. . . this thing up for their magazine. I guess they'd heard me read it at the O+ Literary salon (which had the theme of "Home") and thought it'd be a nice thing in their publication. I offered to draw some illustrations, too. To my knowledge, it was never published. So here it is, years later, finally moved from some folder where I'd come across it from time to time and onto this blog!
“Home”
There are no spinster mourning doves, old and alone, divorced by a disgruntled spouse, for example, and kicked out of the familial nest constructed of her own spit and hard work and various found materials: pine needles, thread, little bits of fabric torn from a young girl’s dress by the thorns of the neighborhood honey locust and scrap scavenged from that selfsame tree by her or the chubby hubby dove, blades of grass and tiny fragile twigs, a rag-tag construction just strong enough to hold the hatchlings and the eggs that brought them. No spinster mourning doves mourning their failed marriages and relegated one sad day to swiping through the disheartening back waters of avian online dating sites such as FlightsOfFancy.com, MourningBecomesElectric.com, or the ever so popular just for this breed alone site: LoveyDovey.com.
And there are exactly zero barn owls flying around from nest to nest, spouse to spouse, one paramour to the next, heart-shaped faces framing eyes that are always on the lookout for the next new conquest, a feathery-downed newcomer ripe for “relations”, a downy fantasy fueling prurient interests and titillating thoughts of silently swooping in for the kill, so to speak. Zero barn owls sharpening their talons for the life of the lothario or the harlot on the wing. No. Amongst the twenty living species of this big, bad bird, infidelity and general barn owl sluttiness is unheard of. They meet, they mate, they roost, they raise their young. Year after year, and if anybody asks momma bird about the 10 or so chicks she’s raised in her life . . . if anybody asks that age old question: “same baby daddy?” the answer always comes back “yes”.
The ape, the lesser ape, the Gibbon ape, whatever name you want to call them by. You won’t find lonely gibbons wandering around the tree tops, swinging between lovers like Hugh Hefner or Dirk Diggler or any other alliterative purveyor of porn, because a) there is no porn in the animal kingdom because b) the critters are all naked all the time anyway and c) gibbons mate for life. The only swinging they do is called “brachiating”and they have specially adapted shoulder joints and unique ball-and-socket wrist joints that let them move at speeds up to 35 miles an hour and free-swing through the air for distances as much as 50 feet, which is maybe why these parkour champ chimps don’t have homes, per se, they have territories, which they singto protect, a few square miles of jungle forest that they claim for themselves and their family, and the whole family joins in to sing so loud to mark their land and keep the interlopers away and there’s not even a pillow to be found around anywhere to rest their simian heads on but still, with love, and singing, and joy, there is a home for their fine furry family.
And that’s only A-C…
And coyotes, too. Canis latrans. Also known as the American jackal. Carnivorous and occasionally omnivorous, its sexual appetites are slightly less adventurous…. Once a female coyote is “in the mood”, she sends out a scent signal that attracts a handful of suitors, who will dog her around for up to a month before she chooses “the one”. Then, she makes him wait. For 2-3 months the woo-er will bring her metaphorical flowers and chocolates in the form of fresh flesh: squirrels, chipmunks, even porcupine, until that romantic moment when she decides she has been sufficiently wooed and succumbs to his erotic entreaties. Now, Wikipedia says that the “copulatory tie” can last anywhere from 5-45 minutes (sound familiar?) and that after that happens, the couple remains strictly monogamous and begins the hard work of building or appropriating a den in which they can raise their young. Lined with dry grass and fur from her coat, the chatty couple only has about 2 months to get their lives in order for the joyous disorder to come: raising babies. Dogs that they are of the wild animal kingdom, they do notspend any extramarital time, as the phrase goes: “chasing tail”. They dig each other, dig a den, and raise their pups. Together.
All of them, like the diminutive prairie vole, mate for life. Profoundly social creatures, vole couples huddle together, snuggle, and groom each other, they share nest building and pup-raising and all the domestic bliss their little fast-beating hearts can handle; (up to 400 beats per minute!) and if a vole’s spouse gets snatched up one dark, fateful day by a cat or a crow or a passing fox, the surviving vole will notremarry. They will mourn. Voles are exemplars in the animal kingdom for exhibiting one of the behaviors that truly turns a house into a home: commitment.
Thank you, natural world for showing us the way home. Again and again.
Over the years, people have remarked to me repeatedly what a happy person I am. One said she reckoned I was the only truly happy person she'd ever known. I am happy. I really am. And I've mulled it over throughout the years, how I have come to be, perhaps, remarkably happy, happier than many.
What I've come up with is this. The serenity prayer. I read it when I was just a little boy. I don't know where I saw it but it just made sooooooo much sense to me. It came to resonate deeply inside of me. To my core. I never forgot it. Don't worry about the shit you can't control and try your best to make the other stuff better. So simple and, I speculate, a recipe for a happy life.
