LET’S GET (PARA)PHYSICAL – PHYSICAL

Though I’ve lived in California for over fifteen years I’m still fairly conservative when it comes to crackpot anti-intellectualism.

I’ve alienated many a fair-weather friend when subjects come up like hypnotherapy, transubstantive biofeedback, mirrored manifestation, wet yoga, large group awareness training, fluoride, magnetic healing, reverse flow temporality, atavistic clearing, auto-immune sweat lodges, sensory discs, hydrolactose intolerance or designer neurons.

Not that I’m closed minded. I’ve flirted with any number of personal effectuation fads.

I’ve walked barefoot on shards of zinc on a scalding beach in Maui in order to “come to grips with my delicate fears.” (price tag $1299, not including air fare and hotel). I’ve chanted with Yogi Yoma Arikhta looking for my under-utilized chakras. I even attended a three day confidence building seminar, a sort of Woodstock Festival for short people where everyone was required to take to the podium and deliver an elevator-pitch rodomontade describing three highly marketable skills.

I tend to fall on the practical side of the paranormal. In other words, if I’m going to stare at my navel it better reflect later on in my bank account. I once took a course on Zen Dating where we were trained to detach from any expectation of romantic affinity or even basic companionability. It worked great but after a while I started seeing the “blissful vacuum of detachment” as simply boredom and as we all know, everything falls apart once you stop believing.

I recently downloaded a Transmigration of Souls app for my I-phone  and I have to say I love it. It’s sort of like having an outer scrolling experience in the comfort of your own home.

The way it works is that you type in the name of some dead person – it could be a friend, a relative, a celebrity or an historical figure – and you enter the decade and century in which they died. Within seconds they give you a complete CV of all their incarnations and even speculates on their future. I got the deluxe $6.99 version so on mine you can even find out about people who are still alive.

I did myself, of course.

Apparently I used to be Thucydides’ niece, a salamander, a eunuch in the court of Song Taizo and most recently a flight attendant on the Hindenburg.

Honestly, I don’t believe the Hindenburg thing for a second!

PATRIMONY

I often confuse the men in my life for my father.

But don’t all women do that?

My father was full of empty promises. His word was about as valuable as a plugged nickel. He was hardly ever home and when he was, he buried his big fat bean in his stupid, meaningless work.

Whenever he promised to take me to school he’d conveniently forget about it and immerse himself in his lukewarm black coffee and day-old Des Moines Register and Mail. He would swear on a stack of Gideons that he’d help me with my science fair projects (he was a chemist) but invariably a golf lesson or a manicure would get in the way. (Yes, a manicure! but we’ll save that one for another time).

He was always going on about the importance of parent involvement yet he constantly left me to my own devices and to the erratic care of my crazy step-mother Doris.

When he turned 45 he entered into a phase of what he called ‘self-discovery.’ He would go on ‘wellness retreats,’ take meditative vows of silence, study sutras with bearded street sages and once he even joined an obscure urban cult that held the promise of ‘infinite possibility, extraordinary and outrageous insight and a 20% increase in your net income within 6 months.’

You’d think with all this guided introspection the dude would gain some wisdom but all it ever did was turn him into an even bigger buffoon.

Is it really a mystery that I don’t trust guys?

I go through relationships like shit through a goose and I can’t remember the last time I even remotely considered the prospect of marriage.

There’s a violence that is inflicted upon the soul of a woman when the formative male figure of her life turns out to be an ice-chest of repressed human emotion.

I’m sure not all men are equally duplicitous but I’m not about to risk my independence in order to find the notable exceptions. I’d rather be cold and intact than passionate and vulnerable.

And besides … who in their right mind would ever want any kids?

HOMAGE TO A SCHMUCK

My friends, I do declare, you can have it all!!

You really can live the American myth of having it all as long as you’re prepared to be a little bit of a “dick.” (The Uncommon Dictionary of Casual Euphemism defines a dick as someone who easily and thoughtlessly puts their own objectives and interests ahead of others).

As Fox News points out nightly, only natural selection should be trusted to anoint the winners and consign the losers to their well-deserved neglect. And so it is with art.

For years I’ve cultivated dalliances and alliances with cold strategic purposefulness. I basically divide my contacts into two categories: The useful and the kind.

The useful are those who supply the rungs for my ascension. The kind are the unwitting dupes who still believe in trust, fairness, talent and integrity.

Jerry Montarosa is a wonderfully talented guy of the second category.

Montarosa in his Venice studio

We dated for a while back in the 90’s and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. (Important rule: If you are committed to having it all, never, ever lose a contact!). The guy is a prince – a true mensch of the first order (Important rule: Collect mensches – the decent are always the most easily duped).

