligent manner. There are no real ‘rules’ here, just suggestions of how this idea may physically exist. Most importantly your approach to this project needs to originate in your own heart.

There will be no public event; the idea is for the spirit of Julie to travel outward into the world rather than to stay cramped up as a memory inside of us. You are being asked to divert the resources you would have put into traveling and attending a memorial into this project. This will be a relatively simple, four-step process:

Julie’s Kindness Project

Identify: Come up with a deserving person/people unknown to Julie who is/are in need of a kind, outward gesture. This could be your neighbor, your grandma, the people at the hospice facility on the other side of town, or, on a larger scale a service organization.

Calculate: Really think about the time and resources you could have invested in attending a memorial gathering such as: Putting gas in your car, traveling, sitting and listening to memories of Julie, chatting and nibbling on snacks. Maybe you would have ordered flowers, contributed to a legacy fund, sent johnie something, or even bought yourself a new black leopard sequined jacket in honor of the occasion.

Activate: Don’t just consume; this isn’t about purchasing gifts. Use your resources along with your time to perform a kind gesture. Prepare a special meal for someone you wouldn’t have otherwise. Put a new battery in the financially challenged person’s car you recently jump-started. Help your friend’s kids build a safe, sturdy tree house. The possibilities are endless, and can be simple or elaborate, as long as you push the boundaries of your kindness threshold.

Share: Put something about the experience on our Facebook page (Shimon Lindemann). Tell the whole story, give a short description, write a poem, take a video, or be obscure with an uncaptioned snapshot. Invite others to participate by tagging them in comments. See how this idea can grow. You may use the hashtag #juliememorial. During this exercise, don’t reminisce about Julie. Instead, remember the kindness that Julie inspired and wanted to see in the world. This starts with Julie, but leads to something new.

The Life of a Shut-In

"J. Lindemann: The Life of a Shut-In" from the Certificates of Presence
exhibition at Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee, January 18-March 8, 2014

We noticed the smallest things,–

Things overlooked before - Emily Dickinson

Living as a recluse seemed intriguing as depicted in Kenneth Anger's Puce Moment (below) or Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. Yet it was only through forced isolation that J. Lindemann (I) fully inhabited the hermit-lifestyle after nearly 30 years of making photographs about people and their spaces. The news of my diagnosis just days before the opening of our Decay Utopia Decay exhibition in November 2012 at Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee changed everything. For the first time we missed our own exhibition and a public appearance with Mike Perry whose book covers our photographs often graced. The cold air of winter had stung and viruses threatened. Seeking refuge in our Queen Anne house near the Lawrence University campus, our new iPhone camera became a tool to capture shafts of light, flowers, weather conditions outside the windows, examination rooms, and treatment modalities. Meanwhile, J. Shimon waited in clinic waiting rooms drawing scenes of rural utopia, art, grief, and my shut-in world. Contemplating the humor in the horrifying and the poetry in the mundane through making pictures provided an urgent and necessary distraction. Instagram had recently emerged and seemed a fitting venue for a post-diagnosis reality while enabling communication with the outside world (if only through likes and comments). Treatment raged on throughout the winter until the oncologist said the words "complete remission" and the crocuses bloomed. Thousands of digital images accumulated by the time Deb Brehmer suggested showing the series with Vivian Maier's Rolleiflex photographs and Livija Patikne's Kodachromes. Using populist display methods like digital photo frames, print-on-demand photo books, and small scale inkjet prints, "The Life of a Shut-in" series became a gallery experiment in the public expression of experience privately observed.  The works of Maier and Patikne combined with my digital images to examine how the camera could "define and defy a sense of isolation" while meditating on Roland Barthes Camera Lucida and his statement that photographs "make a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional effigy" and the ultimate relationship of the photograph to time and inevitable death and that-has-been.

Every photograph is a certificate of presence...like the ectoplasm of "what-had-been"...a reality one can no longer touch - Roland Barthes

Read "Certificates of Presence" statement
by Debra Brehmer of Portrait Society Gallery

Read "Gallery Event Captures Social Isolation..." 
by Mary Louise Schumacher, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 1.16, 2014

Read "The Secret Life of an Artist" review
by Kat Murrell, Third Coast Daily 2.7.2014

View "The Life of a Shut-In" 129 image slideshow on Flickr

Aluminum Christmas Trees Again and Again

1959 Prototype Evergleam® packaging design
(from our collection) displayed in vitrine at
Wisconsin Historical Museum
"'Tis the Season" exhibition, December 2013

Little Evergleam's in vitrine with a few of our 
Season's Gleamings photographs in the background at
Wisconsin Historical Museum
"'Tis the Season" exhibition, December 2013

It's been nearly 10 years since our book Season's Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree (Melcher, NY, 2004) hit the streets. Our research into the history of the aluminum Christmas tree's manufacture in Manitowoc, Wisconsin culminated in that book. The trees were cheap and abundant at estate and rummage sales, thrift shops, and antiques stores 20 years ago. Folks in town generally thought they were hideous except for one man--Richard Thomsen. Our downtown gallery/storefront installation attracted media attention and helped Richard Thomsen find us. He loved the trees and knew their history. We gathered enough information to cobble together a history for Al Hoff's Thrift Score zine in 1997 and Metropolis magazine in 1998 with the mystic help of David Brown and Paul Lukas. For us, the trees transcended their status as holiday decor items instead working as a brilliant exercise in design making for a sublime viewing experience when displayed unadored en masse. Media interest escalated with each passing year peaking with the release of our book in 2004 and the national press coverage it generated from The New York Times to CBS Sunday Morning. When Joe Kapler, Curator of Domestic Life at the Wisconsin Historical Museum, expressed interest in the trees a few years ago, we enthusiastically handed him the mantle of aluminum tree historian. We even donated a prime prototype specimen (pictured above) from our collection. We watch with fascination as Joe enshrined the Manitowoc-made Evergleam in the official history of Wisconsin through various exhibitions. He recently assembled an exhibition titled 'Tis the Season (on view November 26, 2013-January 11, 2014) at the Wisconsin Hisorical Museum on the Square in Madison. Here's a sampling of the media documentation of the show posted in December 2013:

"Evergleam Trees on Display" by Mark Koehn and Susan Simon for WISC TV

"Aluminum Trees Back in Spotlight" video by Carrie Antlfinger for AP
"Wisconsin Museum Highlights Aluminum Trees" video by Rob Duns for WAOW TV

"Remember Aluminum Trees?" by Susan Bence for WUWM radio

"Wisconsin's Aluminum Christmas Tree Legacy" by Cathy Wurzer for WMPR radio 

"Wisconsin: Aluminum Trees are the Stars" by Mary Forgione for LA Times 

 "Hey Block Head: Aluminum Trees Regain Their Shine"

by Meg Jones for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Museum's Evergleam Christmas Trees have Special Nostalgic Sparkle"

by Lindsay Christian for The Cap Times

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)