A history museum by Wang Shu in Ningbo, China, a port city, includes local recycled materials.

By ROBIN POGREBIN
NY Times Published: February 27, 2012

The Chinese architect Wang Shu, whose buildings in a rapidly developing China honor the past with salvaged materials even as they experiment with modern forms, has been awarded the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

A section of the Xingshan Campus of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China.

Mr. Wang is the first Chinese citizen to win the prize (I. M. Pei, an American, was the first Chinese-born architect to win, in 1983) and the fourth-youngest.

The selection of Mr. Wang, 48, is an acknowledgment of “the role that China will play in the development of architectural ideals,” said Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of the Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the prize and announced the winner on Monday.

“The question of the proper relation of present to past is particularly timely, for the recent process of urbanization in China invites debate as to whether architecture should be anchored in tradition or should look only toward the future,” the jury said in its citation. “As with any great architecture, Wang Shu’s work is able to transcend that debate, producing an architecture that is timeless, deeply rooted in its context and yet universal.”

The prize, founded in 1979 by Jay A. Pritzker and his wife, Cindy, to honor a living architect, consists of a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion, which this year will be awarded at a ceremony in Beijing on May 25.

Mr. Wang’s major projects, all in China, include two in Ningbo, a coastal city south of Shanghai: the Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum, completed in 2005, and the Ningbo Historic Museum, completed in 2008.

With the history museum, a commission Mr. Wang won in 2004 after an international competition, he sought to evoke what life used to be like in this harbor city.

The museum, which includes recycled architectural materials from the area, “is one of those unique buildings that while striking in photos, is even more moving when experienced,” the jury said. “The museum is an urban icon, a well-tuned repository for history and a setting where the visitor comes first.”

In designing the Xingshan Campus of the China Academy of Art in his native Hangzhou, Mr. Wang also reused materials, covering the campus buildings with more than two million tiles from demolished traditional houses.

“Everywhere you can see, they don’t care about the materials,” Mr. Wang said in an interview. “They just want new buildings, they just want new things. I think the material is not just about materials. Inside it has the people’s experience, memory — many things inside. So I think it’s for an architect to do something about it.”

Inspired by his father, a musician and amateur carpenter, and his mother, a teacher and school librarian, Mr. Wang seemed to be headed toward a career as an artist or a writer, though his parents pushed him to study science and engineering. He compromised by going for an architecture degree from the Nanjing Institute of Technology, where he also earned a master’s.

His first job was researching the old buildings at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou as it underwent a renovation. His first architectural project — a youth center for the small town of Haining, also in Zhejiang Province, near Hangzhou — was completed in 1990.

In 1997, after a decade of working with various craftsmen to gain building experience, Mr. Wang and his wife, Lu Wenyu, founded their own practice in Hangzhou, called Amateur Architecture Studio.

The firm’s name was chosen to emphasize the spontaneous and experimental, Mr. Wang said. His work has an earthy, industrial quality, with unorthodox, angular shapes that in some cases echo his passion for calligraphy.

“My work is more thoughtful than simply ‘built,’ ” he said, adding that the “handicraft aspect” of his work was important to him, as a contrast to what he considers much of the “professionalized, soulless architecture, as practiced today.”

Mr. Wang has likened architecture to creating a Chinese garden: it requires the ability to be flexible, to improvise and to solve unexpected problems. He brought this sensibility to his breakout project, the Library of Wenzheng College at Suzhou University, which was completed in 2000 and received the Architecture Art Award of China in 2004.

Honoring both the environment and traditions of Suzhou, a city famous for its gardens, he was careful to make his work as unobtrusive as possible: nearly half the building is underground.

“Wang Shu’s oeuvre, seen in depth by the jurors during a visit to China, left no doubt that we were witnessing the work of a master,” said Lord Palumbo, the Pritzker’s chairman.

Mr. Wang says he approaches design as a traditional Chinese painter would; he studies the settings — whether cities, valleys or mountains — for about a week as the design materializes in his mind.

The plan for the Ningbo Historic Museum, for example, came to him one night when he could not sleep, he said. He got out of bed and started drawing in pencil: the structure, space sizes, entrance locations and other aspects.

“Then,” he said, “I drank tea.”

Geometric Abstraction
February 29 – March 31, 2012

Regen Projects

Leonard Knight, who spent most of three decades painting the adobe-clad monument in the desert, is now 80 and in a convalescent home. The challenge of rescuing the landmark has fallen to his friends and supporters.

By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times
February 26, 2012

Reporting from Niland, Calif.—
Under the warm winter sun, tourists and pilgrims and the just plain curious marvel at the candy-colored pastoral scenes on a painted mound in the desert called Salvation Mountain.

Some of the visitors climb the winding yellow path to the top of the three-story mound to pose for pictures beside a tall cross. Others inspect the flowers, waterfalls and rivers that adorn the mountain’s 150-foot-wide face.

And everywhere are biblical citations and admonitions: “Jesus Is The Way.” “God Never Fails.” “God Forgives Sinners.”

Cats, paintbrushes, wheelbarrows and donated vehicles remain in the gravel-strewn area at the base of the mountain.

But the key element of Salvation Mountain is missing: Leonard Knight, who spent most of three decades painting this adobe-clad monument between the Salton Sea and the squatter community known as Slab City.

Knight, 80, no longer greets the steady stream of visitors, strumming his guitar, relating his message of universal goodwill and joyfully leading tours of his mountain.

His eyesight and hearing failing, his memory no longer reliable, Knight is at a convalescent home outside San Diego. Except possibly for a visit arranged by friends, he will not be returning to the spot where he once lived year-round in the back of a broken-down truck and, in heat, rain or wind, spread a simple message: “God Is Love.”

Salvation Mountain, the name Knight gave the site, now needs its own salvation from the desert’s blistering heat and fearsome windstorms. The challenge has fallen to an ad hoc group of Knight’s friends and supporters.

Knight has been gone about six months. Already Salvation Mountain is showing signs of aging: Paint is fading, cracking and peeling.

Dan Westfall, a San Diego massage therapist, is confident that with enough volunteers, Knight’s creation can be rescued. He has set up an email address, salvationmountaininc@gmail.com, and phone number, (760) 332-8016. A nonprofit board is being established.

“I’ve seen that mountain touch and inspire people from all over the world,” Westfall said. “Maybe we can’t have Leonard out there, but we can keep his message there.”

Others share his passion, if not his optimism.

“The mountain needs a lot of work,” said Jo Farb Hernandez, a professor of art at San Jose State University. “It can’t just be anyone with a paintbrush. Even with Leonard, it was a full-time job keeping it repaired and beautiful.”

To Hernandez, Knight’s mountain is a marvelous example of “outsider” art that follows no particular school, only the dictates of an idiosyncratic vision. “The world has a duty to preserve Leonard’s mountain,” she said.

A New Englander who spent most of his years doing odd jobs in the Midwest, Knight arrived in this hardscrabble spot in the Imperial Valley in the mid-1980s, on a day trip while visiting his sister in San Diego.

One story, which he encouraged in numerous interviews, was that he arrived in a hot-air balloon. Soon he heard a message and began erecting a cross. Mixing water and hay, he put a facade on the mountain, then painted it with religious messages and motifs.

Knight was a local celebrity, particularly among the residents of Slab City, a patch of gravel and weeds that hosts thousands of snow-birding campers and other tight-money folks.

Many Slab City regulars would bring cans of paint for Knight, and Caltrans workers would bootleg him a few buckets of yellow paint used for road stripes.

Inside a kind of annex to Salvation Mountain, a structure art scholars liken to an Indian hogan, are trophies and citations from those early days: for participating in the Brawley Cattle Call Parade and for being “Senior King” of the Niland Tomato and Sportsmen Festival. Also on display is the 2001 certificate from the Folk Art Society of America, declaring Salvation Mountain a national treasure “worthy of protection and preservation.”

By then, the outside world had discovered Salvation Mountain. Visitors began coming from around the globe. Knight gave away postcards and cheerfully greeted all. The BBC, Japanese magazine reporters and a German film crew visited. A museum in Baltimore arranged to have one of Knight’s trucks — he had several vehicles donated by followers — hauled across the country and put on display.

Books and videos told Knight’s story. Museums in Santa Barbara and Palm Springs staged Salvation Mountain photo exhibits. U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) had the mountain declared a “national treasure” in the Congressional Record.

In 2007, Salvation Mountain had a small part in the movie “Into the Wild,” directed by Sean Penn. The feature film, about a top student and athlete who abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness, brought a new group of admirers to the mountain.

On a recent morning there were cars from Alberta, Canada; Utah, Montana and Arizona, and a few from California. Some of the visitors were drawn by the religious message; others, such as a backpacking young couple from Idaho, by the story of an iconoclast who lived by his own rules and vision.

“Leonard was free, man; he lived to spread the gospel of love,” said Fred Riggs, 22. “That’s why he painted this mountain.”

Knight still marvels at his journey from obscurity to fame. “It’s amazing how little me got so famous outside California,” he said from his convalescent home earlier this month. “All I did was put ‘God Is Love’ on the side of a mountain and people started loving me.”

Alas, love alone will not save Salvation Mountain.

“It’s going to be a tough road,” said Salvation Mountain supporter Bob Sims, a high school computer teacher in the Riverside County community of Beaumont. “Most of these ‘outsider’ art sites, without protection, just fade away.”

