Reasons for Art & Jack
by Jeff Potter
The Question of Jack
To me, despite any other feelings one might have about Jack’s work, to be realistic and fair about it one has to deal with its objective facts. No one cares whether anyone likes it or not. That’s not the point of art, criticism, opinions or tolerance. What we want to know is What is it worth? Try to answer that question to the best of your ability, for your own good. If you don’t develop such a skill, if you persist in bailing out in the modern way, you might miss out on many important things in life. Here’s my rundown on the facts of Jack. How do you answer them?
How to Criticize Art
Taste. To illustrate the problem with being content with a conclusion that Jack’s art, or any art, is “just a matter of taste,” name other artists whom you react to like Jack or decide to treat like Jack. I haven’t totally figured this out yet, but I suspect that true dislike of an artist comes from either not understanding them or from seeing that they’ve sold themselves out or that they deal with irrelevant concepts. So we don’t just use taste, we judge based on the facts we know or which we bother to find out. The ‘taste’ issue, I suspect, is largely a euphemism. If an artist passes our most basic tests, it seems like we at least leave the door open about them in some way because we might be able to learn something from them, they might be an acquired taste and so forth. Even those we don’t like, we typically don’t loathe or totally strip them of all merit, as so many feel free to do to Jack. Or we say they’re just not artists, but knickknack-crafts types, hacks, coasters, copycats or shills. But if they seem to us both that they ARE artists AND that they disgust us or have no merit, then there is perhaps a good chance that something more is going on, that the story isn’t as simple as it seems.
Criticism.
Criticism and opinion should be as objective as possible for it to be useful to anyone. It’s not entirely achievable, but it’s the orientation to have. By ‘objective’ I mean that not all views of an event are equally valid. People who exercise certain skills are more there than others and see what is happening more accurately. We should welcome further refinement of our conclusions at any time. I suspect this approach will draw plenty of fire today, but I likewise suspect that this just shows how far our culture has declined, that we don’t even know what art is for anymore or why we do it. (Hint: it’s not just to kill time, for fun, or to express some casual sense of self.) This approach is the opposite of artspeak. So, how to do it? If you’re rusty, start by answering the following questions whenever you see art and you’ll be on your way to understanding both art and yourself, and to helping others better understand what you’ve seen and what really happened:
- What is the artist attempting? What are the questions he poses, the challenges he gives himself. Trite or meaty? Does he set up straw men or go for the heart of the matter?
- Does the artist achieve what he set out to do? If he fails are his failures understandable or to be held against him? The bigger, bolder and braver the attempt the more tolerance allowed. Is he lazy? Does he blunder from willful blindness? This sort of failure is less tolerable.
- Have you seen similar attempts? Compare artists. Is another artist doing the same thing better? Is there room for both? It helps to focus on ‘whose ox is being gored’ when evaluating a response. If you react, notice what part of you is reacting and why. How comfortable are we ever with the truth?
- What tradition is the art part of? Does he declare himself part of any tradition? Is he right? Is the artist pushing this heritage further or rehashing old stuff?
- Lastly, is he telling the truth? This isn’t as easy as it might seem. You have to press for it to get close enough to earn anyone’s respect. Superficial truth results in simple facts, unexamined contradictions. Finding useful truth involves resolving or at least confronting one contradiction after another. Is the artist on such a path?
Jack’s Styles
Now that we know how to judge art, let’s look at Jack’s facts. Picasso developed cubism, Pollock did splatter, Dizzy Gillespie did bebop. Over his decades of development, Jack created SIX new styles. Are these inventions an achievement worth noting? Debate and discuss the following explanation of Jack’s styles.
