WPA / in praise of the Index of American Design

Three years ago, I completed a series of thirty posters for the purpose of drawing attention to an affiliate program of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) called the Index of American Design.

The WPA is well known by those who are acquainted with the Depression Era of US history. It is especially famous for hiring unemployed artists to create public murals for government buildings. Even when I was young, I knew about the WPA because one of the murals was in the post office lobby in my hometown.

Only years later did I learn about the Index of American Design, which was a companion agency that existed from 1935 to 1942. It too hired unemployed artists (some sources say 400, others say 1000) for the purpose of making 18,257 watercolor paintings (most or all of which survive), as a means of documenting hand-crafted folk art, functional wares, and decorative components from American history, beginning with the colonial age. Unlike the post office murals, no one remembers the names of the Index artists, who were more or less ignored (dismissed as craftsmen, not artists) who had previously been employed as commercial artists, designers and illustrators.

Looking closely at the Index works, I was soon persuaded that the work of those artists is surely as deserving as the WPA muralists. That led to producing the posters. I have never exhibited them in a gallery setting, but I have just now produced a twelve-minute video talk, called Index of American Design: Commemorating Arts and Crafts, by which I share my discoveries on YouTube at this online link.

Take a look. Hopefully, you will enjoy it, and will share the news of its release with artists, designers, historians and others.

Poster / Roy R. Behrens © 2022

screwed / the vital necessity of engaging in war

Anon, Evolution of the Screw 1871

Simone Weil What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.

•••

Wilbert Snow, Codline's Child (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), pp. 37-38—

There were no septic tanks and no sewers in our village. Each home had a backhouse that had to be cleaned out once a year. For three years, when I was between ten and thirteen, I did this chore for [a woman neighbor named] Fronie. Each time she gave me five dollars, and five dollars to me then was far more than five hundred would be to me now. In those days no lime was thrown over the dung to make the task easier for the shoveler. Each time I became deathly sick, but I needed the five dollars so desperately that I saw the job through. I have no words to express the horror of those two or three hours each year. I would lie on my stomach and throw up when there was little or nothing to yield. After the job was over, I would go to the Mill Cove for a swim and to Patten Point to smell the fragrance of fir trees and bayberry bushes.

Agassiz's hands-on science teaching innovation

Anon, Grasshopper becomes human, Finland 1885

Louis Agassiz, in Lane Cooper, editor, Louis Agassiz as a Teacher: Illustrative Extracts on His Method of Instruction (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing, 1945), p. 82—

In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Massachusetts, before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general.

writer Henry Miller shares his genealogical line

Anon, Birth of a Woman 1907

Henry Miller, in Robert Snyder, This is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974—

And so, if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky (and other Russian writers of the nineteenth century), the ancient Greek dramatists, the Elizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Élie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Céline, everything read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its “message” which I got first and which I will never shake off.

Dean Schwarz (RIP) relives the loss of his father

Above Roy R. Behrens, exhibition poster for Dean and Gunnar Schwarz: Pottery, Form and Inherent Expression (2007), Gallery of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

•••

It is not often that I cry. I cried when my father died. I cried when one of our parrots (Zooey, an African Gray who had bonded with me) died one evening in my arms. And I found that I was crying again just this morning as I was reading the memoir below in this post.

That memoir is not something I wrote. Rather, it was written by a friend (and my primary mentor), the Iowa potter Dean L. Schwarz, who died on March 18. Gerry, his wonderful wife (and one of my favorite people) was there, as were friends and family. His grandson Will Schwarz reported: "Music filled the whole house, and the afternoon sunlight which he loved to watch filtered through the pines and filled his room."

Since then I have been thinking about how I might pay tribute to Dean. And it occurred to me just yesterday that I should share with others a beautiful memoir he wrote in 2005, in which he remembered his father—and, more to the point, his father's death. Here it is—

On the Death of My Father, His Frank-ness by Dean L. Schwarz

It is with a mixture of pleasure and pain that I now stand where we, as family and friends, have stood so many times before, and where we will undoubtedly stand again in the future, when others also come to rest. Is it a blessing to be here? Will someone still be here to stand when we ourselves die? Surely, my "little sister" (Beverley) and my "knee-action brother" (Bill) will never fail to stand on behalf of our family. They know that the future is never the past, and that the present will only be good for those who strive to make it so. Beverley and Bill, I thank you, for your passion in making our father's departure from "the good life" a time that was also worth living. Beverley resides within a sweet bouquet of family, while Bill is receiving the benefits of family buds bursting into full bloom. We all give thanks for what we gained from the teaching of our parents. And to my wife, Gerry, and our children—and to their children's children—"I give thee flowers to strew thy way."