Several Slab City residents have agreed to watch over Salvation Mountain and scare off vandals. Hernandez, who directs a group called SPACES, which tries to preserve “outsider” art sites, said her fantasy is that enough money will be raised to hire someone to live at Salvation Mountain.

The question of who owns the property beneath the mountain is complicating preservation efforts.

For years it was presumed that the property was owned by the state, returned by the military after World War II, when the adjacent area was used for a Marine artillery training base.

But as supporters began their preservation efforts, state officials said the property may still belong to the federal government. Neither government, however, appears eager to determine which of them is legally responsible for Salvation Mountain and the desert around it.

Visitors, disappointed that Knight is no longer at the mountain, leave notes of condolence. Some peer inside the 1951 truck that was his home for decades.

Near the truck is the patio-style swing where Knight rested during the day and chatted with visitors. On the swing is an open Bible, pages flapping in the hot desert wind.

Thanks to Rodney Hill

Four Colors, 2012

Through March 17, 2012

Harris Lieberman

Left, the “Elegy” painting that the dealer Julian Weissman bought from Glafira Rosales and sold to an Irish gallery that later demanded its money back; right, Motherwell’s “Spanish Elegy (Alcaraz) XV,” from 1953, which is part of the catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Dedalus Foundation.

By PATRICIA COHEN
NY TimesPublished: February 22, 2012

NEARLY 17 years ago Glafira Rosales, a little-known art dealer from Long Island, walked into Knoedler & Company’s grand Upper East Side town house with a painting she said was by Mark Rothko.

She showed the small board with two clouds of bruised color floating against a backdrop of pale peach to Ann Freedman, the new president of Knoedler, New York’s oldest art gallery.

“It was immediately, from my eyes, a work of interest,” Ms. Freedman recalled later. She was so impressed that she ended up buying the work herself.

For the next decade or so Ms. Rosales frequently arrived at Knoedler’s coffered-ceiling mansion on East 70th Street with what appeared to be paintings by Modernist masters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell.

All of them were new to the market. All were said to have come from a collector whom Ms. Rosales refused to name.

The paintings were embraced by Knoedler and Ms. Freedman, who handled at least 20 of them, including one she sold for $17 million.

But now several experts have called the works fakes. One has been formally branded a forgery in a court settlement, and the F.B.I. is investigating. Knoedler, after 165 years in business, has shut its doors and is being sued by a client who bought one of the Rosales works. (The gallery said the closing was a business decision unconnected to the lawsuit.) Ms. Freedman, who maintains that the paintings are authentic, was also named in the suit.

Few cases in recent years have roiled the art market as much as this mystery of how an obscure art merchant could have discovered an astonishing number of unknown treasures by the titans of Abstract Expressionism. Each explanation carries its own burden of implausibility.

If they are real, why do some contain pigments that had not been invented at the listed time of their creation?

If they are fakes, who are these preternaturally talented forgers who have been able to confound experts?

And if they are real but stolen, why haven’t their owners come forward to claim them now that the story is public?

Unfortunately the one person who could help unravel the mystery, Ms. Rosales, is not talking, at least publicly. A few details, however, have dripped out in court documents and through interviews with other players in the case, enough to sketch out what happened. Charming and cultured, the Mexican-born Ms. Rosales, 55, and her husband, Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, who is from Spain, once operated a small gallery, King Fine Arts, in Manhattan on West 19th Street. The couple, who had accounts at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have said in court papers that they owned or sold paintings by a host of famous artists, including Andy Warhol, whom Mr. Bergantiños has described as a friend.

Given this experience, it may seem odd that Ms. Rosales would have bothered with middlemen like Knoedler, whose commissions sliced into her own. Part of the answer may lie in the gap between Ms. Rosales’s and Ms. Freedman’s stature in the art world.

Tall, rail-thin and self-assured, Ms. Freedman was in charge of one of the country’s most venerable galleries, comfortable lunching with top-tier collectors like the producer David Geffen and the heiress Joan Tisch, buyers who would not blanch at the thought of plunking down a few million for a painting. She and her husband, the real estate developer Robert Freedman, were also collectors in their own right.

The two women were introduced by a Knoedler employee, Jaime Andrade, who had met Ms. Rosales at a cocktail party.

At first, Ms. Freedman said, Ms. Rosales told her only that she was handling the paintings for a friend who had homes in Mexico City and Zurich, and whose identity she had sworn to keep secret. That wasn’t surprising, Ms. Freedman said; private collectors frequently like to remain anonymous. Over time, though, more details about the owner dribbled out. Ms. Rosales told her that he had inherited the art from his father, who had collected it with the help of David Herbert, a New York dealer who died in 1995.

Herbert planned to use the works to stock a new gallery that was to be financed by the original collector. But the two men had a falling out, and the art ended up in the collector’s basement until his death.

Ms. Rosales does own a 1957 line drawing of Herbert by Ellsworth Kelly that was recently part of an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. What she does not seem to have, however, are any records that track the ownership of the two dozen or so Modernist paintings she brought to market.

Selling work by a major artist without paperwork attesting to the provenance is rare. So, confronted with paintings that lacked documentation, that could theoretically have been painted, as one lawyer put it, “in Ms. Rosales’s garage,” Ms. Freedman said she focused on what really mattered, the quality of the works themselves.

And they were extraordinary, Ms. Freedman declared. She enlisted several experts to check her own impressions of the Rothkos, Pollocks, Barnett Newmans, Clyfford Stills and other works that Ms. Rosales supplied. Claude Cernuschi, for example, the author of a book on Pollock, attested to the authenticity of a small painting signed “J. Pollock” and called “Untitled 1950.” The National Gallery of Art, where an authoritative compendium of Rothko’s works on paper — known as the catalogue raisonné — was being assembled, wrote that two of the Rothkos looked genuine.

By 2000 or so Ms. Freedman had bought three of Ms. Rosales’s offerings herself: the Rothko from their first meeting, “Untitled 1959,” for $200,000; a Pollock for $300,000; and a Motherwell for $20,000. “If Ann Freedman had any questions about these works, she and her husband would not have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in them,” her lawyer, Nicholas Gravante Jr., said.

But shadows began appearing in 2003 when a Goldman Sachs executive sought to confirm the authenticity of a Rosales painting attributed to Pollock, “Untitled 1949,” that he had bought from Knoedler. He took it to the International Foundation for Art Research, an independent nonprofit, and, after study, an anonymous committee declined to vouch for the painting, citing questions about its style and provenance.

The buyer asked for a refund. Ms. Freedman immediately repaid his $2 million and bought the splatter of white, black and red herself in a partnership with the gallery and a friend, the Canadian theatrical impresario David Mirvish. Mr. Mirvish, a former art dealer himself, said he was unconcerned by a report that was anonymous. (He and Knoedler also invested in two other Rosales Pollocks.)

And confirmation was coming in from other precincts. Mr. Mirvish brought the artist Frank Stella, a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists, to the gallery in 2006. After inspecting several Rosales paintings Mr. Stella said, “Each one is too good to be true, but seeing them in context, as a group, makes one realize they are true,” according to notes of the conversation that Ms. Freedman testified about in court.

Headiest of all, perhaps, the appeal of the Rosales paintings was being confirmed in the marketplace. Ms. Freedman testified that she ultimately sold 15 or 16 of the works at Knoedler for a total of $27 million to $37 million. The most expensive was “Untitled 1950,” ostensibly by Pollock, which sold in 2007 through an intermediary dealer to a London hedge-fund director named Pierre Lagrange. Knoedler and Mr. Mirvish had jointly bought the tangle of black, red and white lines flicked across a bright silver background several years earlier for about $2 million. Mr. Lagrange paid $17 million.

•

A few days after the sale to Mr. Lagrange, Ms. Freedman invited to Knoedler some officials from the nonprofit Dedalus Foundation, which Robert Motherwell created to protect the legacy of modern art. She wanted them to see her latest Motherwell.

This was the seventh painting by the artist that Ms. Rosales had supplied either to Ms. Freedman or to another New York dealer, Julian Weissman, over the course of eight years. The set, with their large black slashes and blots lumbering across the canvases, appeared to be related to an acclaimed Motherwell series known as “Spanish Elegies.” Officials at Dedalus had already seen a few of these new “Elegies” and had endorsed them as genuine.

But a couple of weeks after the visit to Knoedler, when Dedalus’s catalogue raisonné committee gathered, some members began to raise questions about the signatures and style of the recently uncovered “Elegies.” The foundation’s president, Jack Flam, said he soon learned that other works from Ms. Rosales attributed to Pollock and Richard Diebenkorn were meeting with skepticism.

E. V. Thaw, the original co-author of Pollock’s catalogue raisonné, for example, said he had previously viewed Mr. Lagrange’s “Untitled 1950” as well as “Untitled 1949” at Knoedler and he told Mr. Flam in 2008 that they “were not by Jackson Pollock.”

Not everyone at Dedalus thought there was need for alarm. Joan Banach, Motherwell’s personal assistant and a veteran foundation employee, said Mr. Flam had made unqualified judgments about authenticity and had violated the foundation’s procedures for evaluating paintings. Ms. Banach has brought suit against Dedalus, arguing she was fired because of her complaints about Mr. Flam. (Dedalus denies that.)

