The Human Maine

Journal entry for 25 Aug 2011 | Link

Robert LaHotan

Grave marker for Robert LaHotan, Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, Great Cranberry Isle, Maine, August 22, 2011

My feature on Robert LaHotan and the residency he founded appeared on Saturday at the Arts Fuse.

John Heliker and Robert LaHotan, known as Jack and Bob, were painters from New York who bought a property on Great Cranberry Isle, ME that had once been a shipbuilding operation. They met as teacher and student, then became a couple and remained one throughout the rest of their lives, pursuing art and teaching careers in New York and painting and living the good life in Maine. “Theirs was a true marriage,” says Patricia Bailey, director of the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, which operates out of what was once Jack’s and Bob’s home and studios and where I am currently an artist in residence.

Read the whole thing here.

Over on what they call the Back Shore of Big Cranberry, the ocean and the land meet in such a way that the native granite stones are tumbled, and end up on the beach as smooth ovoids. Occasionally a double ovoid forms. One of these hearts is placed upon Bob's gravestone.

Another stone heart has been placed on Jack's. The adorable fellow also upon Jack's stone is a neighbor's cat with sixteen toes in front, fourteen in back, and a friendly disposition.

There is something special at work in this place, no doubt about it.

Rainbow behind LaHotan Studio, Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, Great Cranberry Isle, Maine, August 2011

Lois Dodd

Last night my Lois Dodd review appeared at Artcritical.

The name of Lois Dodd has come up a few times in recent conversations with artists I respect. I finally got to see some of her work in person at a solo exhibition at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Maine. I was expecting the sort of painter’s-painter painting in which the very brushstrokes inspire admiration. Instead I found a picture of the Statue of Liberty working at an easel plein-aire.

Read the whole thing here. This article lost a few hundred words at one point during its creation, which usually cures what ails an essay. Nevertheless, I thought that one excised passage was worth preserving for posterity.

The George Condo exhibition at the New Museum earlier this year disgusted me, but until I saw Lois Dodd's show in Rockland, I wasn't sure why. In theory, I'm not opposed to the comicky gimmicks and self-referential hijinks that characterize Condo's work. In actuality, his show was so bad that I found it impossible to like the New Museum's contemporaneous Lydia Benglis exhibition, which deserved higher regard than I could summon. Condo temporarily ruined all contemporary art for me. Both Condo and Dodd are playing a kind of game with painting. Dodd's game is tennis, and she wants to hit the ball back and forth with you, the viewer, in a liesurely way. Condo is competing with the intensity of a Wimbledon hopeful, but his game isn't tennis, it's Kill the Man with the Ball. His quirkiness is a calculated attack on fine art sensibilities. Hers is the incidental product of a person being herself.

In the end I decided that she is not really playing a game with painting and it was a disservice to her to grandstand about Condo, but I stand by the general sentiment.

A Reading

At the age of forty-three, Paul Wienphal, a teacher of philosphy at the University of California, concluded that Western philosophic thought had exhausted its potential and seemed to be leading toward the death of values.

In search of an alternate form of understanding and of hope, Professor Wienphal went to Japan, the heart of Zen Buddhism. He began his study under the discipline of a roshi, or Zen master, and soon took the further step of entering a Japanese monastery for the intensive practice of meditation.

From the dust jacket of Zen Diary, published 1970, found in the library of Jack Heliker. Quoth the author from the preface:

[In the late 1950s] I found myself without a philosophical position. I still have none. But that was an intellectual accomplishment. It need grounding in a practice. It had to become more of me than an idea. We are kind by being kind.

Then the Zen study commenced, first with books and finally in practice. And I began to appreciate the fact that philosophical problems are not solved. They can only be dissolved. A man knows all, understands, when he no longer has any questions—not when he has all the answers. The limits of philosophy are mysticism. I'm not there, but I can see the destination.