So I mentioned my father's last years of senility to Rob
Shearman the other day (god, I'm such a pathetic
name-dropper), and it started me thinking I'd like to write something about him here.
One.
My dad ran a paint company until the early 1950's when, shortly after the death of both his father and his first wife, he sold the company and determined to devote his life to art. He attempted painting, but wasn't much good at it. His talents lay elsewhere. He had a knack for business and organization, and a vision for the future of art. So he
started an art gallery, right on the cutting edge of modernism, displaying abstract expressionists such as
Milton Resnick. In a
Midwestern industrial town like Cleveland, this sort of thing went over like a lead balloon, and most of his exhibitions were met with derision by the press and the public.
So my dad up and moved the gallery (and us) to New York City in 1961. He quickly moved past "traditional" painting and sculpture (even the non-representational kind he had favored) toward a new type of art that utilized leading-edge technology. As a gadget freak, and someone whose early life was greatly shaped by the industrial revolution, he had a fascination with the nexus of art and science. During the Sixties he presented exhibitions of
kinetic art,
light art,
"op" art, and even the
first-ever gallery exhibition of computer-generated (CG) art. In 1968 he presented the first exhibition of video art, called (perhaps a bit
snarkily) "
TV as a Creative Medium," which ultimately led him to the conclusion that art had outgrown the boundaries of conventional exhibition space. Two years later he closed down the gallery and created
Electronic Arts Intermix, a nonprofit organization for the support and distribution of video art.
EAI distributes works by artists as diverse as Nam Jun
Paik, Ed
Emshwiller, and Jean-
Luc Goddard.
Two.
My dad was born in 1903, in Ohio, a few weeks before the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk in the same state. He remembered the day the Titanic sank (people were out in the streets crying, he said, even in Cleveland). His parents took him to visit Charlie Chaplin's studios, and home movies exist of the family taken there. He spent part of the 1920's living in France, and became enough of an expert to write a book about the restaurants and wines of the south of France. During this time he reputedly had an affair with
Josephine Baker, who supposedly broke up with him when she learned he was not actually French.
In the 1930's he spent time in
Weimar Germany and saw the effects of the hyperinflation there. He used to tell the story of going to a restaurant in Berlin and, not knowing exactly what to order, handed the waiter a five-dollar bill. This resulted in the staff bringing him mountains of food, more than he could possibly eat. Finally he had to tell them to stop bringing food, but a few minutes later the waiters rolled out another cart of entrees, explaining "They just
devalued the mark again!"
He played tennis with the Marx Brothers in Hollywood in the 30's. He lived through the Great War and WWII, and of course Korea and
Viet Nam.
He had seen so much. And when, near the end of his life, his mental faculties began to slip away, we in the family were kicking ourselves that we had never gotten a first-hand account of the details of his life (something he himself had done with many artists and intellectuals with his trusty color video recorder a decade earlier). But by then it was too late. My father had taken a left turn into some strange forest of tangled memories, never to return.
Three.
In the last 15 years of his life, my father started taking up causes. The first was the
Pritikin diet, which was the first low-fat diet. He met
Pritikin and stayed at his institute in 1976, and became convinced that people were poisoning themselves with butter and other fatty foods. He quickly became one of
Pritikin's main proselytizers, and would never hesitate to criticize the eating habits of his immediate family if they did not live up to the Pritikin principles.
In 1977 he was extremely disturbed by a book called "The Limits to Growth." This book was a godsend to compulsive worriers, as it used detailed computer models to predict that the planet would run out of oil, food, and just about everything else by the year 2000. The book has undergone two revisions but, like any good End of Days soothsayer, it is still making the same dire predictions, albeit on a slightly altered timetable.
My father worried even more about the proliferation of nuclear arms, a fear that was exacerbated by the Reagan arms buildup of the 1980's. He was in his eighties by then, and he increasingly devoted all his energies to the cause of nuclear disarmament. He made documentaries, joined organizations, and rallied people to aid the movement. He worried endlessly about the possibility of nuclear war. Ironically, a few days after his death, in 1989, the Union of Concerned Scientists turned back the hands of the
Doomsday Clock for the first time in 20 years.
I've known other powerful men like my father who in old age become convinced that mankind is hurtling toward destruction and become obsessed with saving the world. Perhaps this is their way of fighting the knowledge that oblivion will soon be upon them. Or perhaps some misguided sense of vanity makes them refuse to believe that the world could possibly survive without them. Whatever the reason, they, like my father, seem desperate to put their mark on this world before they depart it.
My father believed that his work for disarmament was the most important thing he'd ever done. He was quite wrong, of course, and all his worrying about some impending nuclear holocaust was completely futile. In the end, it was his love of art that did the world the most good.