“It is more likely than not,” Ms. Banach said in court papers, that a Rosales Motherwell she inspected at Knoedler “is a genuine work.”

Mr. Flam, however, was determined to prove the Rosales Motherwells were forged, hiring private detectives to investigate Ms. Rosales and her husband and insisting on a series of forensic analyses.

On a chilly January evening in 2009 Mr. Flam and Ms. Freedman met to discuss the results. They sat outside a viewing room at Knoedler where two “Elegies,” one owned by Ms. Freedman, were hanging. Both paintings, the forensic analyst had concluded, contained pigments not developed until 10 years after the 1953 and 1955 dates on the canvases.

Ms. Freedman disputed the results. Artists were frequently given pigments to experiment with before they were patented or marketed, she argued. But Dedalus stood firm. Ms. Rosales, the foundation later declared in court papers, was “the point person for introducing a cache of seven fraudulent ‘Spanish Elegies’ to the market.”

•

Word of the Motherwell controversy soon reached the F.B.I., which opened an investigation. Ms. Rosales’s lawyer, Anastasios Sarikas, has acknowledged that his client is under investigation, adding that she has “never intentionally or knowingly sold artwork she knew to be forged.”

Ms. Freedman received a subpoena at the gallery in September 2009, though her lawyer said the F.B.I. has since told his client that she is not a target of the inquiry. The following month Ms. Freedman left Knoedler. Both she and the gallery say the investigation had nothing to do with her departure. The breach, Ms. Freedman said, was precipitated by her opposition to the merger of Knoedler with another gallery. Ms. Freedman has since opened her own Upper East Side gallery above a coffee bar. Three artists, including Mr. Stella, ditched Knoedler to stay with her.

Disentangling herself from the trouble brewing over the Rosales paintings has been more difficult. Last year one of the “Elegies” supplied by Ms. Rosales and sold by Mr. Weissman became the subject of a lawsuit when the Irish gallery that had bought the work demanded he refund its $650,000.

Dedalus was dragged into the suit because, after the forensic testing, it had pronounced all the Rosales “Elegies” phony, including those it had once informally labeled as genuine, among them the one Mr. Weissman sold.

Dedalus punched back, spelling out in a crossclaim against Ms. Rosales and Mr. Weissman what it described as a large forgery conspiracy and implicating Ms. Freedman.

That case was settled in October. Ms. Rosales agreed to pay most of the refund and court costs and, at Dedalus’s insistence, the back of the “Elegy” was stamped “forgery” in indelible ink. Despite the settlement Mr. Weissman and Ms. Rosales still maintain through their lawyers that the painting is authentic. Dedalus had one day declared the painting real, then another day decided it was not, Mr. Sarikas noted, adding, “The art world is a world of illusion.”

In defending herself, however, court records show that Ms. Rosales did offer an intriguing bit of new information: the mystery owner’s name. He was John Gerzso, she told a lawyer in the case. And the original owner, Mr. Gerzso’s father, had been helped in his purchases not by David Herbert, as Ms. Rosales had repeatedly said, but by a wealthy Filipino painter, Alfonso Ossorio, who had lived near Pollock and de Kooning in the Hamptons.

Mike Solomon, the director of the Ossorio Foundation, said Ossorio might have been someone a collector would have asked for advice. But as far as acting as a go-between, he said, “I doubt that he would do that.”

As for John Gerzso, Dedalus described him in court papers as the son of the Mexican artist Gunther Gerzso, who died in 2000. The younger Mr. Gerzso, who has been contacted by the F.B.I., said in an interview that neither he nor his father ever owned the paintings in question. “There was never a sale of anything like these paintings,” he added.

Mr. Sarikas offered only this brief response in an e-mail: “The notion that the original ‘owner’ is the ‘son of Gunther Gerzso’ is a conclusion drawn by those with wishful thinking and rich imaginations.”

•

Within weeks of the settlement another painting’s authenticity came into dispute. Pierre Lagrange and his wife were divorcing and he wanted to sell “Untitled 1950.” But Sotheby’s and Christie’s refused to handle it because of questions about its provenance and its absence from the Pollock catalogue raisonné. Mr. Lagrange demanded Knoedler take back the painting and commissioned his own forensic analysis.

On Nov. 29 the results came back: two yellow pigments used had not been invented until after Pollock’s death in 1956. A summary was forwarded to Knoedler. The next day the gallery announced it was closing.

In December Ms. Rosales and Ms. Freedman met again, though this time the setting was federal district court in Manhattan, where they had been summoned by subpoena to answer a lawsuit by Mr. Lagrange. He wanted his $17 million back.

The two women briefly greeted each other before Ms. Rosales invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. They have not spoken since, according to their lawyers. Mr. Sarikas said the negative publicity generated by the case was pushing Ms. Rosales toward bankruptcy.

Whether any lawsuit or criminal investigation will provide a definitive answer to the mystery of the paintings is far from certain.

Authenticity can be difficult to litigate. Pigment dating is generally viewed as reliable, but it is not necessarily the deciding factor. For example the chief executive of Golden Artist Colors, Mark Golden, whose father, Sam, created experimental paints for artists like Pollock, said he was certain that his father did not make the yellow pigments in the disputed Pollock, though he noted the individual building blocks did exist in the late 1940s. Art experts agree that a connoisseur’s eye, a comparison with the artist’s other works and provenance are also critical in establishing authenticity.

In a criminal case the bar is higher. Prosecutors would have to prove that the Rosales works are fakes when even the experts can’t seem to agree. And if they are fakes, the government would still have to prove Ms. Rosales was in on any fraud and not an unwitting dupe herself.

“The defense only needs to raise a reasonable doubt,” said Barry Berke, head of the white-collar defense group at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel. “Questions about the underlying facts — Is it real? Is it fake? — make it even harder for prosecutors.”

Meanwhile the painting at the center of the civil suit, “Untitled 1950,” no longer holds pride of place on Mr. Lagrange’s living room wall. The 15-by-28-inch wooden board is now an art world orphan, left in a kind of limbo where it waits to be hailed as a masterpiece or scorned as a hoax.

Kenneth Price, artist who transformed traditional ceramics, dies
Price was among the first generation of iconoclastic L.A. artists to attain international stature. His work with glazed and painted clay was ‘resolutely original’ and redefined contemporary sculpture, an observer says.

By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic
February 24, 2012, 8:52 a.m.

Kenneth Price, a prolific Los Angeles artist whose work with glazed and painted clay transformed traditional ceramics while also expanding orthodox definitions of American and European sculpture, died early Friday at his home and studio in Taos, N.M. He was 77.

Price had struggled with tongue and throat cancer for several years, his food intake restricted to liquids supplied through a feeding tube. Despite his infirmity, he continued to produce challenging new work and to mount critically acclaimed exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles, New York and Europe.

At the time of his death Price had completed preparations for a 50-year retrospective, scheduled to open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the fall in an exhibition designed by architect Frank Gehry. The show will travel to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A 1992 retrospective traveled from the Menil Collection in Houston to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

In the decades following World War II, Price was among the first generation of iconoclastic L.A. artists to attain international stature. Three Price sculptures were on view in “Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970,” a survey of 47 leading postwar artists that closed this month at theJ. Paul Getty Museum. Important examples of his work are currently included in three additional museum shows featured as part of the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time, which chronicles significant aspects of Los Angeles art made during the city’s efflorescence between World War II and 1980.

Price’s work is often erroneously described as having “transcended” ceramics to become sculpture. However, his organic and geometric forms, use of vibrant colors and provocative installation motifs instead speak of a thorough knowledge and embrace of critical aspects of ceramic history and its shifting place in art’s continuum. Price’s exquisitely crafted art, often leavened by erotic wit, simply accepted clay’s sculptural bona fides.

“Price’s practice has remained resolutely original, challenging categorization and redefining contemporary sculpture,” said Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at LACMA and organizer of the Price retrospective. “The observation that critic Lucy Lippard made in 1966 seems prescient: ‘It is a fact rather than a value judgment that no one else on the East or West Coast is working like Kenneth Price.’ ”

Especially important to his work was the precedent of the Bauhaus, the experimental school in 1920s Germany that sought to fuse crafts and the fine arts. Hand fabrication had been separated from machine manufacture during the Industrial Revolution, creating a distinction between fine art and applied art and establishing a rigid hierarchy for them. The Bauhaus sought to reconcile the two into a modern, unified whole.

For many years Price kept an abstract image of nested color-squares by Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers, the German-born painter and color theorist, hanging on a wall in his Venice studio — the only work by another artist displayed there.

Price, reflecting egalitarian impulses of the 1960s, found surprising ways to incorporate that legacy in contemporary social terms. Among his most charming works is an extensive series of drinking vessels he called “snail cups.” A variety of snails — a garden nuisance but an ancient symbol for slow, steady and self-sufficient progress — carry and adorn the small cups, one of the oldest and most basic vessel forms. With humor and affection, the snail cups nod to the ’60s handicraft fashions of the Aquarian Age.

Completely different in form, but likewise indebted to the Bauhaus, are geometric vessels glazed in flat, bright, primary and secondary hues. Their compositions recall early 20th century Russian Constructivist paintings by El Lissitzky and Dutch De Stijl works by Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and architect Gerrit Rietveld. Like the Bauhaus, Constructivism and De Stijl valued pure abstraction, dynamic asymmetry and simplified shapes and colors. Price’s exquisitely made cups brought down to earth the grand Utopian aspirations of those early 20th century movements.