I myself have been lucky to know a handful of people who were not afraid to die. They and others like them found the courage to deal with the termination of their lives. My mother Nona, my father Frank, and (his brother) my Uncle Roger all died in the process of teaching, and each died with dignity. One used his observational skills to help others as a hospice volunteer—he knew how to make wise use of medication. Another knew when to stop eating at a time when that resource failed to provide sustenance for the life that he desired. And yet another was consoled by the belief in having been visited by angels in the hospital.

My friend David Cavagnaro once said to me, "Dean, why fear death?" He went on to tell about thousands of people, from the widest range of cultures, who, in one way or another, were able to cross the border between life and death. Stamped on their passports is proof that they have traveled through an egg yoke yellow tunnel (free-range chickens, of course) of warmth and happiness. When their names were called to return to the life of that existence, they protested. They wanted to stay, they insisted. I have not yet experienced this but I know it is not wise to fear without cause. Fear is a tool that a person should use only rationally. We have enough problems without creating additional fears. Why invent new kinds of darkness when instead we might create more light, recalling the beauty of lilies of the valley of life?

The beloved man who has left us (Frank Lester Schwarz) will nonetheless always be with us. This is our prerogative, to which he contributed by living creatively. Of course there were exceptions: He was neither a god nor a demigod. Our family of independent thinkers has never been heavy enough to tip the balance of Dad's convictions. We have argued that chicken and fish are food, while he insisted that food was a form of hamburger. Meatloaf is food. And when Nona, his Ruby, went to the reward of her convictions, Frank's global world shrank to the size of a Swedish meatball. As a result, for the past few years, he wanted most to join his wife—our mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, great, forever great. So now our feet are expected to make giant footprints, our legacy from their legacy.

We are all related. Perhaps there was an Adam and Eve, in the form of many truths at least. Whether metaphor, science, religion, or philosophy makes no difference. Choice need not divide us, I hope.

My father, Frank Schwarz, showed us some incredible changes in his lifetime. Rising from his own father's labors in a world of steel, he himself became a welder, a "master welder." And then when everyone thought he had done enough and that his life was set in steel (even his games, such as horseshoe, were steel), he suddenly went back to school. With an outlandish bravado, he said to his teacher (as he entered the college classroom for the first time) that "I will not accept anything but an A in this class." And that, indeed, was what he received, and continued to achieve.

And then he became an avid reader. Previously he had only read a few books, including God's Little Acre. His brother Gail, who was the most successful entrepreneur in our family, had only read one book in his whole life, Smoky the Cow Horse. But now Frank began to read about history, which led in turn to reading about other cultures. No one could have anticipated that.

During this period he honored the memory of his beloved son, Steven Charles Schwarz, by making a monumental steel sculpture, based on his convictions about the Native American belief in contrarians. He had learned that contraries cried when others laughed, and walked on their hands instead of their feet. He saw the marvelous humor, introspection, and the psychological value of this tradition. His sculptural abstraction of a teepee standing upside-down at the entrance of South Bear School, a place that he referred to as his Asa Haugan Home, is about twenty feet tall. The shadows of this sundial still travel across our hearts. When the Hearst Center For 'the Arts, in Cedar Falls, invited Frank Lester Schwarz, artist, to have a show of his sculptures in the gardens on that center's grounds, he declined.

He began to see the value of looking at his own Frank-ness from the outside. This view led him to create by word-smithing, the lead-penciled yellow-paged products of which were published in Paddled Tails From Tattled Tales: An Autobiography of a Family, a family book of power and conviction as strong as his welds. (And that !s strong considering that he was hired to weld some of the most important seams in the nuclear energy plant in Palo, Iowa. Not a single bubble was found in the x-rays of his welds. So Cedar Rapids and surrounding area is safer because of Frank.) One of his playful stanzas reads: "Dean Dean, made a machine, Frank Frank turned the crank, Joe Joe made it go, just because Steven is leavin'."