1. Enema Verite’.
This style is inspired by film and cinema verite’, or the gritty realism used in modern movies. Jack says “Nixon gave his enemies a sword, I give the Mall Builder an enema.” They might not like what he says, but he’s going to say it anyway. Jack goes in through the backdoor, so to speak, to show us the truth about ourselves, something no reporter or writer who’s lecturing out on the front steps can ever come close to and keep his job. Jack finds out the ways in which the emporer has no clothes and tells him so. This helps the emporer and the public, both of whom are being kept in the dark. But it enrages the courtiers who are benefiting from the illusion. A couple tools of great use to this style are first, archeology, in which Jack was trained and showed natural skilltoo much for middle management’s comfort. The courtiers are happy to be paid to dig into other people’s cultures, preferably dead or weak ones. But what happens when we apply archeology and anthropology to, say, a university faculty? Well, it’s fascinating, as they say, how you don’t get published and lose your job. An effective tool for getting truth and helpful info out to those who encounter bureaucrats, however. The other big tool is Underware, by analogy with software and hardware. This technique describes what progress and technology mean to us today, it gets at the underlying form. Superficial changes are obvious, foregone conclusions. What does technology mean, there’s the meat. Fascinating that no one has taken up Underware in the 15 years since Jack first proposed it to IBMand lost his job. Just before most IBM’ers lost their jobs, too. Funny that the main reason IBM imploded was that they had no idea what their own products meant to people. Are you getting a feel for the importance of enema verite’ yet? The real war never gets in the papers, Emerson said. Put it in with enema verite’. If progress is trash, say it. Walk around your town behind the scenes and show what’s really going on. Chase out the fourflushers. And keep chasing them. Because they won’t give up. They’re winning hands down. They’ve found the perfect formula: get everyone greedy, top down, give us all officer mentality so we know what to do before being told: stand up or cover your butt? You know the drill. The business majors are in charge. The business of business isn’t business but culture. Get in charge of the Zeitgeist and you win without trying. Then you auger in a few years later, because it’s all lies. They now sell books like soap even though, as a result, ever fewer people read or even know what it means to learn, even as they cram ever more info down their own throats to keep up with their neighbor. They sell education as entertainment. They teach self-exploitation. Instead of using culture as a mirror to see and improve ourselves, their goal is to hide and fleece. Squeeze every penny. Art survived before because the business majors were busy elsewhere, but now that they’ve taken an interest, watch out! It’s almost a done deal now. To find out what this all means, dig beneath the booster facade and describe modern life, warts and all. With your own life most exposed. One can only work with what one has experience of and knows personally. This puts you at risk. With the most to gain. Most to lose. That’s the spirit of the sword…and enema. Hurts but someone has to do it.
2. Swiss-Family Paranoia-Critical.
Comes from Salvadore Dali and painting. If realism is surreal, then surrealism is realistic. You do your best when asked for it, send it out, describe what happens to it and how that makes you feel. If they DO start trying to bury and suppress you, that’s part of the story! You don’t politely play their game and go home when snubbed, you don’t edit out how the game is rigged. You keep plowing it all in, throwing it back at them. They’re responsible like all of us for what they do, right? THEN see what happens to you. It will get so outlandish that fiction couldn’t be stranger. Do all this while being a good father, good husband, good son, good neighbor. Include lots of kids, get togethers, cooking, local trades jobs, research, road-trips and round-robins. Plus being rejected and fired. Nonstop. Being a drunk, a lout, an adulterer would decrease the pressure, you’d be like them. Then how could you look at your kids at dinnertime? Anyone can stand proud being a decent poor person. So stand your ground for common decency. Retreat if need be. No shame in defeat if you never give in. We’re all in this together.
3. Crank-Lettres
. From the reflective side of elite literature and belle-lettres. Keep a journal and publish it, write to friends, publish that. The writer’s life. Write from the inspiration of the greats and take our cultural elite and their system at their word, exposing what happens as a result. When someone likes a writer, they typically want to read everything they can get their hands on. Belle-lettres lets one do that to an extent. Crank-lettres anticipates the rush and includes it all together from the start, in the order in which it all really came down. Watch the various triumphs and defeats happen in their natural setting. See the letters to the editors and friends built into the novels right when they were written. See how they all play off each other, forming a whole. Don’t break it up like the gatekeepers insist. Since when have they been right? The writer is king. Until he gives in and lets the business majors tell him his job.