Years later, I discovered that it's a valuable part of AA, a program for which I have a great deal of respect; it having helped numerous friends live much better, sober lives.
Anyway, here it is, attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, Lutheran theologian (1892–1971)
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Below is my artist's statement about this project and below that is my response to the magazine's biography prompt: name 10 things you can't live without. Below all that is a link to the project on South Writ Large's website.
FUTURE CONDITIONAL
Lynching. Lynching. It means an extrajudicial murder, usually carried out by a mob, usually to bring what that mob thinks of as “justice.” Usually, but not exclusively, the method of lynching is hanging. Usually, historically, there were other means used as well: beating, shooting, evisceration. Usually, traditionally, it was perpetrated by mobs of white Americans, white Southern Americans against Black Americans: including women and children, but men mostly; it didn’t seem to matter. In California, mobs lynched Chinese-Americans, white Americans were lynched, Mexicans, Jews, Italians, Native Americans too. The list goes on. As Bobby Kennedy said, “A mob asks no questions.”
As Abraham Lincoln said, “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” And yet, mob law persists, perpetrated by racists or bigots or zealots in the name of religion or politics, fundamentalism or conservatism or fascism or xenophobia or just plain hatred, and encouraged by clerics and cult leaders and police chiefs and even by the president of the United States. According to an investigative article in the Guardian, between 1885 and 1915, an estimated 2,812 black men were lynched.1
From 1920 to 1938, in front of the NAACP headquarters in New York, a banner was hung on days when its message was literally true; its message was: “A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY.” It’s not clear how many times the banner appeared, but Wikipedia reports that it was flown “73 times in the period for lynchings in the state of Georgia alone.”2
Flag, announcing lynching, flown from the window of the NAACP headquarters on 69 Fifth Ave., New York City. Library of Congress.
Rodney King asked: “Can’t we all get along?” Eric Garner and countless others provided a grisly answer to King’s question with their final words: “I can’t breathe.” It’s a tragic call and response that has always undercut America’s claim of “liberty and justice for all.” Over and over and over again.
Sadly, lynching is as American as apple pie. Or peach pie. Or pecan pie. What a horrible legacy for a country to have. For MY country to have. We’ve always grappled with our baser instincts, our instincts for revenge and intolerance and vigilantism, but at some points during my life, it seemed maybe things would get better. Right now, late 2020, I’m a little hopeful even. Maybe it’s just my nature, maybe it’s the enduring power of the #BLM movement. Maybe it’s some strange feeling that, post-Trump, the pendulum of hatred can and will swing back into the realm of love and acceptance. Not all the way, mind you (my expectations are not that insanely hopeful), but, you know, just a little bit. And maybe even a little bit more later on.
Still, that hasn’t happened yet, and lynchings are still happening. Cutting lives short in the name of some perverse notion of justice or even in the name of law and order. Each life cut short had potential attached to it, the potential for a human to become something, to help others, to change the course of history or to simply make someone smile. Each lynching erased all such potential.
* * * * * *
That’s what this project, “Future Conditional,” is about, in a nutshell: imagining the lives that might have been led if they hadn’t been cut short. Each lynching erased the potential these lives had and, in these few “historical” marker mock-ups, I both create and commemorate what might have been. I’ve been making art in this vein for over a decade, subverting the format of the historical marker to highlight some of America’s most pressing political and social issues. To see my work in this vein, click here.3
* * * * * *
A procedural note: I made up each name. Pulled from thin air, or something I read long ago or wherever. Any similarities to persons living or dead is pure coincidence. I made up, obviously, their future lives, as bakers or lawyers or fathers or what-have-you. I tried not to make them all remarkable, and, in fact, for me, the most moving ones are the most ordinary. I made up their ages, too; the only part of each piece that is factual is the reason that they were attacked. So many lynchings were perpetrated for so many petty reasons. It’s almost as if there were a blood thirst amongst the populace and a switch that turned it on with the slightest touch. I chose a victim mix of Black and white and unspecified (though most of the unspecified were, in my head, Black, as the majority of lynching victims were), a mix of male and female, various ages, and though the places are not mentioned, the murders I highlighted happened in Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama.
I did all the inventing for a number of reasons. There are plenty of historically accurate listings of lynchings that can be found with a simple Google search. I easily could have used actual names and actual details of lives cut short, but those people have actual living relatives somewhere and I did not want to co-opt their family history for my own art project. Also, my hope was that making them more fictional would make them more universal. Because, sadly, this kind of violence is universal.
Lastly, the dates on the markers range from 1965 to 2020. I reasoned that actual historical markers are put up anywhere from a few years after the event they mark to a few decades after. I used 1965 as the earliest date because it was the year of the Selma to Montgomery marches and the infamous “Bloody Sunday” attack on Civil Rights marchers, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams. I used 2020 in order to reference the Coronavirus and to signal that lynchings continue to this present day.