Our father was a keeper of and a sharer of the lessons he learned. So is our Uncle Charlie, who speaks of the wisdom of being streetwise, a necessity for his brothers and sisters in their youthful days. Some of the lessons never taught in school are those that keep homes wise today. Ask Uncle Charlie to show you his hands: One is a map of the French coast that he stormed in World War II, the other is a pointer that teaches us about the important battles.

There were years when Frank would pout and crab at social events and drink beer into friendliness. But this was surely not the case in his later years. During those years (and there was certainly no family precedent for this), he began to make speeches at social gatherings. He became an orator. Yes, an orator, truly! And he liked to say the Lord's Prayer, aloud and loudly, with great reverence and conviction, and in what his deaf ears thought to be unison, very s-l-o-w-l-y. Some people had finished their dinner before he finally said A-a-a-men.

Beverley was witness to his growing love for children in his later years, and how he got so good at it. He became a grand grandfather. He quit suffering the little children to come unto him. He began to make it very pleasant. He loved to baptize them with new names, names they will forever remember in his spirit.

Our Aunt Jeanette is a wise woman. In the pains of our recent yesterday she kindly reminded me of a fact that is one of the most important ideas for to remember from the wisdom of El Franko: "He was a rich man. " And yes we often heard him say, "I am the richest man in the world." If you think it so, so it is. Such direct teaching has made all of us rich: We are a rich family finally, because we have inherited a great legacy, a richness beyond money.

Our many memories now tease the passions of our lives, lives that could not have been lived without our "Why-Nona?" and her "Frank husband." But now they are together again. His mission is complete, and now it is our responsibility to insure that the heaven we seek is the one we will receive. One of my hopes is that wherever Frank and Nona are—and they ARE together—that each of them can simultaneously enjoy the low and high volume of their television set.

For many years I suffered because I could not say words of endearment to Frank without hollering loudly, because of his deafness. And even if he did hear what I heard coming from my shouting mouth, it never sounded intimate, no matter how hard I tried. And the pathos was made even greater because I knew that he could only see a shadow of who I am…

So now, dear Father, for the first time in many years, I can say to you in a softer, pleasant voice that all can hear, from a radiant countenance: "l love you, please say hello to Mom and Stevee."

•••

A few years ago, I made a short slide loop video in tribute to Dean and Gerry Schwarz in connection with an exhibition at the Hearst Center for the Arts. It can be viewed online here. Dean's memoir of his father was initially published in Ballast Quarterly Review Vol 20 No 4 Summer 2005.

from memories of a catholic girlhood / Mussolini

Mary Snyder Behrens / Backpack 2026

Mary MacCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), p. 50—

It is our parents, normally, who not only teach us our family history but who set us straight on our own childhood recollections, telling us that this cannot have happened the way we think it did and that that, on the other hand, did occur, just as we remember it, in such and such a summer when So-and-So was our nurse. My own son, Reuel, for instance, used to be convinced that Mussolini had been thrown off a bus in North Truro, on Cape Cod, during the war. This memory goes back to one morning in 1943 when, as a young child, he was waiting with his father and me beside the road in Welfleet to put a departing guest on the bus to Hyannis. The bus came through, and the bus driver leaned down to shout the latest piece of news: "They've thrown Mussolini out." Today, Reuel knows that Mussolini was never ejected from a Massachusetts bus, and he also knows how he got that impression.

poet e.e. cummings / elephants were his totem

John Dos Passos, The Best of Times: An Informal Memoir. New York: New American Library, 1966, p. 135—

[American writer E.E.] Cummings' delight in certain things was contagious as a child's. Christmas tree balls, stars, snowflakes. Elephants were his totem. I would never have enjoyed snow so much if I hadn't walked around Washington Square with Cummings in a snowstorm. He loved mice. He had a great eye for sparrows and all pert timid bright-eyed creatures.

The last time I saw him the summer before he died he was entertaining a tame chipmunk. We ate supper on the porch of his father's old hilltop house in the woods above Silver Lake. The chipmunk kept popping through the vines and out onto the brick floor of the porch for peanuts. You couldn't tell whether Cummings or the chipmunk enjoyed the little scene more. They had the same glint in their eyes. They both looked their best.

the sunset tree / tum, tum, tum, and tum again

Above Until now, I hadn't realized that British novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902), as in Erewhon, was also a capable artist, as confirmed by the self-portrait reproduced here.