Anyway, Jerry is one of those artists who talk dreamily about “process” and “the generative power of line.” He speaks several languages, has traveled extensively and seems to have read every important book ever written. You’d never know it though. He is the most soft spoken, humble and unassuming person I have ever met. His whole life is devoted to this kind of monastic yet ecstatic form of sensuality. He is constantly working in his studio and it seems that everything he touches is sublime.

He’s also a really crappy networker. If non-brand were a brand Jerry would be a trademark.

I make it a point to get together with him and check out his work at least once or twice a year. I think of it as corporate espionage.

Jerry Montarosa, Oil on canvas 6 x 14 feet. 2014

The mural-sized painting above is only one of about half a dozen similar works that Jerry has hanging about his studio. They literally can take your breath away. They are stunning, bravura performances of improvisation, technical mastery and impeccable design. They seem to somehow rescue the tired themes of nudity and gesture from the scrapheap of figurative redundancy. Through their obsessive repetitive insistence they manifest a raw concrete graphic presence that is both mysterious and new.

They’re also practically invisible.

Jerry the Good firmly believes that it is wrong to exhibit his work before he is completely satisfied with his results. He’s committed to completing at least fifteen more of these giant paintings until, as he puts it, “the ideas are fully played.”

Well, I for one have no problem playing Jerry.

Dahlia Danton 2015

I’ve basically lifted his idea wholesale and have made my own Dahlia version of the writhing commotion of fleshy forms formatted as a polyptych – (Important rule: Always listen to smart people and use their words in your artist’s statements).

With my next big show coming up in the fall I expect to be, once again, the toast of L.A. while Jerry ponderously struggles after another “noiseless nuance.”

Dahlia Danton 2015

THE NARCISSISM OF MINOR DIFFERENCES

My poor sister Deb is a complainer. To Deb every silver lining comes with its own special cloud and she seems never to have met a worst case scenario she didn’t embrace.

We’re opposites (I hope) in every way but to look at us you would never know it.

We’re identical twins, but that’s a subject I’d prefer to put aside in favor of some general comments on the radically different perspectives available to women in our post-feminist era.

As you can see from the photo, Deb (on the right) is a bit heavier than myself and that, in a nutshell may explain our differences.

She seems incapable of sustaining a relationship. She was married to this really nice radiologist for about 4 or 5 years and for some obscure reason I still don’t understand, she demanded a divorce with what seemed like the forethought of an impulse purchase at Loehmanns. But unlike shoes, she left a stunned and very decent man hurt, confused and free to trade up.

“He felt he was entitled to me and he liked to have my attention,” is how she explains things now, “he wanted to hug me and I found it uncomfortable.”

Um … he was your husband, not some creep rubbing against you on the subway.

But then again, who am I? To me the benefits of being a feminist lie in, among other things, the embrace of my sexuality and not my withdrawal from it. As a woman I feel empowered to love myself for who I am and in turn I can enjoy being loved by someone else.

“All that groping … I felt I always had to protect myself from his affection.”

Listen girl, our dad never once told us he loved us, never once gave us an encouraging word and here you have a guy who loves every corpuscle in your body, who worships the ground you walk on and is man enough to express it it countless different ways and you dump him because he likes to kiss you too much? Because he tells you you’re beautiful when you wake up in the morning all puffy-eyed and hung over? Because he expresses his love for you too much?

You call that feminism???

I call that fuckedupism!

I can only dream of meeting a guy like that. I always end up with these nerdy artsy guys who can quote Neruda in Spanish, have subscriptions to the opera and are better cooks and housekeepers than me.

Come to think of it Deb, I think we’re a lot more alike than we thought.

SPIN THE DIRNDL

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

As all my readers know, so begins Dante’s epic rendering of his road trip through hell.

My own mid-life road trip through hell begins with a dress.

I saw it in a shop window in Berlin and I couldn’t resist. It’s called a dirndl and depending on who is wearing it, it can evoke the folksy chill of The Sound of Music or the forbidden thrill of The Secret Confessions of a Bavarian Nursemaid. 

It took me a while to piece together all the accessories and figure out how to put the damn thing on.

Trying to find the context in which to wear it became my next challenge.

You see, ever since I turned thirty-five I have been torn apart by the everyday evidence of my waning youth. The trills of becoming had been leeched away only to be replaced by Mahlerian dirges of imminent mortality. Every eyebrow pluck brought me closer to a face that was slowly becoming my mother’s. Every twitch and every ache was echoed by a small lapse in memory, a misplaced key and a careless collapse of cognitive associations that were, in better days, second nature.

The comforts of my successful career were of small consolation. Playing the eminence on a panel of experts only highlighted the discomfiture of chronological advance. Long “emerged” my exhibitions were billed as retrospective summaries as if my best work was behind me. Students offered me their seats on the train and in stores if I were even noticed, I’d be addressed as ma’am or even madame.