Price’s use of bright color on clay forms was a distinctive feature of his work. Sometimes he achieved it through the use of acrylic paint rather than fired glazes, a method that upset ceramic purists but satisfied the artist’s determination to follow his interests. The technique has reached new heights since the 1990s. Sexy, bulbous forms are painted black, layered with lush acrylic colors and then sanded to reveal the under-paint in richly textured spots of brilliant hues. Some sculptures carry 70 thin coats of paint.

Speaking of his early years, Price told interviewer Kristine McKenna in 1996, “In those days everything was supposed to reflect the inherent nature of the materials, and consequently there wasn’t much colored clay sculpture prior to the ’60s. … But I didn’t think it was a big deal to put color on form. L.A. was the city of cars and fabrication shops where you could have anything made, so it didn’t seem unusual to me to make an organic form and then give it an industrial paint job.”

Similarly critical to Price’s development was his adoption of attitudes and motifs familiar in Mexican pottery. His inspirations include the sensuous, poured glazes of traditional Oaxacan ceramics, plus the domestic and souvenir production of commercial centers such as Tlaquepaque, just outside Guadalajara. Encountering Mexican folk ceramics in roadside stands and souvenir shops during surfing trips to Tijuana and visits to other border regions of the American Southwest, as well as in Taos, he admired their verve, frequent humor and evident humanity.

In an era when many sculptors farm out production to commercial fabricators, Price valued studio labor throughout his career. In the 1970s he spent nearly six years producing “Happy’s Curios,” an elaborate mixed-media installation named for his wife, Happy Ward. A sprawling homage to Mexican folk traditions, Pre-Columbian motifs and popular designs, the work is composed of nine cabinets of pottery, store display-windows, multimedia “Death Shrines,” paintings, tapestries and drawings.

The ambitious project was never completed. “It took a toll,” said New Mexico art critic MaLin Wilson-Powell, who conducted an extensive interview with the artist for the LACMA retrospective’s forthcoming catalog. “It was meant to be an installation to fill an entire building in Taos, but it was too big to finish. So Kenny said he had to do what we did in Vietnam: Call it a victory and get the hell out.”

Portions of “Happy’s Curios” were shown to critical acclaim at LACMA in the spring of 1978. In a serendipitous juxtaposition, the memorial-themed work was displayed in galleries upstairs from the traveling “Treasures of Tutankhamun” extravaganza, a hugely popular presentation of Egyptian tomb artifacts that is generally regarded as the first museum blockbuster exhibition.

The Price installation’s “Death Shrine I,” an elaborate funerary altar behind a cheerful white picket fence and crowned with a skull-shaped vessel, its grinning teeth echoing the white slats in the fence, is now on long-term loan to the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos. “Unit 3,” a knotty pine display case for 15 decorated vessels, is in LACMA’s permanent collection. “Town Unit 1,” a fenced display case for 22 plates, cups, bowls and a double-spouted teapot is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Other Price ceramics, as well as prints and drawings, are in the collections of Washington’s National Gallery of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Art Institute, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and 35 other international museums. In addition to sculptures, prints and drawings, he also made illustrations for books of poetry by Harvey Mudd and Charles Bukowski, an album cover for Ry Cooder and several bottle labels for Del Maguey mezcal spirits.

Price’s fusion of fine and applied art made him the godfather of significant younger generations of artists, many working in Southern California. Functional design is now a central component of sculpture for Kim MacConnell, Jim Isermann, Pae White and MacArthur Fellows Josiah McElheny and Jorge Pardo. Adrian Saxe, a leading artist whose elaborate clay sculptures were the subject of a 1993 LACMA retrospective, cites Price’s precedent as a key inspiration.

Born in Los Angeles on Feb. 16, 1935, Price took informal trumpet lessons from jazz musician Chet Baker and drawing classes at Chouinard Art Institute while still a student at University High School. His first ceramics class came after graduation at Santa Monica College. In 1954 he transferred to USC, where he later taught, and in 1957 he enrolled at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design). There, artist Peter Voulkos had shaken up the ceramics establishment with muscular, monumental slabs of roughly worked clay that infuse Asian traditions with Abstract Expressionist bravura. Voulkos’ slashed and gouged platters and brawny sculptures bucked the prevailing ceramic taste for refined harmonies between elegant form and punctilious surface.

Price began to chafe under Voulkos’ domineering influence. Deciding that he also needed specialized training in the intricate technical aspects of firing clay and the complex sciences of glazing, he enrolled in the rigorous ceramics program at the State University of New York at Alfred. He finished the two-year course in just a year, receiving a master’s degree in 1959.

The following year he had the first of three solo exhibitions at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, showing rough-hewn, beehive-shaped covered jars, some displayed inside modest wood cases reminiscent of Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages. The small size of his works surprised people more accustomed to large-scale sculpture, but it announced a lifelong interest in intimacy as a subject.

His second show in 1961 featured a now-famous poster of Price casually riding a Pacific wave on his surfboard, arms held high with his name printed in a rainbow-arch between outstretched hands. It included small, sleek, brightly painted “eggs” with sexually provocative fingers of tangled clay erupting from dark orifices. Friend and fellow artist Edward Ruscha once described them as “psycho-erotic.” The stylistic break with Voulkos was complete. The beautifully crafted and brightly painted work was as effortless and triumphant as the playful surfing poster implied.

Examples of these and other early sculptures are currently featured in the exhibitions “Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California, 1945-1975,” at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, and “Clay’s Tectonic Shift: John Mason, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos, 1956-1968,” at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, Claremont.

In 1968 Price married Ward, who survives him along with their son, Jackson, and his step-children, Romy and Sydney. Two years later the couple moved to Taos. In 1983 they relocated to the Massachusetts coast, where they remained for seven years, until Price returned to Los Angeles and joined the USC faculty. After teaching for a decade Price went back to Taos with his family. He lived and worked in both New Mexico and California ever since.

Shannon Ebner, Ash Wednesday, 2001, wallpaper pasted color Xerox print, 11 x 14

3 March – 7 April 2012
Organized by Phil Chang

“Despite, or potentially because of, its several meanings, affect occupies a unique position in contemporary life. In addition to its role in the oscillation between pluralism and populism, its place in liberal guilt, its function for networked sociality, and its indispensable contribution to late, experiential capitalism, affect also occupies a crucial point in the inextricable relationship between art and politics. As a noun, affect inhabits the site of the psychological subject (emotions); as a verb, affect refers to effect (actions). Most importantly, as the critic Stephen Shaviro argues, affect is useful in how it functions as a matter of “manner” rather than essence, concerning itself not with what something is but how it is, or, more exactly, how a thing affects and is affected by other things, and hence raising the question of the relation between what it is and what it does. In this way, affect becomes an ostensible articulation of excess due to its ineffability, but also due to its performativity, as a perplexing condition that trades in cliché and convention. In media including photography, sculpture, video, and works on paper, the works in this exhibition ask in excess of what?”

-Phil Chang

featuring works by:
Walead Beshty, Justin Cole, Shannon Ebner, Owen Kydd, Sharon Lockhart,
Erlea Maneros Zabala, Arthur Ou, Alexis Smith, Yanai Toister, Erika Vogt, and Jeff Wall

Pepin Moore

The department relies on three men who make and repair ladders dating to 1918, saying they are safer and more durable than metal. ( Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times )

By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times
February 24, 2012

Reporting from San Francisco — Jerry Lee ran his battered hand along the side beam of a 35-foot extension ladder.

This particular workhorse of the San Francisco Fire Department — from Truck 5, Station 5 — was showing serious wear and tear. It had been dropped on the job in the middle of January and could no longer be trusted to bear a firefighter’s weight.

“There’s a crack they’re concerned about,” Lee said, tracing the offending scar with his thumbnail. “I’ll open the break so I can get some glue in there. Then I’ll clamp it back together.… If they don’t destroy the ladder, I can repair any part of it, and it’ll go out as good as the day it was built.”

Only two dozen or so fire departments in America still swear by wooden ladders for their strength, safety and durability. Most are in California, and all but one buy their climbing gear from a company in Chino. The lone holdout is San Francisco, which still manufactures its own.

The department’s 400 or so ground ladders are made of old-growth Douglas fir, harvested from eastern slopes in the Pacific Northwest, where limited light makes the wood grow dense and strong. All of them have been built or refurbished by a three-man crew with singular skills.

Those same men also turn out the 163-year-old department’s metal nozzles and hose couplings, its hydrant wrenches, fire bells and the ornate eagles that adorn them. They build and maintain 13 types of ladders and track the department’s long-lived inventory in a linen-bound book nearly a century old.

And when firefighters come up with ideas to improve equipment — a redesigned forcible-entry tool or a pressure-reducing valve for fire hydrants — their sketches end up in the drafty shop between the wholesale produce market and San Francisco Bay.

At least they do now.

The shop’s patternmakers, Lee and Qing Du, are nearing retirement. And the city has yet to engage in the lengthy process of finding and training successors. Within a year, refinisher Peter Misthos could be left alone to carry on the San Francisco tradition.

Ladder-making is “part science, it’s part art, it’s all craftsmanship and experience,” shop supervisor Michael Braun said. “To find replacements for gentlemen like this is not easy.”