•••

Samuel Butler The Way of All Flesh. London: Grant Richards, 1903, pp. 109-110—

In the course of the evening they came into the drawing room, and, as an especial treat, were to sing some of their hymns to me, instead of saying them, so that I might hear how nicely they sang. Ernest was to choose the first hymn, and he chose one about some people who were to come to the sunset tree. I am no botanist, and do not know what kind of tree a sunset tree is, but the words began, ‘‘Come, come, come; come to the sunset tree for the day is past and gone.” The tune was rather pretty and had taken Ernest’s fancy, for he was unusually fond of music and had a sweet little child’s voice which he liked using.

He was, however, very late in being able to sound a hard "c” or “k,” and, instead of saying “Come,” he said ‘Tum, tum, tum.”

"Ernest,” said Theobald, from the arm-chair in front of the fire, where he was sitting with his hands folded before him, “don’t you think it would be very nice if you were to say ‘come’ like other people, instead of ‘tum’?”

"I do say tum,” replied Ernest, meaning that he had said "come.”

Theobald was always in a bad temper on Sunday evening. Whether it is that they are as much bored with the day as their neighbors, or whether they are tired, or whatever the cause may be, clergymen are seldom at their best on Sunday evening; I had already seen signs that evening that my host was cross, and was a little nervous at hearing Ernest say so promptly “I do say tum,” when his papa had said he did not say it as he should.

Theobald noticed the fact that he was being contradicted in a moment. He got up from his armchair and went to the piano.

“No, Ernest, you don’t,” he said, “you say nothing of the kind, you say ‘tum,’ not ‘come.’ Now say ‘come’ after me, as I do.”

“Tum,” said Ernest, at once; “‘is that better?” I have no doubt he thought it was, but it was not.

“Now, Ernest, you are not taking pains: you are not trying as you ought to do. It is high time you learned to say ‘come,’ why, Joey can say ‘come,’ can’t you, Joey?”

“Yeth, I can,” replied Joey, and he said something which was not far off “come.”

“There, Ernest, do you hear that? There’s no difficulty about it, nor shadow of difficulty. Now, take your own time, think about it, and say ‘come’ after me.”

The boy remained silent a few seconds and then said “tum” again.

I laughed, but Theobald turned to me impatiently and said, ‘‘Please do not laugh, Overton; it will make the boy think it does not matter, and it matters a great deal;” then turning to Ernest, he said, “Now, Ernest. I will give you one more chance, and if you don’t say ‘come,’ I shall know that you are self-willed and naughty.”

He looked very angry, and a shade came over Ernest’s face, like that which comes upon the face of a puppy when it is being scolded without understanding why. The child saw well what was coming now, was frightened, and, of course, said ‘tum’ once more.

“Very well, Ernest,” said his father, catching him angrily by the shoulder, “I have done my best to save you, but if you will have it so, you will,” and he lugged the little wretch, crying by anticipation, out of the room. A few minutes more and we could hear screams coming from the dining room, across the hall which separated the drawing room from the dining room, and knew that poor Ernest was being beaten.

“I have sent him up to bed,” said Theobald, as he returned to the drawing room, "and now, Christina, I think we will have the servants in to prayers,” and he rang the bell for them, red-handed as he was.

dumbstruck / a cultural history of ventriloquism

Above The dust jacket of my favorite book about the history of ventriloquism—Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. UK: Oxford University Press, 2001—and below my childhood attempt at the same.

he paced the deck with his bantam swagger…

Digital Montage / Roy R. Behrens © 2012

John Dos Passos, The Best of Times: An Informal Memoir. New York: New American Library, 1966, p. 20—

He was particularly fond of crows. He said their caw-caw was really ha-ha. They were laughing at us. He would dance his little dance and pace the deck of the Gaivota with his bantam swagger and laugh back at the laughing crows: "Ha haha."

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cartoonist recalls meeting famous US generals

Sherman montage / © Roy R. Behrens

Walt McDougall, This Is the Life! New York: Alfred Knopf, 1926—

I was born in 1858, in Newark, NJ, and about ten years later the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, took me in hand and, recognizing qualities not yet discernible by parents, teachers or companions, with one prophetic sentence planted in me a firm, enduring conviction that I was destined for great things, along with a deep-seated aversion for hard work. The exact date of this memorable event may be found by ascertaining just when President Grant drove the famous Dexter around the track at Waverley Fair Grounds, a couple of miles south of Newark.

