POST-POST-POST MODERNISM

I am a modern, sophisticated, fierce and independent woman! I live to achieve. I am consumed with personal growth and professional development and I refuse to waste my time on anything that lacks a clear, coherent value proposition.

I learned in art school about the principle of form following function and I immediately identified with the economy and efficaciousness of the idea. But let’s be bold about this! Let’s dispense with the form part of the equation. Who needs it!? From now on consider function as a strict utilitarian concept that follows only and strictly function itself!

I’m done with art. Or at least with the part of art that still wades in the sorghum of nostalgic Romanticism. Paintings, sculptures, operas, poems, plays …. USELESS ALL!!

The only purpose for art – my art – is as a vehicle to advance my career! Other art, by other artists serve only as a necessary context for the comprehensibility of my art. Therefore galleries and museums and art schools and art critics and curators and academics are inescapable and therefore important despite their tedium.

People are equally necessary as fangs in a gloomy network of mercenaries. We dance in a fragile contract of assured mutual interdependence. We not so secretly hate one another but are bound by a covenant of the craven. We euphemistically refer to each other as friends but nobody has any illusions.

I don’t mind confessing any of this in print because I am confident that no one will get past the first paragraph. The first paragraph was deliberately provocative and deliberately inconclusive. The reader is left with the impression that Danton is a sassy, strong woman – something of a role model for younger women in the way she unapologetically asserts herself.

The frank confession that follows comes as a taunt, a dare, a death wish.

Why!!??

Because I’m tired.

I HEARD THAT FUN DELAYS AGING

It’s funny how elusive satisfaction seems to be. Forget joy, pleasure or that ineffable state of eudaemonia, here in a country with the eighth highest GDP per capita in the world, our ranking on the Happiness Index is a lamentable 108th out of 140.

Go figure …

As an artist I can’t understand the North American distrust of the senses. Look at the way we eat! It’s as if we live on a collective precipice of hypoglycemia. Food must be fast and here in L.A. we must eat our quick meals while we drive.

People boast about how much work is left on their desk, their bloated calendars, their engorged inboxes, their deadlines, their stress and the pressures of their impending performance review.

Living gets deferred, and deferred and deferred until it suddenly disappears like a dropped call. Our aesthetic well-being is outsourced to therapists, life coaches, awareness trainers and pets. We grouse on instant message with our equally aggrieved ‘friends’ because Skyping is way too intimate.

Well I’ve had it!!

I’m so determined to lighten up that I’m even willing to allow myself a little old fashioned spontaneity! I’m even going to try to express myself without the help of emojis!

Who knows? I might start reading poetry!!

Nah …..

THE YEAR OF THE CHIROPRACTOR

If I read one more article in The New York Times about our diminishing attention spans and our collective indifference to complexity I believe I will turn senseless with undeserved shame. This neuroplasticity they all talk about – these “new” neural trails in our heads that have made us dumber because of our smartphones – sounds like a 21st century alarmist form of Reefer Madness. The way I see it, if Tolstoy and Proust were really that interesting they would be able to sustain an onslaught from BuzzFeed.

And besides, who says complexity and ambiguity are all that critical to our alleged eudaemonic aspirations? The felicitous Tweet is way mightier than the pen ever was, the sword has been effectively supplanted by the hack and just wait for all the great sex we’ll have on PlayStation VR!

Face it you tweedy nostalgics, the inkwell is dry. You can now earn a tasseled mortarboard after four years of keg parties and workshops in Corporate Coaching Fitness IT Marketing!

And this is how it should be!!

So to all my reader(s) – in the spirit of the age I shall remain brief – you no longer need to be embarrassed if you haven’t read the latest 600 page installment of Knausgaard’s roman d’ennui or managed to sit through the latest Satyajit Ray retrospective on Ovation TV. We can all lift our heads and proudly proclaim that we dwell in the Age of the Post.

Now sit back and enjoy that hysterical video of the cute American Shorthair buying groceries in German!

ART IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCTION

I’m very busy these days.

In fact, I can’t think of a time when I wasn’t very busy.

I stay busy precisely because I have nothing of real importance to actually do.