A personal note: This stuff is so very horrible. Researching these atrocities is emotionally trying, crying is common. It shakes a soul to know what humans can do to each other. It shakes a white man’s soul to know what other white men have done and continue to do to Black men and to others and even to each other. It shakes a parent’s soul, a sibling’s soul, a son’s soul, to imagine the abrupt loss of life and the sad tragic impact it would have had on loved ones. It shakes an American’s soul to know that all this hatred made manifest is not just our past, it’s also our present.
Now is the time for all of us to be, not just not a racist, but to be actively engaged in becoming an anti-racist, in the hope that racism and its horrible manifestations are not a part of our future, too. (Click here to watch Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, talk a little bit about this pro-active stance.)
A little note for the grammarians in the bunch. “Would have been,” as used in some of these imagined “historical” markers is the “perfect continuous conditional tense.” Still, I liked “Future Conditional” as the title, as it both invites the consideration of verb tense names and sums up the focus of this project.
1 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/27/lynching-naacp-photographs-waco-texas-campaign
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_man_was_lynched_yesterday_flag
3 https://currenthistoricalmarkers.blogspot.com/
South Writ Large artist's bio:
Raised in Cincinnati and educated at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Norm Magnusson lived in Atlanta before moving to New York to work in advertising, which he eventually left to pursue a career as an artist. He has shown in galleries and museums in New York and New Zealand, London, Normandy, Paris, and all over the United States. He is in private and museum collections, including MoMA, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New-York Historical Society and has been reviewed everywhere from the New York Times to the Washington Post to the Utne Reader, Sculpture magazine, TrendHunter.com, and other national and international magazines, websites, and blogs.
As a curator, Norm has brought together exhibitions such as “FU,” which examined and illustrated U.S. fair use laws as they pertain to visual artists; “The Museum of Controversial Art,” which re-created some of the most controversial art through the ages; “Beautiful nonsense,” an exhibition of absurd objects and art; “abc@WFG,” a survey of text-based art, and “Abstract Evocative” a show of abstract painting and sculpture at WAAM in Woodstock.
As an educator, he’s taught art to underprivileged kids in New York City and overprivileged kids in Woodstock, New York. He cofounded FISHtheMOUSEmedia, a developer of educational apps for iOS, where his “Animal alphabet” app was honored with a prestigious Gold award from the Parents’ Choice Foundation. Norm serves on the board of directors of CultureConnect and GoodJTDeeds and is the father of three wonderful kids, all of whom are especially talented at seeing the world around them with appreciative eyes and a grateful heart. That’s totally his proudest accomplishment.
Ten Things I Can’t Do Without
Well, not long ago, I was asked to juror a member show at the Putnam Arts Council. Maybe a couple hundred artists who had entered their work into this annual exhibition. So much fun getting to see such a wide range of art and creativity and soooo hard to judge. I mean, who the fuck am I to judge this stuff?!? But they were paying me a few shekels to do it and I can always use a few shekels, being an artist myself. So, I dropped the humility and self-doubt, stepped up and narrowed down. From 200 or so pieces to 5 or 6. And a grand prize winner. Which was a cat portrait that I just kinda loved. After I got home from this happy day of judging, they asked me to write something about the judging. And so I did. And I liked it. So here it is:
It’s the best job in the world and the worst job in the world at the same time. Pushing my personal whims and tastes through a room full of beautiful art made by inspired artists. What goes, what stays? What are my feelings today? Am I in an abstract mood or a representational mood, did I just have a bad experience with a squirrel or get in a tiff with a photographer? Are my emotions a little bit close to the surface because I didn’t have any breakfast and the coffee was weak and my blood sugar is low?
There are so many factors that affect any person’s feelings at any given point in time and I beg you all to forgive me for the state of my artistic tastes as I walked through this room a handful of times the other day trying to decide what art I was especially liking at that particular point in time.
Take (artist’s name here, please) who painted this cat. Seriously, it’s a pet portrait and I’m mostly not crazy about pet portraits, but this one is different. Something about it grabbed me the first second I saw it and wouldn’t let go. I can’t tell you where its power comes from but i also can not deny that it has a power over me that made it my favorite piece in this show.
Or this artist’s book entitled “(please insert title here)” by (artist’s name here, please). So beautiful an idea and so delightfully executed. The drawings are unique and ownable by this artist and the story they tell is so fun to move through.
There are so very many pieces I loved in this show . . . this spare yet engaging figure drawing by (artist’s name here, please), this really remarkably rendered squirrel entitled “(please insert title here)” by the ridiculously talented (artist’s name here, please) or this fantastic bird painting by (artist’s name here, please), which, though not a style I am especially drawn to, is so beautifully painted that the talent alone made me keep coming back to it again and again.