The drindl gave me an idea that I somehow justified as an exercise in performance art but was in fact a desperate cry of despair.

I applied for a waitress job in one of those tacky, food court restaurants specializing in beer, bad sausages, pretzels and sports telecasts.  The place was called SteifWurst and the average age of the waitresses looked to be about twelve. I figured that if I could get myself hired it would mean that I still had it and that my anxieties were only symptoms of a repressive vanity imposed upon me by a culture that commodifies youth.

Much to my astonishment I got the job and much to my consternation, I found myself liking it.

Fast forward and a year and a half latter and I’ve got the primo Thursday thru Saturday evening shift, I haven’t done a lick of art work, my professional standing is in the toilet and I’m dating the twenty-two year old bartender who couldn’t find Germany on a map if you held a Luger to his head.

And my feet are absolutely killing me.

PHILOMEL

My father is a mediocre man.

My father is a boastful man.

Growing up with a parent like that was difficult.

My father was best known for regaling table’s full of dinner guests with breathless recitatives listing the pale, pointless minutiae from his oh so unremarkable life.

He left little oxygen for the rest of us to breathe and turned our home into his minor marquee of vacant and arbitrary musings.

How could I not dream of ripping his dingy edifice down as if it were a piñata. How could I not pray for his quick and messy demise. All I could hope for during my tormented childhood was for the indifferent world to turn its adoring eye away from my father …

 … and on to me!!!

 At first I tried my hand at acting but quickly came to the realization that the only character I cared to play was the one I was inventing for myself. Writing required reticence and patience, qualities as foreign to me as chariot racing. Settling on a career as a painter was a compromise having been told that the art world was really just show business for people with bad teeth and dyslexia.

I sat down with dad the other day and had a long deferred, asymmetrical chat.

I see him once or twice a year and I always come away feeling oily. He lives in a retirement community in south Florida and by his telling he’s the septuagenarian Casanova nonpareil. With undisguised mischief he trots out that old saw confusing ‘acute angina’ with ‘a cute vagina’ as if I had never heard it before. Then comes the soliloquy of such interminable duration that I found myself fantasizing about cutting off his tongue .

You think that’s harsh?

Given half a chance he would have clipped my wings long ago.

ART IN AN AGE OF RHETORICAL SEDUCTION

A while back, several years after finishing graduate school, I got an adjunct teaching job in a small art school back east which for reasons that will become apparent will remain nameless. I was assigned three classes – Freshman Design, Basic Drawing and Painting.

If I were hired to teach advanced Croatian or underwater welding I think I might have been better prepared.

After four years as an art major and two years of graduate school I had all the proper paper credentials and I was genuinely excited about my first teaching job. Even after my first faculty meeting where I first realized I was way over my head, I still retained my hopeful optimism.

I soon learned that marquee art colleges and State and Community Colleges were unrelated parallel universes. My students were not only talented, they were sophisticated and extremely well-read. When on my very first day of Freshman Design a lovely young student politely asked if we’d be using Arnheim the only reason I answered  ‘no’ was because I had no idea who Arnheim was.

Equally humbling was the terrifying disparity of skill levels in my drawing class. Not between the students themselves, they had been thoroughly vetted with home tests and portfolio reviews and to the last one possessed impressive degrees of draftsmanship. No – the gap was between the students and me!!

Don’t get me wrong, I loved teaching and though I was out of my depth in many aspects I did bring to the job valuable qualities that hopefully made an impact.

I was always good at managing people and being the only girl in a family of  six children I had plenty of experience in conflict resolution. I was always punctual and cheerful during department meetings and I had a great knack for organizing field trips and booking visiting artists. My only notable flaw was my lack of expertise.

In the end, the entire experience proved to be a valuable lesson.

First of all, had I not been fired (I started dating one of my students) I know I could have grown into competence – I’m a reasonably hard worker with an above average sense of responsibility. But the major take-away from the entire ordeal was that at the end of the day, I figured out that everyone is essentially bluffing and as long as you implicitly agree not to expose your colleagues and peers they will joyfully return the courtesy.

I wish I had time to teach that to my students.

PAPER LIONESS

The other day I left my apartment in a hurry and suddenly realized  I had forgotten something.

I was on my way to a meeting with two independent curators who were planning an exhibition with the putative theme of “language, signs and self-reflexive memes.” (In other words, one of those broad, open ended things that could include anything and anyone).

I have been wading for years on the upper tier of mid-level renown in the Los Angeles art world and have been struggling relentlessly to break through to the serious and rarified other side. I go to at least two or three openings a week, I constantly host studio visits, meet with collectors, shmooze with critics and have established countless strategic alliances with my peers. In other words I dwell within the network and work diligently to expand that network as widely as possible.