Like most of my peers I’m obsessed with my career. And like most of my peers, my career is stuck in the purgatory of mid-level inconsequentiality. I show my work, I teach, I get invited to deliver lectures here and there and I sell enough of my work to keep my parents from thinking that art is just another stage in a rebellious personal odyssey.

But I know, as do most of my colleagues, that we will never swing with the real heavy hitters. We’ll never represent our great country at the Venice Biennale nor will we ever fly first class to Bilbao to attend our mid-career retrospectives.

What we’re more likely to do is to borrow a friend’s truck in order to schlepp an over-sized wet canvas over to Chinatown to take part in another group exhibition with a clever title like “Relevant Rabbits” or “Pre-hIP/Post-fuNk.”

The real reason that I stay so busy is because I can’t bare the painful fact that in the grand scheme of things my work and my life are lamentably irrelevant.

Think about it.

To be an artist one needs a healthy ego. To sustain a healthy ego one must constantly feed it as if one were pushing infants through the fiery mouth of Moloch. With such an impossible task and with such meager rewards one needs a battery of pious, agonizing fictions to keep from curling up into an anorectic ball of self-pitying bitterness and decay.

And so we rank ourselves and we rank each other.

Relentlessly.

It’s a good day when my erstwhile best friend from graduate school gets rejected from Yaddo and has to face the prospect of spending the summer teaching ceramics at a Mormon day camp in the Adirondacks.

On the other hand when my ex-boyfriend got a Guggenheim to make a documentary about women wrestlers in rural Thailand I got so depressed I could have polished off a bottle of Draino.

I recently earned 98 likes on Facebook when I posted a picture of myself giving a speech at the Mayor’s office.

Few people realized that my “speech” was delivered to an empty room (I was there to meet my friend Katie who, by the way, had the perspicacity to realize that being a graphic designer at City Hall promised a more stable future than being a performance artist in Bushwick, Brooklyn).

But a capitionless photograph can do wonders in destabilizing one’s rivals.

And so it is with tasks like this that I remain absorbed. I’m up most nights till 2 or 3 in the morning burnishing my brand on social media. I plot my online presence like a military campaign and I position my persona for optimum exposure. Physical alliances are no longer enough. Virality is the ultimate objective and cracking the cryptic code that attracts flocks of followers and untold cadres of calculated contacts will prove to be the key to some post-post modern semblance of success.

That I no longer have time to paint is regrettable but honestly, my work wasn’t very good to begin with anyway.

When the time comes and I need to consider an actual product I’ll rent a studio, get a couple of interns and bang out enough edgy/kitschy pictures to satisfy my adoring public’s appetite for novelty and angst.

OH SO OSHO

Color me Californian, I just LOVE meditation!

,

I prefer the meditative state to practically all other available states. For me, meditation beats wakeful vigilance, it beats post-bachannalian catatonic and when it’s really really good it can even rival orgasmic.

I just love the emptiness of it all.

Most people think it’s hard to empty the mind never realizing that it’s as easy as feeding kibbles to a kitten. You basically imagine yourself as a gentle gust of carbon progressively ascending an infinite set of atmospheric rings. The rings, being concentric, become larger and larger and the space that they occupy becomes an indeterminate galaxy of absolute emptiness.

Simple …. right?

And as you drift within this shapeless, blissful universe you repeat in a rhythmic, repetitive fashion some catchy phrase, preferably in some dead and difficult language. I used to say ho-ya-eema-abba, ho-ya-eema-abba but it always felt ridiculous so I switched to English. Now my mantra is simply Dahlia-Dahlia, lover of light/Your candle burns with every flight.

I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean but it was suggested to me by my very first meditation teacher, Arvinda Ta. He’s written a bunch of books about Eastern philosophy and he had a great way of making all this mumbo jumbo sound appealing to American narcissists.

I was really sad when he got deported.

Anyway, I try to meditate at least three or four times a day and I find that it really helps me keep things in perspective.

But like most wonderful things, it’s best done in moderation.

WHEN I WAS YOUNG

There are things in our past that in a just world could vanish from our record if only we had gone to traffic school. I’m speaking, of course, of mistakes of misspent youth, inebriated confessions, impulsive leaps of faith and above all else, mercenary romances whose tactics, though foul, yielded expedited rewards.