Finally, there’s this portrait of a woman. It’s a little bit reminiscent of Balthus, whose figures each tell a story and evoke interpretation in much the same way as the Mona Lisa. Who is this woman? What are the clues the artist has given us as to her identity? What is she looking at? Thinking about? It’s a wonderful painting and as I sit at my desk back home, I’m not so sure that it wasn’t my favorite of the show but hours earlier, it was not.
So here we are: the ever changing whims of art appreciation. It’s one of the most wonderful things in the world to experience a piece of art differently upon different viewings or listenings or tastings or whatever. It’s why art can give us so much joy on a daily basis and it’s why choosing which art should be in an awards show and which art should not is the worst & best job ever.
I hope everybody keeps making their art and want to thank you all for sharing it with the Putnam Arts Council where I was so lucky enough to see it.
In first grade, my kid Daisy went to a nice private school in NYC's West Village. It was so lovely. Expensive, but lovely. There were a lot of very wealthy people who sent their kids to that school and the Steuben's (Names have been changed here just for kicks.) were some of them. She was a little mousey and sweet and, I think worked full time as a mom to their kids, and he was the son of one of the richest men in the world and, I think, worked in the family business. He had his own driver take him everywhere in a huge black Suburban and, well, ok, even if that seemed a little bit much, I guess that's what rich people do, so, whatever. Now, I'd spoken to him (let's call him Robert) some (we each had a kid in the same class) at school events, fundraisers and whatnot and he always seemed friendly enough in those situations, but in a daily, casual situation, it was completely different. And it was irksome.
He and I would pass each other a few times a week in the narrow hallway as we were walking our kids to class or leaving afterward. And I would always give him a nod, a little smile and upward shake of the head as if to say "hey! There you are! We know each other! Hello!!" and he would just ignore me. Over and over and over again. So I started doing a more exaggerated nod and a bigger smile and probably even engaged my eyebrows in the silent salutation. I'm sure I eventually looked like an aggressive clown in my attempts to get this chauffeur driven douchebag to return my greeting. But he never did. And I started to see him as a dick.
One evening, in the midst of all this, me and the missus were out for cocktails with John and Olga and we were dishing on the school and the other parents and whatnot and the subject of the Steubens came up. And how nice they are and how they're so supportive of the school and whatnot, and I shared my dissent: that he's a douchey snob who can't even engage in the common courtesy of returning a hallway hello. I shared my story of ever-escalating nods and smiles and eyebrows and getting ZERO in return from this Robert guy. I shared my opinion that he was NOT a nice guy at all but was, rather, in fact, kind of a jerk. Everyone appeared surprised to hear this, including my missus who, when I'd finished my mini-rant, turned and matter-of-factly said to me:
"You know he's legally blind, right?"
I did not.
"Yeah, he even has a driver, 'cause he can't really see."
Yeah. Huh. No, I did not know that. Any of that. And I was kinda shocked. And maybe a bit embarrassed. But I got this story out of it, anyway. A great story. Illustrating that, ever-so-often, you just don't know the whole story. One doesn't know the whole story. OK: I don't know the whole story. Which is actually a great place to be, 'cause if you're there, then it's possible that you might just learn something. Or at least, get schooled.
Well, it's been a good year for my art, getting a little steam, especially for the 'historical' marker sculptures, and the other day I got this email:
Hi Norm,
My name is Helen, I work with an educational organisation called Creativity & Change based in Crawford Art College in Cork, Ireland. We run a post-graduate course, as well as lots of other training and events exploring art's place in addressing social and global justice issues. It's a really great alternative and forward-thinking programme that I think is pretty important and unique.
I am writing to you because we are creating a publication that shares the insights of certain changemakers and socially engaged creative practitioners on how art and imagination are best placed to support our futures in this mad world. I love your work and think it would be amazing if you were interested in adding your voice to our book. It could be as simple as submitting a few images and words, or something you had previously written that you feel is a fit. We have some interesting submissions from some great contributors already, including the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins.
You can see all the information here:
https://www.creativityandchange.ie/invitation/
Thanks for reading, hope to hear from you,
Best wishes,
Helen
on behalf of the Creativity & Change team
So I clicked on the site, where there were further instructions and it seemed they were looking for writing, from socially engaged artists, about how this is a good moment for art in our societies. A topic I'd been thinking about ever since late March, when the pandemic first hit and I did this: https://samiamchef.blogspot.com/ and then the "Pandemic Heroes" sculpture below. So I wrote a piece for her journal and sent it in and now I wanna post it here. So I won't lose it, I guess, since, realisticaly, I doubt anyone reads this blog except me!! Here's the essay:
...in the pocket was a whole bunch of stuff. At the bottom of it was $150 I'd forgotten about or given up for lost. It brought to mind this poem, which comes to mind often....
