1st INSTALLMENT FLOWER POWER

All content of the Santa Fe Art Blog by Peter Gumaer Ogden: copyright 2008. All rights reserved. Reproduction, sale, or copying of this content is granted only by express email or other written permission from Peter Gumaer Ogden, P.O. Box 24045, Santa Fe, NM, 87502-0045, USA.

Dear Art Blog Readers Out There:

This is my first post. I will start by reviewing only one work of art from the current Flower Power exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art [Feb. 1-May 11,2008]. I would like to write more but after just dealing with almost 500 emails and a heavy enchilada meal followed by a murderously rich chocolate cake my energy level is waning fast. I am forcing myself to write about at least one piece tonight for the sake of 'getting started' with 'dissere blog. More will follow soon if the gallons of cholesterol and pounds of salt now coursing through my cardiovascular system do not snuff me out permanently during the night.

At the entrance to the exhibit a plaque states approximately:

" 1960's antiwar, anti-establishment. How artists have used the daisy in art and design from the 1960's until today. 'A simple form, but a complex symbol, the daisy has become an apt metaphor for optimism and protest in a time of turmoil." This made a lot more sense to me after viewing the exhibit than when I first read it. I was not previously familiar with daisies as anything more complex than a cheerful and hardy simple wildflower that children revel in ripping to shreds while reciting a riddle of love or as an appropriate and inexpensive if not free sentimental old fashioned gift for one's grandmother in June.

Initially my wild horse mind kept clinging to a "Driving Miss Daisy" mantra and I half expected to see her viewing this exhibit with me and her chauffeur.

DIVERGENCE/WANDERING MIND COMMENT:

It would be good to also experience an
art exhibit based upon the rose. This ever seductive flower has a long and fascinating history as well as female sexual and yin-yang existential symbolism. The rose would have been somewhat inappropriate to the '60's bohemianism [except in Jackie's White House] due to it's rather elitist and royal associations.

I recall in 1997 or 1998 attending an exhibit at an art museum in Provincetown where a contemporary nude painting had provoked an uproar among some of Cape Cod's more traditional lingering Puritans. The painting featured a nude male prominently displaying his provocatively excited stem.

When this sexually liberated artist was assailed by the wounded and scandalized Pilgrim community he stated something to the effect that there was little difference between a harmless cuddly flower and the blossoming male essence he had lovingly painted. As a result of this artist's benign horticultural opinion of naked human male floressence a small group of determined, reactionary puritanical critics stationed themselves in front of the museum entrance where, in protest they handed one rose to each about-to-be-visually-assaulted person who arrived to view the exhibit while the crumpet nibbling "demonstrators" somberly chanted "fleur d'homme, fleur d'homme" ; thusly these valiant Mayflower menaces proffered their prickly posies to make an art-politics statement which remains obscure to his day.

But that's P-town--a world and a planet where, unlike utopian multi-cultural [I want to see some homie's from the Bronx welcomed to the Plaza to blast their rap-hip-hop boom-boxes for twelve hours without being arrested as authentication of Santa Fe's proud "cultural inclusiveness" banner.] "Anglo-ism" dominates and is highly regarded, preserved, and awaits the next climate change supercharged nor-easter to expunge the last cold grain of this glacial sandbar from the coast of stiff New England and into the abyss of now codless Georges Bank.

BACK TO OUR MISSION:

1. Corita Kent's fluorescent, almost half tie-dyed imagery screams off the wall in blinding colors, small as it is, like some esoteric supercharged art nouveau parking lot signs. It's brightness virtually requires the viewer to employ a pair of sunglasses. Ari Onassis would have been pleased.

I seem to recall this was an era when a plethora of new, unprecedented, glowing neon paints became widely available. Kent's screen print of the famous photo of a somewhat dainty yet stylish young man inserting fragile, lacelike flowers into the determinedly inappropriate muzzles of military police guns is one of the most striking images in the exhibit and defines a substantial element of the -60'sU.S. anti-war movement flower child-hippie culture.

I was reminded of my cousin Sally who, as a flower child of this period fled oppressive Washington D.C. power politics to live in the Arizona desert grinding maize into meal with a stone mortar and pestle to sustain her nouveau-aboriginal anti-materialist lifestyle.

Most likely, considering the times and circumstances, these MP's guns were loaded when this photo was taken. The situation was tense and unpredictable with lethal intent. This image evokes the feeling of a man in front of a firing squad attempting to impossibly shield himself with his hands or a piece of clothing. When one considers that this utterly vulnerable and possibly suicidal young man might have suspected that the least accidental flinch on the part of the MP's could have resulted in a fatally explosive discharge one can only regard this immortal semi-mythic adolescent as an extremely courageous and or half mad individual.

The cheerful minty sweet colors in these prints contrast starkly with the dark subject matter in the same manner as the vulnerable youth clashes against the savage military threat which he attempts to stifle like a lamb against a pack of wolves.

To be continued...--Peter Gumaer Ogden: would-be art critic on the loose.