Those of us blessed with the fairer features favored by the rougher sex have been taught from a young age to leverage our gifts toward gain. In a rigged world dominated by men, guile and deception are countenanced by the asymmetrical circumstances that govern professional hierarchies.

As my mom, who was second to none in the feminist department, used to say: “If you got it, flaunt it!”

I guess what I’m doing here is a bit of retroactive penance. I’ve come a long way since those callow, calculated days of crass careerism. Now that I’m an accomplished woman, an artist of undeniable merit and a mentor to a new generation of young women making their way in the world, I’ve come full circle. Judge us by our merits on a level playing field and sisters, don’t stab one another in the back!

There’s always going to be those who want to crush us and diminish us and reduce us to that demeaning condition of mascot and eye-candy. But I say, let’s come clean, admit our past indiscretions and move on from a position of strength and self confidence.

So here goes.

As most of my readers know, my career was, to say the least, facilitated by my notorious liaison with the French artist Currado Malaspina. At the time, rumors, though true but nonetheless vicious, circulated in the art world that I was something of a “kept woman.” I admit that I pursued this romance for practical reasons and I endured the indignity of acting as an exotic accessory in order to further my ambitions.

Malaspina has recently published a few images in advance of an illustrated memoir to be published by Gallimard in the fall of 2017. It’s a masterstroke of a French publicist and a young social media maven and this highly anticipated publication has already aroused the interest of a few key players in Hollywood.

Fine.

But the best way to head off a scandal is to meet it head on (or so my publicist and my young social media maven have advised). Here are a few of the images that are trending and I’m sure there will be more as time moves on. Make of them what you will but be sure that I fully intend to publish a powerful countervailing narrative that will flip the scales in favor of empowerment!!

 I have to admit, the old guy does have talent …

QUAINT

Whether it’s from indolence or fatigue, it scarcely matters. I admit that The Harps of Heaven has been lately offering up its equivalent of summer reruns.

Calling them “holiday issues” does little to hide the fact that I’ve been culling old essays from our archives. But I promise all this will change fairly soon.

I’ve been distracted from my editorial responsibilities by an impending exhibition in Austria.

Why Austria? Because any excuse to absent myself from our great land during a presidential campaign is more than welcomed.

I’m almost finished in my preparations. I have been producing reams of drawings – mostly rehashed ideas from old work that I felt would go over well in Vienna.

Originality and invention are just so, so, so twentieth century …

MY KANT

Why is it that every man that wants to sleep with me invokes the categorical imperative?

Well, not every man, just married men – young guys treat moral philosophy like Medicare, something nice that’s best deferred till later.

I have a friend, an older gentleman, who visits me in the summer because he loves the beach.

 

He never wears a bathing suit and if he takes off his socks and rolls up his pant legs it’s as if he went skinny dipping at Woodstock. I like him precisely because he is eccentric for how many true eccentrics are still around?

Sure, you have your nut-jobs – especially in Los Angeles – but the cultivated original is a breed apart.

Anyway, this friend, who refuses even to be photographed, would like nothing more than to make love to me and for some mischievous reason I adamantly refuse. As Robert Musil pointed out in an age where poetic ideas still mattered, an amorous woman is far more clever than a man of character.

Since my friend is married – I don’t think it’s too much of a betrayal to say that he lives in Paris and he is in his early 60’s – one could plausibly argue that adultery might deviate from the Kantian idea of universal law.

But it’s funny because nearly every married dude I go out with can come up with some marvelous refutation of this fairly basic premise. Complete fidelity to one’s wife, I’m told, falls under the category of “imperfect duty” and therefore its moral imperative is somewhat hazy.

Still, I argue, these circumstantial duties are no less binding. This infuriates my brainy suitors and it is especially infuriating if I’m wearing a bikini.

Men are swindlers and women know this. The metaphysics of morals must be argued persuasively if I’m going to consider dropping my panties.

These guys think that if they can theoretically legislate a universal principle, some maxim of scruples, some normative code of behavior than I’ll melt into their arms like some velle brutum. But fellas, I have news for you, determinism and debauchery are a thorny pair!

So every summer my European friend returns to his wife tanned and disappointed.