I was there with about half the boy population, but every incident of the day is forgotten except this historic happening. Loitering back of the judge's stand, a circular structure, the vast crowd blocked my view except aloft to this bird-house wherein I knew the President and a number of notables were watching the races. An enclosed stairway led to the upper platform, supported by a three-inch post, and urged by Destiny and exuberant vitality, I amused myself by climbing up this support. Reaching the platform, I was, of course, checked by the paneled balustrade and slid down, but on a third or fourth attempt I looked up to find a bearded face looking down upon me with kindly amused eyes. A hand was extended to me and raising mine, I was drawn up and lifted over the balustrade.

"You'll get up in the world, my boy!" said the bearded man as he set me down. Every eye in the judge's stand was fixed upon me and I expected an instant expulsion, but a pleasant grin upon the handsome face of Patrick Quinn, the Secretary of the Waverley Association and a friend of my family, gave me some confidence. I stared eagerly about me but saw no face resembling the well-known one of General Grant. After a moment, Congressman Courtland Parker, also a family friend, asked me with a teasing smile: "Who are you looking for, son?"

"Why, I'm looking for General Grant!" I stammered. "I thought he was up here."

What he replied I cannot recall, but there was a general laugh following it, and in my embarrassment I turned about toward my introducer as a refuge. Instantly I recognized the familiar face, but wreathed in a broad smile. The shock was such that I bolted down the stairway, unlatched the door and fled. Before I reached home I was highly exultant, but when I told my story my mother was deeply mortified by such unseemly conduct and insisted that I write the President an apology. Poor mother, with six boys to guide, had none as erratic as I, and she feared that my little adventure would get into the paper, but, unfortunately, it didn't.

One day in '86 I went with James Kelly, the sculptor, to Grant's house in 65th Street to watch him make some sketches for a battle monument he was designing. I asked the General if he remembered driving Dexter at Waverley. He said that he had driven the horse several times but did not recall the name of the place in New Jersey, and he was highly amused when I related how he had uplifted me and given me a slogan to live up to.

•••

Somewhere about the same time as the Waverley incident a great Industrial Exposition, the first of its kind, I think, in our quiet city, was opened at the Washington Street Rink and General William Tecumseh Sherman was the main attraction. An immense throng attended that formed an endless line to shake hands with the hero of the March to the Sea. I remember well the gaunt yet handsome figure he made as he underwent this ordeal. I slipped into the slow-moving line and finally felt the tingling thrill of contact with that smooth but formidable sword-hand. The sensation was delicious, but, not content, I wormed myself into line again and took another electric shock. When I reached him for a third thrill, the General glared down upon me and said gruffly:

"You get out of here! I've shaken hands with you twice already!"

One evening years afterward when I had come to know him, as I shall relate in another place, I told of this incident at a big theatrical banquet. The General wrinkled his brow meditatively for a moment, then smiled and said:

"Why, I remember that little episode very well, but you've got it wrong. Didn't I kick you? Seems to me I did!"

"You did not, General, but I deserved it," I replied. "I suppose it irks you to discover that you neglected an opportunity?"

"Well! Well, I still think I did!" he insisted, grinning. "Anyway, I guess I knocked a lot of conceit out of you!"

dream-like substitutions / Guiseppe Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo, Fruit Basket (upsidedown reversible)

During all the years I taught university-level art and design (about 45 years), among the most pleasurable aspects was the process of inventing hands-on studio exercises which I presented to students to solve. 

Everyone was given the same problem, but the solutions that resulted were invariably different, often surprisingly. Each problem was presented to the assembled group, but each student worked alone on his / her answer. No one knew what the other would do until the day of the critique, at which time everyone's work was revealed.

The problems were sometimes derivative of certain kinds of imagery, which often as not were indebted to historical styles of art. In one of those problems for example (of which five responses are reproduced below), which I presented to freshmen, I gave a prefatory talk about the portrait paintings of the Italian Mannerist artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), one of which is shown in the reproduction above.

In the Modern era, it was often claimed that Arcimboldo had anticipated the dream-like qualities of Surrealism, since the bulk of his paintings consist of surprising portraits that were made by combining bits and pieces of non-portraits, such as plants, animals, flowers, fish, and so on. Using cut-out fragments of magazine photographs (this predates the use of computers), the students were instructed to devise comparable portraits.