In the wood shop, perfumed by pitch and lightly coated with a fine layer of sawdust, Braun sorted through a stack: There are boarding ladders for fireboats, with hooks designed to fit over a gunwale; 50-foot extension ladders to scale the sides of multistory buildings; and so-called baby extension ladders for access to the attics of old Victorians.

Most fire departments switched to aluminum ladders half a century or so ago, Braun said, because they are cheaper and require less maintenance. Some firefighters believe that the metal models are lighter and easier to handle.

But handcrafted wooden ladders live on in San Francisco in part because of the city’s uncommon combination of geography, architecture and urban design.

Old, wood-framed houses stand cheek-to-jowl. The streets are narrow and twisty, and many run beneath a canopy of electrical wires that power buses, streetcars and trolleys.

“A wood ladder,” Braun said, “does not conduct electricity. In case you have a ladder up and you were to strike a live wire, you won’t get electrocuted.”

It’s a danger that retired Battalion Chief William C. Peters of the Jersey City (N.J.) Fire Department understands all too well.

In the 1990s, Jersey City firefighters were called to a blazing tenement. People were trapped on the third floor, screaming for help. As two rescuers struggled to hoist an aluminum ladder in the snow, a third firefighter jumped in to help. When they swung the apparatus toward the building, it struck a 4,800-volt primary power line.

All three firefighters were hit with a jolt of electricity, Peters recalled. One of the men died. Another lost toes and a finger. The third was blown clear. “His heart rhythm was screwed up for a while,” Peters said.

Longevity is another plus for wood. Although the life of an aluminum ladder is 15 to 20 years, Braun said, San Francisco’s oldest wooden ladder still in continuous service was made in 1918.

Known by the serial number B3, the 50-foot extension model weighs in at 350 pounds and is no outlier.

The cross-hatched pages of the ladder shop’s log book are a testament to wood’s durability: C1, a 35-foot straight ladder, was made on Aug. 15, 1919, and is still in service with nothing more than basic maintenance. C5, built in 1920, was destroyed on the job 51 years later. C7, also of 1920 vintage, was rebuilt and put back to work.

Lee figures that a good 80% of the work done in the cluttered shop is repair and maintenance of the Fire Department’s functional history. Boards of Douglas fir are stacked against the wall to cure. There are piles of rungs made of hickory and ash. Molds for metal parts lean against a workbench. Nothing is thrown away. Everything is reused.

“There’s a lot of history in this shop,” Braun said. “The guys that all work here are keenly aware of how important what they do is for the citizens, the fact that these ladders are designed to go into buildings, put out fires, save people’s lives.”

The most famous fire in the city’s history — in fact, the worst U.S. blaze ever — was the conflagration of 1906, which followed the far-more-famous San Francisco earthquake.

Fire Chief Dennis T. Sullivan was killed in the quake, and the military stepped in to help fill the breach. The Army Corps of Engineers decided to create fire breaks by dynamiting buildings along Market Street and Van Ness Avenue.

“The more buildings they dynamited, the more fires they started,” said Braun, who also is on the board of the San Francisco Fire Department Museum. “They ended up becoming their own worst enemy.”

By the time it was over, an estimated 28,000 buildings were destroyed, about three-quarters of the city by some counts. More than 3,000 people died.

But that wasn’t the first time that the better part of San Francisco burned to the ground. The first “great fire” began Christmas Eve 1849, in a gambling den called Dennison’s Exchange. The fledgling city, which had been slapped together out of salvaged wood and canvas, was destroyed in mere hours.

Rebuilding went quickly — there was, after all, a gold rush on. But over the next 18 months, the painful cycle of burn and build repeated itself five more times.

San Francisco’s official seal includes a spread-winged phoenix, the mythical bird that rises from the ashes.

“The San Francisco Fire Department has got this unique history,” said Glenn P. Corbett, associate professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “And the ladder is a part of that.”

What makes Lee proudest of his 27 years in the shop is the safety record of the ladders that he, Du and Misthos make and fix.

“No one’s been injured on one of our ladders,” the 61-year-old said. “It gives [firefighters] confidence when they go up the ladder. The last thing they think about is that it will fall apart on them.”

Just ask Firefighter William A. Mulkeen, who was on duty at Station 2 one blustery New Year’s morning when the call came. A three-story apartment building on a narrow street at the edge of Chinatown was in flames.

When the first engine arrived, there were so many rescue vehicles blocking Montgomery Street that it couldn’t get close enough to use its truck-mounted aerial ladder. So Capt. Michael V. Rolovich and Mulkeen raced through the structure and headed for the roof.

As Mulkeen cut ventilation holes with an ax, Rolovich did a perimeter check. That’s when he saw an elderly couple waving their arms and pleading for help from a third-story window. Smoke billowed out above them.

Firefighters used a 24-foot wooden ladder to bridge the alley separating the burning building from a two-story structure nearby.

Mulkeen and Firefighter Daniel J. Molloy crawled across, and then Rolovich used a rope to carefully lower the ladder into the window where the couple waited, terrified and overcome with smoke. As Molloy anchored the ladder, Mulkeen inched toward them, reaching first for the woman.

“She really didn’t know what she wanted to do — stay in the building with the fire or go on the ladder with me,” Mulkeen said. He stripped off his breathing apparatus and bulky coat, carried the woman to safety and returned across the ladder for the man.

As the firefighters’ commendation letter put it, the couple “would have surely perished” had it not be for “the ingenuity and bravery of Captain Rolovich and Firefighter Mulkeen and Molloy.”

And the ladder.

“If you don’t trust your equipment, you can’t do your job,” Mulkeen said. “With the ladder shop, it’s what we’ve always depended on.”

Untitled, 2003
Oil and wax on panel
14 x 12 inches (36 x 31 cm)

Through March 31, 2012

Dependence

Errol Morris believes there are no relative truths, only true truths. Maybe that’s why the postmodernist Thomas Kuhn hurled an ashtray at him. Photo by Dina Rudick

By Ron Rosenbaum
Smithsonian Magazine, March 2012

My favorite private-eye trick is the one I learned about from Errol Morris.

You probably know Morris as an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. Roger Ebert called his first film, Gates of Heaven, one of “the ten greatest films ever made.” With The Thin Blue Line, Morris dramatically freed an innocent man imprisoned on a murder rap. In The Fog of War he extracted a confession from Robert McNamara, getting the tightly buttoned-up technocrat to admit “[we] were behaving as war criminals” for planning the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, which burned to death 100,000 civilians in a single night.

You may also know that Morris is the author of the recent massive, fascinating book called Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, which won rave reviews for the way it looks not just into the frame of a photo but behind, beneath it—the way truth is “framed” in every sense of the word.

You may even think, as I do, that Morris has become one of America’s most idiosyncratic, prolific and provocative public intellectuals.

But what’s less well known about Morris is that he brings to his work the invaluable experience he picked up working as a private eye. And he hasn’t given up the private-eye impulse: He’s back on the case, two cases actually—two of the most electrifying and controversial cases in the past half century.

Born in suburban Long Island, Morris graduated from the University of Wisconsin. After a stint of cello study in France, he talked his way into the Princeton graduate philosophy seminar of Thomas Kuhn, an icon of postmodernism, the man who coined the term “paradigm shift.” It wasn’t exactly a meeting of the minds. In fact, it almost cracked Morris’ skull, which is what Kuhn seemed to be aiming to do at the climax of an argument when the esteemed philosopher threw an ashtray at Morris’ head.

“The Ashtray,” Morris’ five-part, 20,000-word account of that episode and their philosophical clash over the nature of truth, is a good introduction to the unique kind of writing he’s doing now. (Don’t miss the section on the obscure Greek philosopher of irrationalism, Hippasus of Metapontum, a digression worthy of Jorge Luis Borges.)

After the ashtray incident, Morris eventually did two stints as a private eye. If there is one subtext to all of Morris’ subsequent films and writings, it is the private eye’s creed, the anti-postmodernist belief that “the truth is out there.” Truth may be elusive, it may even be unknowable, but that doesn’t mean, as postmodernists aver, that reality is just a matter of subjective perspectives, that one way of seeing things is just as good as another.

“I’m amazed,” Morris said when we spoke recently, “that you still see this nonsense all over the place, that truth is relative, that truth is subjective. People still cling to it.” He calls these ideas “repulsive, repugnant. And what’s the other word? False.”

But I digress (something impossible to avoid in writing about Errol Morris). I wanted to tell you about his private-eye trick, which he learned from a hard-bitten partner.

It wasn’t a blackjack-, brass knuckles-type thing. “It went like this,” Morris explained. “He’d knock on a door, sometimes of someone not even connected to the case they were investigating. He’d flip open his wallet, show his badge and say, ‘I guess we don’t have to tell you why we’re here.’

“And more often than not the guy starts bawling like an infant, ‘How did you find out?’” And then disgorges some shameful criminal secret no one would ever have known about otherwise.

I have a feeling about why Morris likes this. There’s the obvious lesson—everybody’s got something to hide—and then there’s the subtle finesse of the question: “I guess we don’t have to tell you…” No water-boarding needed, just an opening for the primal force of conscience, the telltale heart’s internal monologue. It’s one of those mysteries of human nature that private eyes know and Morris has made his métier.