4. Daily Typewriting.
Comes a little from Kerouac’s famous method of typing nonstop from a big scroll of paper, but not really. It’s mainly from Dizzy Gillespie and what his biographer called his ‘everyday progressive development’, as in “Every time I hear Dizzy play, I think ‘He was just now developing into what you heard tonight.'” Create live, online, without a net. Witness to the truth of your life. Get the brushwork down and the roadwork in then the let hand have its way. (Like Henry Miller said “Don’t change a word. They’ll shit on you anyway, you might as well have your say.” Or Picasso, he wouldn’t let himself change what he did, why would he let anyone else?) So the writing and editing happens automatically. It gets so ingrained you couldn’t quit if you wanted to. But there’s a difference between addiction and the planned results of years of discipline. It’s automatic like the famous japanese caligraphers. That is, not automatic. No second-guessing gets in the way, when it does, include it. Development has its ups and downs. But when it hits critical mass, it gets a life of its own.
5. Stark-Nakedism.
From Walt Whitman: “Hankering, gross, nude.” Don’t hide. We are who we are, warts’n’all. You can’t judge a culture unless you consider it all. Write with the head, heart and balls, all in sync. Dredge the black heart’s truth of yourself up into the light of day and expose it. So you know what you’re dealing with. People might not like it, but there’s no need to stop when you’re right. Use the assumptions that ‘all genius is local’ and that if the particular is desribed true enough it becomes universal to boost the raw nude to glory. New forms always meet resistance initially. The truer it is, the longer it takes usually. This is why the artist is an outcast, why he raves. He’s a scary sight. We’re not used to it. Shock theatre doesn’t come close. Bigfoot comes close. The trail of water leading back to the swamp. Often the artist has to be dead or beyond help, often the civilization has to go first. But how does this square with what today’s elite say? That there’s no great masterpieces going unpublished. Speak with such candor, in the land of the freest art, and see where you get.
6. Bebop Musical.
From jazz. Jack is ole Johnny One Note. No need to be fancy, to play licks that are sure to wow the crowd. No need for glitz that impresses but doesn’t last. Don’t play to the crowd, play to the band. If they like you, you know you’re on to something. Jack just keeps playing his handful of leitmotifs. Gives a sense of melodic space to the writing. (Compare with some popular complex, rich, showy writing out there today.) Use natural, playful, meaningful repetition and variation to get at the depths and the real rhythms. Bebop was rejected at first. No one would play with Diz. When he beat them toe to toe, it became the only thing. Same thing happened to Cannonball Adderly. He was considered a pariah hick until he whupped em fair and square. Use John Cage’s ideas about noise, silence and everyday sounds to bring to life Emerson’s idea that it isn’t meter but a meter-making argument that makes poetry. The others will play with you as soon as they tame you and turn what you do into licks they can follow, imitate. It’s a lonely road staying out ahead. Charlie Parker never did play a concert. It was always the next club down the road. Bebop is always from the truthful perspective of the underdog, from someone who is compelled to tell it like it is no matter the consequence. The standard our literature has striven for since the start, but which it rarely touches. Our star literature today could be read aloud in any corporate boardroom without raising an eyebrow. Fully vetted carbon copies of Ray Carver and his buddies. But is it music? How long will anyone remember it? Ornette Coleman said he played out where the leaves trembled, that he danced in his head. No one would play with him either. Be Ornette Coleman.
Jack’s Job
Jack says his job is Cultural Operator. In myth, this is the guy who resolves the crisis of the culture, who struggles to see, who cuts to the chase and rides it on out. His curse is to be right but never believed, like Cassandra. So Jack finds out what’s happening and what it means to be here, now. And reports back. He dives to the bottom of the barrel and comes up with the pearls for us. He rides the horns of the modern dilemma without giving in to either side. Takes the good with the bad, up with the down. It all helps. Losing the house. The jobs. The rejections. Takes tight strings to make music. If they give you an inch, take a mile. Truth doesn’t stay put. You’re never done. Keep the pressure up. Stay right in the mainstream, so that you’ll find yourself against the grain, which is in the grain in America. New writing of merit has always been well-received here by plain folk readers, even if the publishers are scared to death of it. You can’t tell them anything they haven’t seen. All you can do is say Is it like this where you live? In this way you bring kindred spirits together to keep up the good fight. But if you only have friends, there’s no tension. If you do it right, you draw their fire. Truth steps on toes. If you have enemies you’re getting close. If they say you’re too fancy for plain readers and too crude for fancy readers, you’re getting close.