Five of those are shown below. I regret that so many years have passed that I no longer have a record of the names of the students who made these.

the purposeful use of confusion / invention is

Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, n.d.), p. 145—

One day [German Dadaist artist Kurt] Schwitters decided he wanted to meet [German artist] George Grosz. George Grosz was decidedly surly; the hatred in his pictures often overflowed into his private life. But Schwitters was not one to be put off. He wanted to meet Grosz, so [Walter] Mehring took him up to Grosz's flat. Schwitters rang the bell and Grosz opened the door.

"Good morning, Herr Grosz. My name is Schwitters."

"I am not Grosz," answered the other and slammed the door. There was nothing to be done.

Half way down the stairs, Schwitters stopped suddenly and said, "Just a moment."

Up the stairs he went, and once more rang Grosz's bell. Grosz, enraged by this continual jangling, opened the door, but before he could say a word, Schwitters said "I am not Schwitters, either." And went downstairs again. Finis. They never met again.

Koestler on creativity

Remembering AK

plastic surgeon from Michigan meets the pope

Roy R. Behrens, Bus to Beijing, digital montage (©2004)

Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise (Pleasantville NY: Akadine Press, 2001), p. 46—

[In 1958, four days before the death of Pope Pius XII, British actor Alec Guinness was allowed to join an audience with the Holy Father, in a group that consisted primarily of plastic surgeons. Guinness stood “near the end of the line next to a middle-aged American couple,” where] I didn’t grasp what the Pope said to me...but I assumed it was about surgical alterations to the face and not about theatrical make-up; but I did catch every word said by the Americans. They both kneeled to kiss the Fisherman’s Ring, and then the man burst into loud sobs, the tears coursing down his face. The Pope [who was suffering from hiccups] patted him, took his hand, saying the Italian equivalent of “There! There!” and the man grasped his white cassock. The wife explained her husband away with a motherly smile. I imagined her to be a woman who would not have permitted him to buy his own shirts, socks or underpants. “He’s so moved, Your Holiness,” she said. “It is such an honor to meet you. Isn’t it, dear? He’s always like this on great occasions. Aren’t you, dear? Oh, he’s very moved! And just think, Your Holiness—we’ve come all the way from Michigan!” The Pope mastered a hiccup. “Michigan?” “Sure, Michigan.” “I know Michigan,” the Pope said, and managing to free himself from the plastic surgeon’s grip he raised a hand in blessing: “A special blessing on Michigan!” Those were probably the last words of English he spoke. The entourage sped him away from the audience chamber. His private doctor followed, glowering at each of us in turn as he passed.

pus-tilence / the god of war is drunk with blood

Sherwood Anderson in H.H. Campbell, ed., The Sherwood Anderson Diaries, 1936-1941. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987—

Went with Katy and Mims to a German place in Philadelphia [in 1936]. Danced. It was hot and I took off my coat. They saw my brown shirt and cheered. They thought me a Nazi.

•••

William Blake—

The god of war is drunk with blood,

The earth doth faint and fail;

The stench of blood makes sick the heav'ns;

Ghosts glut the throat of hell!

•••

Anon—

There is a pus on the Presidency.

art prank / replacing old sockets with new ones

Roy R. Behrens, Deplorable Strikes ©2004

Jeffrey Vallance, quoted in Pranks, an edition of Re/Search (February 1988), p. 115—

One day I walked around the Museum looking at paintings and noticed that underneath them were all these wall sockets. So I bought a number of wall sockets and painted stupid little scientific scenes on them, like microscopes and dinosaurs and cows and slabs of butter. I showed up at the Museum in a janitor's outfit, with a name tag and a toolbox, and started replacing the old wall sockets with my new ones. I had friends in the hallway who would whistle every time a guard came near—then I'd go somewhere else. Sometimes I had to move furniture out of the way, and if ladies would be sitting down I'd have to say, "Can you please move? I have to fix this wall socket." Nobody caught me. I sent out a bunch of invitations, just like a real show, and people came down. I made up some nicely illustrated programs, and sent one to the Museum to tell them about my project. I thought I'd get some sort of reaction...but I never heard from them...they hushed the whole thing up, and the wall sockets remained there for about two years.