For three decades Morris has painstakingly produced brilliant documentaries on subjects ranging from pet cemeteries (Gates of Heaven) to jailed innocents (The Thin Blue Line) to lion tamers (Fast, Cheap and Out of Control) to cosmologist Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time) to Holocaust deniers (Mr. Death), Vietnam War architects (Fog of War) and Abu Ghraib’s “bad apples” (Standard Operating Procedure). And more recently, in 2010, a long-forgotten, insane tabloid war over “the manacled Mormon” sex scandal in Britain. This film, Tabloid, is a strange, delicious documentary that uncannily anticipated the current tabloid scandal there. And (like Gates of Heaven) Tabloid is really an investigation into the nature of perhaps the ultimate mystery: love.

He hasn’t stopped making films; indeed, he’s making one now with Ira Glass of “This American Life” dealing with cryogenics, of all things. But films take time, so in the past five years, Morris has turned to writing, developing a unique new genre that combines philosophical investigation with documentary transcripts and inventive graphics.

It began with a three-part, 25,000-word New York Times series on the question of the arrangement of some rocks in the road in two 150-year-old photographs taken during the Crimean War. (The “rocks” were actually cannonballs; they just looked like rocks in the photos.) I know: You’re running for the exits. Twenty-five thousand words on some rocks on a road?! But believe me, it becomes an absorbing intellectual adventure story.

I suppose I should disclose that I make a brief appearance in what became the first paragraph of the first chapter of the book, Believing Is Seeing. Wherein I ask Morris incredulously, “You mean to tell me that you went all the way to the Crimea because of one sentence written by Susan Sontag?”

To which he replied: “No, it was actually two sentences.”

Sontag had implied that the rocks in one of the photographs had been “posed,” and this lit a fire under Morris, who believes that everything in photography is “posed” in one way or another, not merely by what’s put in the frame, but by what’s left out.

To illustrate the near-impossibility of establishing veracity in photography he engaged in what might seem like a mad, hopeless enterprise: to see whether the cannonballs were initially on the road or placed there—posed for ideological impact. An investigation that involved him going halfway around the world to the Crimea to find the road and subsequently interviewing “shadow experts” on the time of day each photograph might have been shot.

As one commenter wrote:

“Don’t miss the excursus on the use of albatross eggs to provide the albumen for photo emulsions in early film developing. Or the meditation on Descartes’ Meditations. Or the succinct and devastating deconstruction of deconstructionists’ dim witted view of truth (just because we can’t necessarily know it, they rashly conclude it doesn’t exist). This leads to his critique of the correlative misreading of the film Rashomon [it’s not an ‘all points of view are equally valid’ manifesto] and his desire, expressed in a footnote, for a Rashomon about Rashomon.”

OK, that was me, writing back in 2007 when the series first appeared.

One of Morris’ advantages in his investigations is his disarming personal style. He’s a friendly, genial-looking, unpretentious guy, who reminds me of the old “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and Alec Guinness’ amazing, offhandedly profound portrait of the disarmingly unassuming, apparently empathetic George Smiley. And it occurred to me that in his own way, Morris is our Smiley. Robert McNamara, for instance, thought Morris understood him. And he did—just not the way McNamara understood himself.

But as wily as Morris is, I was worried when he told me about his latest obsession: the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case. “Oh my God, no,” was my measured reaction, “Not that!”

For the past four decades the MacDonald affair has been a toxic swamp that has drawn in some of journalism’s best and brightest writers.

“Yes, that,” Morris replied, telling me that MacDonald is the subject of his next book, titled A Wilderness of Error. In fact, he said, the book is the culmination of 20 years of fascination with the case, going back to a time in the early ’90s when Morris and his wife visited wig shops in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to investigate the wig-fiber evidence at the MacDonald crime scene. He is not a MacDonald partisan in that he doesn’t necessarily believe prosecutorial errors are proof of innocence, rather evidence of uncertainty.

If Errol Morris is that excited about the MacDonald case, it’s a sign we can’t say “Case closed.”

It is, you’ll remember, one of the past half century’s most controversial murder mysteries. The central question remains in dispute: Is MacDonald an innocent man wrongly convicted of murder or is he the ultimate con man?

It began in 1970 and soon became a national scandal widely known as the “Green Beret murder case.” MacDonald, then a Green Beret doctor with an unblemished record, was accused of murdering his wife and two young daughters in his home at Fort Bragg, a key Green Beret base. MacDonald blamed the crime instead on a band of hippies—including a woman in a floppy hat and blond wig—whom he claimed he unsuccessfully fought off as they invaded his home chanting, “Kill the pigs!…Acid is groovy!”

From the beginning the case was fraught with cultural implications. Who was guilty: a Green Beret or Manson-like hippies? After being exonerated at an Army hearing, MacDonald was convicted by civilian prosecutors and given a life sentence that he’s still serving, while spending every waking moment proclaiming his innocence.

You’ve probably heard of how two big-name journalists got involved in tormented relationships with MacDonald, then in fractious relationships with each other. First Joe McGinniss (of recent Sarah Palin biography fame), who seemed to intimate to MacDonald that he believed in his innocence but then came out with a book (Fatal Vision) that sought to nail him. MacDonald sued McGinniss for breach of trust.

Then the New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm produced a book, The Journalist and the Murderer, which accused McGinniss of treachery and became a huge media-ethics kerfuffle because of Malcolm’s dramatic opening sentence, which still echoes in the dusty classrooms of J-schools throughout America: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

I had thought the case was finally dead.

“It’s not dead!” Morris exclaimed, “He’s got another appeal coming up” (most likely in April).

“On what?” I asked, unable to believe there could possibly be a scintilla of evidence or testimony that hasn’t been combed over in the past 40 years.

“Two pieces of new evidence,” Morris replied. “One involves this federal marshal, James Britt, who was with Stoeckley [Helena Stoeckley, supposedly the woman in a floppy hat and blond wig] and who says that he heard the prosecutors threaten Stoeckley when Stoeckley said that she was going to insist that she had been present in the house that night.” (Stoeckley herself is now dead.)

“The other piece is the DNA evidence of an unsourced hair [untraceable to MacDonald or anyone else in the family] under the fingernail of one of the murdered children.”

Which means…the possible presence of another person at the scene of the crime.

Morris claims he has uncovered more Helena Stoeckley evidence on his own.

“There are too many coincidences,” Morris says. “For instance, it just so happens that the first officer, the officer who heard [MacDonald’s] statement [about the woman in the floppy hat], noticed on his way to the crime scene a woman who answered to that description standing in the rain and fog at 3 in the morning. He couldn’t stop because he was answering an emergency call, but the minute he heard the description, he made the connection.”

“Are you saying that MacDonald could be as innocent as Randall Adams in The Thin Blue Line?

“I think so much of the evidence has been lost,” Morris said wistfully. Lost too, perhaps, is any hope of certainty.

This is one of Morris’ greatest strengths, what Keats called “negative capability”: the ability to hold conflicting perspectives in the mind without “irritable” reaching after certainty. (So many conspiracy theorists just can’t bear the irritation of living with uncertainty.)

Any entanglement with the Jeffrey MacDonald case is risky, if you ask me, but Morris is not afraid of risk. As if to prove it, Morris tells me he’s considering plunging into the most dangerous labyrinth of them all—the Kennedy assassination. Abandon all hope ye who enter there.

Last November 22, the New York Times posted a six-minute mini-documentary Morris carved out of a six-hour interview with Josiah “Tink” Thompson, the author of Six Seconds in Dallas.

Another remarkable coincidence: Thompson was my philosophy professor at Yale, a specialist in the works of Soren Kierkegaard, the gloomy Danish proto-existentialist best known for the “leap of faith” notion—the idea that to believe in God one must abandon the scaffolding of reason for the realm of the irrational, even the absurd. The Lonely Labyrinth, Thompson’s book on Kierke­gaard, is still widely admired.

At the same time he was leading students through the labyrinth of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Thompson worked as a consultant for Life magazine on the JFK case and wrote his influential book on the ballistics evidence in Kennedy’s assassination—an attempt to prove through pure reason (and science) that the Warren Commission was wrong. That Oswald could not have fired the number of shots attributed to him in six seconds from his antiquated Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Which meant there had to have been at least one more gun­man. (Others have since claimed to have disproved Thomp­son’s contention.)

More coincidences: Thompson eventually quit his promising academic career to become—yes—a private detective working with David Fechheimer, a legendary investigator who had also employed…Errol Morris.

After reading a story I’d written that discussed Thompson’s arguments, Morris called him and arranged an interview. “He drove from Northern California to Florida, where I filmed him,” recalls Morris. “I wondered why [he drove] because we offered to fly him in. So I’m interviewing him. He gets up. He walks off. He comes back. And he has a Mannlicher-Carcano, just like the one Oswald used.”

“That’s why he didn’t fly?”

“Exactly. He wanted to demonstrate for me the enormous difficulty of firing those shots in rapid succession.”

My feeling is that the real JFK mystery is what was going on inside Oswald’s head, not inside the chambers of the Mannlicher-Carcano. Why was he doing it? What was his motive? Were others involved, even if they didn’t fire a shot?