These guys should try Wittgenstein.

A little silence can go a long way.

ACHSENZEIT – GESUNDHEIT

There’s a funny trick I do with my eyes that never fails to freak out my little nephews and nieces.

I can’t really describe how I do it but the effect is one that gives the appearance that my lids are simultaneously opened and closed. You can see how creepy that can look to a kid. Hell, it looks creepy enough to an adult! It’s sort of like a physical, visual expression of duplicity.

My favorite character in all of Shakespeare is Iago. I don’t think he gets a fair shake. I think I understand him pretty well and I admire the way he is able to think, like a good chess player, several moves in advance.

He was very clever in anticipating how completely bat shit Othello could get. He played the Moor like a kazoo.

To be a successful artist these days you have to be very lucky and very calculated. You have to model your foreign policy not after some namby-pamby Jeffersonian democrat but after something like Uganda’s Idi Amin or Romania’s Ceaușescu . You have to be paranoid, despotic, strategic and supremely anti-ethical.

Not unethical, anti-ethical.

I literally lay awake at night designing elaborate stratagems in order to advance my ambitions and confound my foes. I watch old reruns of Dynasty and Dallas and carefully observe the cold impassive expressions that mask the characters’ flagrant assaults on human decency. I meditate and concentrate, training my mind on the time-honored Machiavellian tactics of ass-kicking and back-stabbing.

While my earnest colleagues collect inspiring quotations from Deepak Chopra and Camus I plot like Picasso with the single-minded goal of achieving my mild form of greatness. I know I don’t have talent but I certainly have the looks.

And let’s face it, with Candy Crush, Hot Tub Time Machine and the Twerk this ain’t exactly what I’d call the Axial Age.

THE PRINCE(SS)

The first time I met the Los Angeles artist David Schoffman I was awed, humbled, smitten and terrified.

Schoffman and me, (date deliberately forgotten)

The next time  I saw him I nearly threw up.

I met him through well-intentioned friends who thought it was in my best interest to attach myself to an established older artist who could both mentor me and connect me with otherwise inaccessible professional opportunities.

These well-meaning friends all agreed upon Schoffman thinking that as a middle-aged married guy with three kids and a young beautiful wife (the choreographer Adelenne Laurenti) he was unlikely to hit on me too heavily and more likely to help me without the typical oily quid pro quos.

I’d always admired Schoffman’s work and I told him so over the phone when we arranged out first meeting at his big beauty loft on a walk street in Venice Beach. Schoffman lived at the time in Beverly Hills and used his loft strictly for painting. He had a staff of three full-time assistants and a part-time office manager named Chi who I could swear wasn’t a day older than fifteen.

The studio was filled with small jewel-like oil paintings – I learned later that they were part of his legendary 100-paneled polyptych The Body is His Book – and though the pieces were fairly impressive there was something depressing in seeing so many repetitious images crowded on his moldy walls like restless congregants in a megachurch.

Schoffman was the perfect southern (Californian) gentleman on that first brief encounter and we agreed to meet the following evening for dinner to discuss the possibility of joining his small staff as a grant writer and bookkeeper.

Why powerful men in this day and age still assume their so-called droit du seigneur I’ll never know but suffice it say the evening was terribly awkward and by the time I stumbled home (well, I wasn’t about to pass up a free meal and a couple of very very decent bottles of wine just because some old fart insisted on pawing me like a cat) I had lost all respect both for Schoffman and for the whole enterprise of contemporary art.

Much to my astonishment, a few months later a photo appeared all over social media that so misrepresented me and my relationship to that rakish lowlife that to this day I still have to explain to people that it is not in the least how it appears.

It was an early lesson in practical feminism. I ended up working for the guy for a about six or seven months. I kept him on a short leash of flirtation and withdrawal. He introduced me to enough important people to get me started on my career and as soon as I had enough of my own momentum I dropped him like a gum wrapper.

Now I’m in a whole different level of play. Schoffman was like community theater compared to where I’m hobnobbing now. If the name Gustav Oligrecht means nothing to you than either you’ve been living under a rock or you’re somehow ambivalent about the world of art fairs and blue chip collectors.

Oh, and David … if you happen to be reading this …

L’chaim and thanks for the memories!