The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

This is a drawing of a root pulled from the ground. Unsigned but every bit the signature of its creator, it was done in oil crayon by an artist who was once my closest friend. A reckless vitality courses all along its length. The energy tensed in it reminds me of these lines by Dylan Thomas:
     "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
     Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
     Is my destroyer."
The drawing is taped to the wall above my desk. Sitting here writing, when I'm at a loss for words and growing desperate, my eyes seek it out, as though a transfusion of its sap might save me from the fear creeping up on me that I've got nothing to say.

I find it beautiful, but the drawing is just an offhand piece of work, tossed off by an artist who like most of us will go unremembered in order to make room for the next wave of the forgetful, the universe apparently needing things to be this way so as not to get bogged down. The drawing is beautiful but so in its own way is Nothing.

What makes the drawing not Nothing but Something to me, however, is the unsettling resemblance it has to the left side of the outline, from a certain angle, of a great work of sculpture from Greek antiquity--the powerful Nike of Samothrace, or Winged Victory, which now stands in the Louvre.  I scissored out this image from one of those Franconia bumper stickers that say, "Start Seeing Sculpture."

How is it, I wonder, that in infinity's vast inventory of random, freely meandering lines the contour of this smudged drawing of a root with dirt clinging to it should so closely (but not exactly) coincide to the outline of a picture of a goddess carved in marble more than two thousand years ago? Given to seeing faces in the wallpaper and the stains on the ceiling, maybe all I'm seeing here is the Virgin in a burnt tortilla but everywhere you turn the world seems to reverberate with the idea that what goes around, comes around.

What's come around to the art world this past year, as chronicled in recent posts to this blog by Michael Fallon, is desolation. The collapse of the Minnesota Center for Photography and the imminent shutdown of the Minnesota Museum of American Art are just two of a growing number of casualties. But while institutions falter, crumble, and struggle to reinvent themselves, photographers are still making photographs, painters continue to paint, and musicians-- for no shortage of reasons--are still playing the blues. They have to--their compulsions demand it, so if we can leave off the handwringing for a moment, let's consider the possibility, shocking though it is to artists suddenly denied the nipple, that the creation of art might not be entirely contingent on the condition of the art world's infrastructure. It would be nice if that infrastructure were healthier, but art is weeds; it finds ways to push up through concrete.

One artist whose work pushes through is the irascible Scott Murphy, a painter from up near Duluth. Murphy planted his flag in the Twin Cities last spring with a mural on the corner of Fairview and University in St. Paul.

Done under the auspices of Forecast Public Art, the mural depicts the trolley (peopled with an interesting cast of characters. . .  check it out up close) that used to run along University and it anticipates the trains that will once the Light Rail is in. Murphy is one of the last of the artists who, like James Rosenquist, has painted billboards for a living. If Obama institutes a new WPA, Murphy and other artists who actually know how to paint ought to be unleashed on post offices all over the country, restoring the art of fresco to its former glory while pulling down a steady check.  

Committed but untenured artists have known something about uncertainty and the chronic lack of a steady check for years--the fear spreading through everybody's stomachs is not news to them. One of my favorite paintings of Murphy's is his Funding for the Arts.

Were the painting not the dead-accurate account that it is of things as they've been all along, you'd be tempted to call it prophetic. . . the ship aflame, she sent out an S.O.S. but things are not looking good for the SS Steinway.  What gets my respect is that Murphy says screw going down with the ship--he paints the damned thing instead.

Fire creates as much as it destroys. At iron-pours around the region, artists stoke crucibles to cast molten iron into the shapes of their obsessions. The iron is smelted from old steam radiators busted up with sledge hammers. When it reaches the temperature of hell it's poured almost white hot into molds that may or may not explode.

An iron-pour is an offering to the gods of uncertainty and risk. The gods shrug their shoulders at most of what comes out of the molds, but sometimes a piece emerges that seems fully to embody the elemental violence of the physics that gave it form.  Below is Matris Fe V, one of a series of works cast the last several years by the sculptor Felicia Glidden. Powerfully expressive of the process, it is a thing at once molten and frozen, solidified into a sort of three-dimensional photograph of a moment.

On a cooler note, sweeping the snow off his driveway recently, Willis Bowman, a Minneapolis artist and engineer, fell into a sort of dance with his broom. From the picture, it looks like it was a tango, the way those long, slinking glides, abrupt turns and dips are grooved into the snow.

Bowman lived in Japan for a few years as a child and remembers his parents taking him to Kyoto’s Ryoan-ji Temple with its Zen garden of rocks set in carefully raked white sand. Never one to think small, he’s now thinking about what you could do in a big parking lot with fifty people waltzing with as many brooms.