But if anyone can solve it…

I have a fantasy that someday Errol Morris is going to show up at the door of some old guy no one has connected to the Kennedy assassination before and say, “I guess we don’t have to tell you why we’re here.

via

Through February 25

Anton Kern

Through April 15, 2012

Kunstverein München

Samantha Contis for The New York Times

By MARK LEVINE
NY Times Published: February 17, 2012

Each November, a papermaker named Timothy Barrett gathers a group of friends and students on the grounds of the University of Iowa Research Park, a onetime tuberculosis sanitarium in Coralville, Iowa, for what he bills as a harvest event. Armed with hook-shaped knives, Barrett and his party hack away at a grove of bare, shrublike trees called kozo, a Japanese relative of the common mulberry. At his nearby studio, which is housed in the former sanitarium’s laundry facility, the bundles of cut kozo are steamed in a steel caldron to loosen the bark. After the bark is stripped from the kozo, it is hung on racks, where it shrivels to a crisp over a matter of days. Eventually the bark is rehydrated and sliced apart from its middle, “green” layer, and that layer, in turn, is sheared from the prized inner layer. It takes about a hundred pounds of harvested kozo trees to yield eight pounds of this “white bark,” from which Barrett will ultimately make a few hundred sheets of what connoisseurs consider to be some of the world’s most perfect paper.

Barrett, who is 61, has dedicated his life to unlocking the mysteries of paper, which he regards as both the elemental stuff of civilization and an endangered species in digital culture. For his range of paper-related activities, he received a $500,000 fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation in 2009. “Sometimes I worry about what a weird thing it is to be preoccupied with paper when there’s so much trouble in the world,” Barrett told me, “but then I think of how our whole culture is knitted together by paper, and it makes a kind of sense.” The Library of Congress and the Newberry Library in Chicago are among the institutions that often use his paper to mend their most important holdings, from illuminated manuscripts to musical scores penned by Mozart. In 1999, officials at the National Archives commissioned Barrett to fabricate paper on which to lay the fragile parchment originals of the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. A visitor to Washington, Barrett said, would be unlikely to notice his paper resting beneath the founding charters. “But if you kind of turn your head sideways and squint, you can see it.”

I first met Barrett last winter, when I went to his studio to see him make washi, the lustrous, translucent, tissue-thin Japanese-style paper that is the fruit of his mulberry harvest. Washi, he told me, was a centuries-old winter vocation of Japanese rice farmers. A thermostat on a cinder-block wall read 50.2 degrees, and Barrett was wearing a thick long-sleeve undershirt, a flannel shirt and a down vest beneath his heavy apron. He makes washi only six weeks each year, and forms sheets of paper only on Thursdays. Much of the rest of the time he is preparing the white bark according to a regimen that includes cooking it in a solution of wood-ash lye, laboriously picking the strands free of tiny bits of debris, beating them with a mechanical stamping device, pounding them with mallets and then macerating the stringy clumps in a tub outfitted with S-shaped blades that he says are modeled on a medieval Japanese sword.

He stepped inside an 8-by-10-foot corner of the studio that was enclosed by curtains of plastic sheeting and scooped a few liters of wet white bark fibers into a vat of purified water. Then he poured in what he called a “formation agent” — plant secretions that, he said, were the key to the amazing strength, softness and flexibility of sheets no thicker than a Kleenex. He stirred the vat with a four-foot pole, then pushed and pulled the prongs of a huge, rakelike wooden tool through the solution to disperse the fibers evenly in the water. “A hundred and fifty strokes,” he said, though he didn’t appear to be counting. He stirred with the pole again and paused. Now he was ready to make a sheet of paper.

He took hold of a rectangular wooden frame, or mold, that had a bamboo mat and dipped it into the vat. He lifted it out, let excess water splash over the sides, then plunged it back in. He shook his arms rhythmically. Small waves formed on the surface. He might have been taken for someone at a washtub, though he swayed in a languid, trancelike manner. Finally, he bent his knees deeply, took one more pull out of the vat and quickly tossed the excess off. Nothing but a wet sheen was left on the mold. I thought that the process had, for some reason, failed to produce paper. But soon, from a corner of the frame, Barrett peeled off a pale yellow sheet, which resembled a large damp handkerchief. “People are always surprised when they see it for the first time,” he told me afterward. “It’s as though it comes out of nowhere.” By the end of the day he had a stack of 100 sheets or so, which he would drain overnight, clamp in a screw press and dry on a wall of steam-heated sheet metal the following day. The finished product was a rectangle of radiant simplicity, an unfancy, richly hued blank presence that was the predictable result, Barrett insisted, of selecting proper materials, preparing them in patient, time-honored ways and approaching their manufacture with a spirit of total dedication. “This is pretty much how it was done for 1,800 years,” he remarked. “By hand. One sheet at a time.”

The origins of what paper cognoscenti call “true paper,” which requires the breaking-down and reconstitution of plant fibers, are often dated to A.D. 105 and linked to Ts’ai Lun, a eunuch in the court of Emperor Han Ho Ti of China. Few technological advances have been as enduring. Wherever it appeared, paper swiftly relegated more primitive writing surfaces like stone, wood blocks, clay tablets, wax and sheets of laminated bark or matted papyrus stalks to oblivion. The miracle of paper — its combination of flexibility and tensile strength in an easily fabricated and, well, paper-thin material — is a chemical gift of cellulose. When cellulose fibers are separated from noncellulosic components of plants, beaten to a pulp, briefly suspended in water and spread onto a screen, the fibers bond together to form a sheet. A piece of paper is a plant re-engineered for specifically human purposes.

Paper production was confined to the Far East until the year 751, when, some historians believe, Muslim conquerors of Central Asia carried the secrets of the trade to Samarkand. It wasn’t until the 12th century, when Muslims ruled Spain, that papermaking began spreading to Europe. Unlike Asian papermakers, who relied on plants like hemp, mulberry, bamboo and daphne for fiber, mills in Italy, France, Germany and the Low Countries turned to worn-out textiles for their raw material. Rag men roamed the towns and countryside, collecting scraps of fabric whose hemp and flax fibers had been degraded by years of washing and drying in the sun. Until the 19th century, European and American books were made largely of recycled clothes and other textiles.

According to Jesse Munn, a paper specialist who worked as a conservator at the Library of Congress for 32 years, the rapid spread of printing took a toll on the quality of paper. “The insatiable demand of the common market lowered standards of some papers,” she says. “The history of paper in most cases is one of steady decline in character and strength.” To cut their costs, some mills began using less-carefully-sorted rags and rushed the process of preparing the pulp. The result was weaker, darker paper, with knots and clumps of fiber in the finished sheets. Quality sank further when, at the beginning of the 19th century, French and English inventors developed a steam-powered “paper machine.” Paper production exploded, quickly exhausting the available supply of rags. Papermakers turned to a plentiful source of low-grade cellulose: trees. An age of abundant, cheap, inferior paper emerged. Newspapers flourished and inexpensive books flooded the market. Paper became an ingredient in everything from shoes to construction materials. The industrialized paper trade crossed the Atlantic in the 19th century, eventually transforming vast swaths of American forests into paper plantations. Some chemicals used in preparing wood pulp resulted in what paper conservators call “self-destructing paper,” which turned brown and brittle with age. As Munn told me, “We’ll lose a lot of the 19th century.”

At the same time, small artisanal movements grew up in fierce resistance to industrialization. In England, William Morris commissioned a mill to supply his press with paper made by hand, using the materials and methods employed in the Italian Renaissance. Dard Hunter, an Ohio-born acolyte of the Arts and Crafts movement, spent much of the first half of the 20th century proselytizing on behalf of meticulously handcrafted papers. Nonetheless, the use of cheap, mass-produced papers grew inexorably. In his 1947 edition of “Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft,” Hunter noted that per capita consumption of paper in the U.S. was 287.5 pounds in 1943; that would rise in recent years to more than 600 pounds. In the interim, handmade paper became all but obsolete.

Tim Barrett was raised in Kalamazoo, Mich., which was once known as the Paper City, in recognition of the local paper industry. As a boy, he took an interest in all things mechanical. Unlike his father, an English professor at Kalamazoo College, Barrett was less interested in what was written in books than in how their paper was made. Barrett’s father would occasionally take the family on visits to local factories. On one such trip, Barrett recalled being struck by the sight of massive machinery churning bales of waste paper into pulp.

At the famously countercultural Antioch College, he threw himself into all manner of arty pursuits — ceramics, stained-glass-window making, photography, film, printmaking. He tanned deer hides and made fringed clothing. For the first time, too, he tried making sheets of paper, pulping cotton linters in a garbage pail with an electric drill and mixing in fabric dye he bought at a grocery store. When he graduated, he traveled for a while with a group of artist friends, painting vaguely political murals on the sides of barns.

In California, Barrett crossed paths with a pair of twin sisters who were planning to move to Indiana and open a papermaking studio with their husbands. He signed on as an apprentice. “We were all self-taught as papermakers, which is another way of saying we had no idea what we were doing,” he said. Eventually the studio, called Twinrocker Handmade Paper, gained a following for its heavyweight cotton printmaking papers, which were favored by artists like Jasper Johns and Jim Dine. But Barrett wasn’t interested in making art papers. His temperament was both more austere and more drawn to plain, pragmatic craftsmanship. He wanted to make paper that would be handled, not simply looked at, and he wanted to make it in ways that the old artisans would have approved of. After two years at Twinrocker, he received a Fulbright grant and went to Japan, despite having no knowledge of the language or the culture. He traveled the countryside, getting tips on where paper was being made. The papermakers he met tended to be perplexed by his interest, but he persisted. “I learned enough Japanese to say things like, ‘How much wood-ash lye do you use for cooking the fiber?’ ”

When he returned to the U.S., he moved into a barn on his parents’ property, and, using sketches and notes he made in Japan, began building equipment for his own paper shop. He also embarked on writing the book “Japanese Papermaking,” which is part manual, part affectionate, detailed history of a waning craft. He supported himself, barely, with occasional grants and by driving around the country in a van, giving lectures and demonstrations.