Jack’s Goal
To write in plain speech about subjects that matter. Do that and see what happens. The vernacular writer gets at complex things straight on. He redeems culture by going to the street and its folk, who don’t lie. No doubletalk or euphemisms there. Jack revives the American language, bringing back plainfolk terms and cadences by the bushel. Not just for affect either, of course not, how could you think such a thing? He uses it because it’s better. It helps him tell the truth. The topics, of course, are: race, sex, libel. Careers, work, money. Quality and commerce. He asks why aren’t these topics written about candidly anywhere else? Why is the obvious buried, suppressed? You don’t have to be banned when no one has heard of you in the first place. The libraries, newspapers and TV will see to that. Anyway, Jack goes around asking people and himself: How do you earn an honest living without dishonest customs? Did what you had to do to get what you got dilute what you got? What did you have to pay? Did you come out ahead or behind? What are the side effects for others? Simple questions.
Jack’s Format
He uses the multi-genre, multi-format approach. Each of his books includes: novels, plays, screenplays, short-stories, essays, memoirs, poems, vignettes, letters, queries, one-liners, blasts, broad-sides, bumper-stickers, catalogs, indexes, glossaries. Covering all categories from mystery to travelog to cooking show to x-rated movie. Using humor, tragedy, despair, vitriol, death’s-head grin. You get it all. Most writers let themselves be forced into one mold, as the price of admittance to a career. This price is charged by gatekeepers who don’t know what they’re doing, culturally. Or even commercially. They go out of business left and right. All they want to do it seems is save their jobs. As one imprint goes under, they lateral over to another. It seems like modern risk publishing means NO-risk publishing. All they want is celebrity and the sure thing. No one really respects that. Their product disappears without a trace. All they know is they’re getting smaller margins from ever more titles, trying to grab a bigger slice of a shrinking pie. Truth, quality, and culture take the hindmost. See what real diversity looks like for a change.
Jack’s Material
Jack uses his own life plus encyclopedic cultural references and anecdotes to illustrate events, challenges and feelings. Pithy mentions of interesting inside info from the movies, books, history, biography, music, society, war, military life, politics, all helping him find his way. From his life he draws mostly from family, military service, grad school, archeology, corporate life, IBM, state work, arts programs, publishing, mail art, cooking fishing, and driving around. Each adding its own special strength and atmosphere. Stories about and allusions to all these sources all working together. A quote about Mozart gets applied to an encounter with a loan officer. The personal particulars of Jack’s own quest are thus universalized. As I reader, I understand and am thus interested in more aspects of culture than I used to be. I read Shakespeare, Hemingway and Mailer in a new light. I ask questions I don’t see others asking. Jack is better than college.
Conclusion
With all this in mind, is it any wonder that Jack gets rated by an NEA committee as having zero talent on a scale of 1 to 10? When you see the awareness and pathos of all the query letters he composes, is it any wonder that all 100 of his books have been rejected? For 25 years? Does it tell you anything that in this country a writer can say “Give me back my manuscript, I’ve waited 25 years, I can wait 25 more.” Solzenhitzyn said that after only ten years of waiting. The truth of the gulag finally prevailed as communism fell. What does it mean that it has taken more than twice as long for the truth about us to get out?
Perhaps Jack’s decades of rejection had a secret benefit in allowing a unique treasure trove to come to fruition, unhampered by attention and celebrity, purified by the fire of failure which he USED rather than letting it make him bitter. Is this the only way it could have happened for our culture to be rescued? Perhaps Jack is the artist who is alone escaped to tell us the truth and show us new forms? If someone gets the career, can they keep developing as they need to? If so, in what cases has this happened? How does proper artistic development, how does the truth fit with the demands of legal, marketing and the intermeshed careers of many people as it must today if it hopes to see the light of day? Can it? To what extent have we benefited from the artists who use the method of the establishment? I suspect that careers stop development and that our culture hasn’t grown from a single one of them. Compare this to what might happen if Jack were to come to light.
With all this in mind, do you think it might be worth reading Jack to find out for yourself? Is it all just stories? And are they that bad?