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have shriveled testicle from mumps / can't marry

Roy R. Behrens, Levitation © 2004

Danny Ballow, quoted in Elizabeth Stone, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us (New York: Times Books 1988) p. 208—

It began with him [my father] telling me about how he had the mumps, and then leaps forward to my parents' courtship by mail when he was in America and she was still in London. He told me that during the course of the correspondence, he wrote, "I think I have to tell you something. I have a shriveled left testicle, and I can't marry you because I'm not able to have children."

He sealed the letter and mailed it, and then he thought, "Oh no, what did I do?" He went to the mailbox but the postman had already come and taken the letter. So he went down to the central mail office in Brooklyn...and they said, "Well it's somewhere in all these sacks." My father said, "I've got to get it." And he went through the sacks. I have this image of my father going through millions of letters. And he found the letter! He tore it up, and he didn't send it.

William Blake, neuroscience, esthetics & sports

Above William Blake Poster (2011) © Roy R. Behrens.

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Roy R. Behrens, Art, Design, and Brain Research: Non-Scientific Thoughts about Neuroesthetics in Gestalt Theory, Vol 35 No 2 (2013), pp 169-182—

Today, when I think about defining art (in truth, it’s something I usually try to avoid), I am reminded of an old routine that was part of a Monty Python comedy in 1972. It was a parody of an athletic competition, and one segment featured a sports-running contest in which the participants were "people with no sense of direction." In that sketch, the athletes were shown in their starting positions, awaiting the sound of the pistol. When the gun sounded, they all ran off—not down the track as expected, but instead in a wacky confusion of speeds, directions and running styles.…

I find it ironic that artists today are distressed by the imbalance of public devotion to art and athletics, and the seemingly limitless funding that goes to competitive sports in our society. It is typical for an artist to ask: Why isn't such funding given to the arts instead? Why is there so little coverage of art in the news when such excessive attention is given to sports? Why does art have such low priority in public education? In short: Why don't people take art seriously? I suspect this is largely explainable by the fact that in art, as widely practiced now, just as in the Monty Python sketch, there is no credible "contest" to watch.

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

end of performative writing / writing for voice

Roy R. Behrens © 2005

Above Exhibition flyer for works by Mary Snyder Behrens (2005).

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William H. Gass, interviewed in Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, eds., Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 158—

I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It's destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed...By the mouth for the ear: that's the way I'd like to write. I can still admire the other—the way I admire surgeons, broncobusters, and tight ends. As writing, it is that foreign to me.

info online

how do you like your blue-eyed bird, mr. death?

Roy R. Behrens, © digital montage

Above One of my early digital montages (its title and date I can't recall). At the time I was interested in Arts and Crafts designer William Morris (that's Jane Morris leaning leftward), and Buffalo Bill (behind and above the target). One day we discovered that a bird (a starling) had been trapped in our wood stove, where it died and remained somewhat preserved. The feather colors were astonishing, and I decided I should place its body on a flat bed scanner, then use the result in a montage. Perhaps I also had in mind that wonderful e.e. cummings poem about the demise of Buffalo Bill: "How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mister Death."

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Wilhelm Reich, Passion of Youth: An Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988, p. 10—

Once I was playing by the fence and a peasant boy my age [whom he was forbidden to play with] was watching me from a few meters away. Suddenly he grabbed a stone, I presume as a joke, and threw it at me. It hit my forehead and I bled a little. He certainly had not intended to be mean. My mother washed my forehead and told my father [who was the boss of the other boy's father] what had happened. Father became enraged. He summoned the child and the child's father. After referring briefly to the incident, he gave the father a dreadful beating. The peasant endured it quietly, without defending himself. As he walked off with his child, I could see him beating him the whole way home. The boy screamed frightfully. I was very upset, but said nothing and crept away to hide. I was about eight years old.

Behrens, Dreams of Fields (2025)

to catch a green lizard without its tail falling off

Above Roy R. Behrens, book cover design for Joseph Langland, The Sacrifice Poems. Cedar Falls IA: North American Review, 1975.

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Lawrence Durrell, quoted in George Plimpton, ed., The Writer's Chapbook (NY: Viking Press, 1989), pp. 107-108—

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off. In India when I was a boy they had great big green lizards there, and if you shouted or shot them their tails would fall off. There was only one boy in the school who could catch lizards intact. No one knew quite how he did it. He had a special soft way of going up to them, and he'd bring them back with their tails on. That strikes me as the best analogy I can give you. To try and catch your poem without its tail falling off.

more info

Rainbow / machine-stitched appliqué and thread

Mary Snyder Behrens © 1986

Above Mary Snyder Behrens, Rainbow Sleeves (1986). Machine-stitched appliqué and thread on found fabric. 19"h x 29"w. Collection of the Racine Art Museum, Racine WI.