In 1986, he landed at the University of Iowa, which was one of the few schools in the country to employ a papermaker. Over the years, he developed a fascination with 15th-century European papers, which, he said, “were amazingly attractive to me, but in a totally different way from the Japanese papers. They struck me as having an elusive quality of character, authenticity and integrity, that I didn’t see anywhere else. They were supple, strong, had a kind of crackle and made you want to touch them.” Barrett began analyzing these and other papers, testing close to 1,500 pages produced between the 14th and 19th centuries. He reconstructed the materials and techniques that were used in the papermaking centers of preindustrial Europe and began producing Western-style paper in ways that he considered historically accurate — starting with raw flax and hemp, sometimes fermenting them for weeks, cooking the fibers in lime, adding gelatin to the paper and burnishing the finished sheets with a stone.

Barrett’s connection to the old papers was becoming more than simply technical. It was emotional. He detected life in them. He once found the imprint of a person’s thumb on a page in a Renaissance book. “Maybe the papermaker was rushing to fill an order, and grabbed the corner of the sheet too firmly,” he said. “To me, that fingerprint marked the sheet with the humanity of the person who made it. I could feel his presence.”

James Galvin, a poet who teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, occasionally feels the need to send his students a wake-up call. When this happens, Galvin calls Barrett, with whom he attended Antioch (for a while, the two of them dated sisters), and asks him to send over one sheet of paper per student. “I describe the paper to the students,” Galvin says, “and I talk about the care, knowledge and aesthetic wisdom that went into making it. Then I tell them to go home and write something on it that makes it more interesting than it is when it’s blank.”

Barrett’s work has been driven by the notion that good materials, worked by hand, transmit their power in ways that the products of less painstaking manufacture can’t. “I have to believe that the eye and the hand take it all in, even when we’re not aware of it,” he said. There’s a poignancy to his work, given that paper’s long role as the repository of cultural memory and accomplishment is being usurped by swift technological change. As Bob Stein, the founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book, told me: “The notion of a page is being expanded as we speak. I imagine the book going in two directions — one as an art object, printed on paper in small quantities and so expensive only the rich can afford it, and the other as an electronic form that will incorporate still images, animation, a diverse set of links to the open Web and a significant social component. In terms of the electronic book, we’re in 1464” — the infancy of Gutenberg’s press — “and everything is poised to change.”

One afternoon last year, I met Barrett in the special-collections department of the University of Iowa Libraries. “Sometimes I worry that handmade books and paper are going the way of the horse-drawn carriage,” he mused, “and that I’m one of those enthusiasts who get really into making replicas of buggies. But I don’t think so.” He continued: “Paper is a big part of who we are. I like to imagine someone falling in love, and writing a note to his sweetheart on a piece of well-made paper. It’s got to be more meaningful than sending an e-mail.”

One of Barrett’s coming projects involves gathering a team of students to reproduce what he called the “production environment” of a 15th-century paper mill — making paper in relatively high volume and treating the product as a useful commodity rather than a luxury item. Usefulness, he said, is a large part of what makes the paper he most admires beautiful. He opened a case and took out a book he considers one of his favorites: “Historia Scholastica,” by the 12th-century French cleric Petrus Comestor, published in Augsburg, in Bavaria, in 1473. It’s a book of biblical stories, but it wasn’t the text that inspired Barrett.

“Look,” he said, fingering the lushly textured paper, which dates to the year of Copernicus’s birth, “you can see fine lines from the way the threads were sewn down on the mold. And here, if you hold it up in raking light, you can see where someone in the mill picked up the edge of the sheet. I love these little touches of the hand.” He glanced down at a librarian’s notes detailing the efforts that had been made to conserve the book, and read with a mix of surprise and delight, “Mended in the spine with paper from Barrett’s shop.”

17 Nov ’62
1962
Acrylic on paper
22 x 30 inches; 56 x 76 cm

Drawings

Through April 14, 2012

Matthew Marks

Friday, February 17th, 2012, 7 to 10pm

“Herbert Cholmondeley Presents” 420 W. Avenue 33 Unit 10 Los Angeles, 90031

Down the rabbit hole: A customer makes new friends during a visit to the Ra.a.g.f rabbit cafe

Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012
The Japan Times
Kyodo

Tokyo is full of cafes catering to a wide assortment of tastes, but in recent years a new breed of coffee house has emerged for people who love to hang out with rabbits.

Ra.a.g.f, pronounced “raf,” opened last fall in the fashionable Jiyugaoka area in Meguro Ward, and is usually packed at weekends with customers reveling in the company of the cafe’s 20 to 30 rabbits.

“I came here during my break to relax,” said a smiling woman in her late 20s as she fed fresh vegetables to some of the rabbits.

Customers who want to buy rabbits can purchase the animals from the cafe’s breeding center — but the cafe’s rabbit “staff” are not for sale.

Cafe manager Maria Fuwa cautioned that customers have to be able to provide suitable accommodations for the rabbits and also must promise never to abandon them.

In Fuwa’s view, a rabbit is for life.

Another rabbit cafe, Usagi Cafe Ohisama (Rabbit Sun Cafe), was launched last year by a pet shop operator in the Shimokitazawa area in Setagaya Ward.

This coffee shop is also buzzing on weekends and most of the customers are women, said cafe manager Asami Yoshimura

The cafe has about 30 of the animals, but the big rabbit on campus is Naito-kun — who lives with Yoshimura.

Yet another rabbit cafe operating in the same area is Usagi no Ehon (Rabbit Picture Books).

Given the many live music houses and small theaters nearby, it has turned into a gathering spot for musicians and actors.

“I want our cafe to be a healing space for stressed-out people,” said Etsuko Kawasaki, who has been running the cafe with her family for the past two years.

The cafe’s seven rabbits may not be a match for the hordes cavorting in its two rival establishments — but it does display picture books and sell rabbit-themed merchandise.

Thanks to Stephen Tsou

Untitled, oil on panel, 14″ x 14″, 2011

Nancy De Holl

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 16, 2012

First, Atlas shrugged. Then he scratched his head in puzzlement.

Modern Republicans are very, very conservative; you might even (if you were Mitt Romney) say, severely conservative. Political scientists who use Congressional votes to measure such things find that the current G.O.P. majority is the most conservative since 1879, which is as far back as their estimates go.

And what these severe conservatives hate, above all, is reliance on government programs. Rick Santorum declares that President Obama is getting America hooked on “the narcotic of dependency.” Mr. Romney warns that government programs “foster passivity and sloth.” Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, requires that staffers read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which heroic capitalists struggle against the “moochers” trying to steal their totally deserved wealth, a struggle the heroes win by withdrawing their productive effort and giving interminable speeches.

Many readers of The Times were, therefore, surprised to learn, from an excellent article published last weekend, that the regions of America most hooked on Mr. Santorum’s narcotic — the regions in which government programs account for the largest share of personal income — are precisely the regions electing those severe conservatives. Wasn’t Red America supposed to be the land of traditional values, where people don’t eat Thai food and don’t rely on handouts?

The article made its case with maps showing the distribution of dependency, but you get the same story from a more formal comparison. Aaron Carroll of Indiana University tells us that in 2010, residents of the 10 states Gallup ranks as “most conservative” received 21.2 percent of their income in government transfers, while the number for the 10 most liberal states was only 17.1 percent.

Now, there’s no mystery about red-state reliance on government programs. These states are relatively poor, which means both that people have fewer sources of income other than safety-net programs and that more of them qualify for “means-tested” programs such as Medicaid.

By the way, the same logic explains why there has been a jump in dependency since 2008. Contrary to what Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney suggest, Mr. Obama has not radically expanded the safety net. Rather, the dire state of the economy has reduced incomes and made more people eligible for benefits, especially unemployment benefits. Basically, the safety net is the same, but more people are falling into it.

But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? I’ve seen three main explanations.

First, there is Thomas Frank’s thesis in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.’s exploitation of social issues. And it’s true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don’t.

Still, as Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.’s war on contraception.

Finally, Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they “have not used a government program.”

Presumably, then, voters imagine that pledges to slash government spending mean cutting programs for the idle poor, not things they themselves count on. And this is a confusion politicians deliberately encourage. For example, when Mr. Romney responded to the new Obama budget, he condemned Mr. Obama for not taking on entitlement spending — and, in the very next breath, attacked him for cutting Medicare.

The truth, of course, is that the vast bulk of entitlement spending goes to the elderly, the disabled, and working families, so any significant cuts would have to fall largely on people who believe that they don’t use any government program.

The message I take from all this is that pundits who describe America as a fundamentally conservative country are wrong. Yes, voters sent some severe conservatives to Washington. But those voters would be both shocked and angry if such politicians actually imposed their small-government agenda.