And yet I remain stalled.

If the art world is shaped like a diamond I am somewhere on the very top of the middle – higher than most but very very far from the narrow, sparsely populated top.

So there I was, weaving through traffic on my way to yet another brown-nosing meeting when it suddenly hit me like a belly-full of bad sushi.

After years and years of  burnishing this brand I call Dahlia Danton, searching for just the right kind of definable artistic identity, the nascent self with which I was endowed at birth had become so remote and indeed so irrelevant to my ambition that it seemed at that very moment downright inaccessible.

After years and years of chameleon-like behavior, tactically shape-shifting my character in order to suit whatever professional situation I happened to find myself, I had reached such a pathetically mediocre level of stature and accomplishment and had forgotten completely who I was and why I decided to become an artist!

Childless and incapable of a sustained romantic relationship, I had become this empty, mercenary shell consummately adept at social circumnavigation but completely clueless in the art of introspection.

The good news is, I have another show coming up (I better get to work) and I hope you all find the time to check it out.

And by the way, who the heck designs these awful exhibition announcements??!!

IN PRAISE OF SURFACE: A Manifesto

Much has been made of our age of superficial gloss. We are admonished for our deficits of focus and depth. We are told that we are chained to our desks and enslaved by our devices.

Have you noticed how the wagging digits of derision come uniquely from waggish (typically male) nostalgics and crusted academics? Has it been lost on anyone how our frictionless phones have become the ultimate (typically female) accessory?

Let’s put this all in perspective please.

When, pray tell, have we ever experienced a society whose denizens engaged, with full attention, on weighty matters and complex ideas? To which Golden Age to our (male) curmudgeons which to return?

Superficiality has received the ill-deserved short shrift from carping elitists who equate literacy with intellectualism. Give me (or any of my friends) the option of one of the “Great Books” and a fresh, new and clever Tweet and the choice is rather apparent.

Poetry is so damn virtuous, opera is absurd, slow Sweedish movies are cumbersome and depressing and social media is fun.

So what exactly is the problem??

Nobody will ever make me feel guilty for living in the present age enjoying the broad fruits of our collective ingenuity.

I love my computer, I adore my phone and my tablet’s dulcet tones reliably alert me to everything I need to know in real time to be a fully engaged 21st century woman!

Now if you will excuse me there’s a beer-pong video on Vine that I’m dying to watch …

CALL AND RESPONSE

Some people collect speaking gigs like stamps or bottle caps. Others milk honoraria like fatted goats hopping from one symposium to another delivering the same tired truisms over and over again.

I get invited to lecture all the time but not only am I extremely discerning about which offers I accept,  I also make sure that I never deliver the same talk twice.

For example, in May I spoke at the graduation of my alma mater. I easily could have slapped on a few retreaded inspirational talking points about vision, opportunity and decency but instead I pushed for a more strident tone. I told the crowd of over two-thousand students, parents and faculty that “… artists are the vanguard, scholars are the rear-guard and critics are the Right Guard.” That got a good laugh though most of the 22 year-olds had no idea that I was referring to the deodorant and instead thought I was citing the hip-hop tune Right Guard for the Wrong Time by the UK band Risible.

A few weeks ago I spoke at the annual Physicians for Nutrition convention in Atlantic City. They invited me because of my work with Artists Against Excess and there I spoke about the need for creativity in public school cafeteria menu planning.

At the pre-gala MOCA trustees meeting a few days ago I gave a full-on powerpoint introduction to Post-Dada sound-sculpture and its relationship to the poetry of Paul Claudel. I knew it would be a bit highbrow for that crew but I refuse to be uplifting just for the sake of some fleeting intelligibility.

My most memorable presentation took place a few years ago at a luncheon for midwestern museum curators that took place in Iowa City’s largest reform synagogue, Congregation Rodef Shtuyot. Their sanctuary seated over 700 people and as waiters in pressed white shirts and black silk vests served delicious plates of bagels with smoked whitefish I showed slides of works by Denis Ambatiya, Micah Carpentier, Puna Rahandrapatha and Albrecht Amgott. I never competed with smoked whitefish before and its not exactly something I would recommend to the faint-hearted but I seemed to hold my own and maintain the assembled crowd’s attention more or less intact for the entirety of my 40 minute talk.

What made the late morning meeting memorable was the Q and A following my lecture. A young independent art impresario asked me with complete earnestness if I thought it was important that a curator believe in someone’s work if they were to include them in an exhibition. Hiding my astonishment I decided that it might be an interesting exercise to test the intellectual integrity of the assembled audience. “No, of course not,” I replied, steeling myself for an onslaught recriminatory rebuttal.

Instead I was met with stone cold silence and without missing a beat asked if there were any more questions.