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H.H. Green, Simple Life of a Commoner, 1911—

But of all the things I saw that day, there was one that so deeply interested me that I have never forgotten its exact appearance. It was a wonder to a boy of my age and would be of considerable interest even now. It was just a common ordinary pocket knife with a bone handle and blades of steel, but it contained 1,851 [because it was made to be shown for the first time at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, the first World's Fair, in 1851] of those steel blades, from one to two feet long and proportionally wide and thick, on down of all sorts and sizes till the smallest could not have been more than a quarter of an inch long. They were all open from the handle and stood out in all directions like the quills on a porcupine's back when he is on a war footing. Up to that time that was the greatest sight I had even seen. I have often thought since, if that knife had been lost for a thousand years and then found by some antiquarian, what a time the wiseacres might have had ever the monstrous size of a man, who, in the middle of the nineteenth century carried a pocket knife like that.

proof / the curse of whiskey undercuts longevity

Roy R. Behrens © 2011, digital montage (detail)

Robert Kosmicki, quoted in Steven J. Zeitlin, et al., A Celebration of American Family Folklore (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 57—

Well, my grandfather came from Poland, and he just died here about a year ago, at the age of ninety-five. I remember one thing he said. He was a very wise man, but he was kind of a boozer all his life... On his birthday or something like that I'd take him a bottle of bourbon. And he told me one day when I brought him a bottle of bourbon for his birthday—! think he was ninety-two at the time—he said that he had given up alcohol, that alcohol had killed two of his brothers and so he thought that it was time for him to quit, because he wasn't old enough to die yet. So I asked him about the brothers it had killed. And he told me it had killed his brothers Colin and Stanley. I checked up on it and found that Colin was ninety-two when he died and Stanley was eighty-nine.

art is rare, sacred and hard work / no short cuts

Mary Snyder Behrens, Drawn Conclusions No. 14, Cleave 2005

Anthony Burgess, But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwertyuiop and Other Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986)—

Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered. You can't create unless you're willing to subordinate the creative impulse to the construction of a form. But the learning of a craft takes time, and we all think we're entitled to short cuts…Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

slow art / deep-running skill and doggedness

Roy R. Behrens (©2011), Barbarian Seville. Digital book montage.

Robert Hughes in "A Bastion Against Cultural Obscenity" [a speech delivered at Burlington House, London] in The Guardian, June 3, 2004—

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in ten seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks into something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

See also "Art, Design and Brain Research: Non-Scientific Thoughts about Neuroesthetics" in Gestalt Theory (Vienna), 2013.

Indian eyes / the role of ocular culture in high art

© Mary Snyder Behrens

Above Mary Snyder Behrens, Title and current location unknown. Machine embroidered wall art / altered Brownie Scout uniform, ©1984.

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Ginu Kamani, “Code Switching” in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, ed., Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 99—

Indian lore is full of the magical power of the eyes—justified, in my view, as Indian eyes are truly incomparable. The cultural emphasis on implicit rather than explicit communication, on keeping emotions in check, on placing others before self, and observing duty-bound restrictions on words and action, transforms ocular communication into a high art. In the Vedas, the visual gaze is considered as potent as the transmission of semen between bodies. Westerners are often entranced by the eyes of Indian gurus and holy men, whose gaze casts an enticing spell. Many have felt hypnotized, submitting to a power they cannot fathom.

not funny adults / do you know what happened

Above Roy R. Behrens, acrylic painting [title and whereabouts unknown], 1968.

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Deborah Andersen, Dialogue: An Art Journal {March/April 1987), p. 50—

In 1948 when I was six years old, I was selected to appear on Art Linkletter's radio program People Are Funny. The night before the show, my mother worked feverishly getting me ready. On the show I was the first child to be announced. Art Linkletter asked me "Debby, do you know what happened last night?" In my cutest little voice, I responded, "No, what?" There was hysterical laughter. Without saying another word to me, Art Linkletter turned to the next child and asked him the same question. He answered, "President Truman was elected." I have spent the rest of my life trying to figure out what happened.

•••

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook