Broken English - Bad French Lessons

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 My father spoke with an accent from his native country, it reminded me that their was a world beyond the shores of our red white and blue land. Indeed it wasn't all that unusual my playmates across the alley Magnus and Erik were also born in Norway like my dad. Many immigrant parents were anxious for their children to be as American as possible because they understood being a foreigner was not good in the post war days of the red scare. The administration of Dwight Eisenhower was fraught with passive aggressive realities. On the surface things never seemed better Mickey Mouse,Tupperware and biblical epics starting Charlton Heston teaching us bible stories transmogrified by so-called middle amerikan values. My dad was a commercial / industrial painter and I recall my first visit to the Art Institute of Chicago occurred when  he was painting the vast galleries there . He would often show me and my sister his latest bridge or steeple that he had painted. He was anxious to show me some artworks that he found completely puzzling and suspected them of being hoaxes. One painting a rather huge vertical canvas looked like nothing so much as a dropcloth covered with a lot of thinned orange paint. Later I understood this painting to be the work of Mark Rothko. It was a laugh to my dad how such a thing could be celebrated in this antique house of art.

 Years later my Dad and I made a trip to the Art Institute to see a Marcel Duchamp retrospective . I recall my father's laughter when he saw R'Mutt the urinal Duchamp had presented as art to a jury for the 1st Armony Show (it was rejected and Alfred Stieglitz took the immortal photograph of the piece that we all know from art history classes.). I was happy my dad reacted and not surprised by his laughing indeed much modern art had been greeted with laughter and derision.  Laughing seems better as a response to art than the sort quiet that greets so much historical art, the sort pious whispering  and general sense that a gallery is not unlike a library.  ( one moment please we are having technical problems)  That trip to see Duchamp's work and another I made to Philadephia to see the Large Glass  and the secret tableaux ) really were exciting and though I can't precisely say how I found a distinct relationship between the Sephirotic Tree of Hebrew Mysticism and Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass ( The so called Brides &  Bachcelors ). Prof Jack Burnham wrote 3 essays in 1974 about Duchamp and the mystical traditions the Kabbalah and I shall always be in his debt for his pointing the way towards an alternative view of Marcel Duchamp.

New Paragraph - One writer said my art up at the Walker Art Center was almost made like ALMOST CRAZY   that sticks in my mind almost crazy. It is true somethings were when I was mad, technically. I destroyed things, I was in the grips of a huge delusion. But now I discovered I was partly correct, at least art-wise. It's Duchamp by a nose over Picasso and Pollock isn't in this horse race, Pollock is Atomic Super Optical Re-Mix. The drinking which I feel begat existentialism, witness Sarte and his cognac.

The snowshovel - the doppelganger snowshovel next time when we play pin the tale on the author  The whole pain in ass about the moustache on Duchamp see illustration - Oi! - See for yourself -  Duchamp as you may remember put a mustache on Mona Lisa and I did the time. Mssr Franck G'art aka Frankie