aquarius

I drew these while sitting at a table in the reading room of the Lilly Library on East Campus. I was probably sitting there with a stack of periodicals: October, Artforum, Art in America, Critical Inquiry, Flash Art, the New Yorker, Harpers, New York Review of Books, Art History, Burlington, Art Papers, Art on Paper, and other things I find essential for having close at hand on a early spring afternoon.

I should get a scanner in order to reproduce my images more accurately - there's wide discrepancy in how they clean up from the photos and the photos are bothered with shadows and discolorations, so that the reproductions here and elsewhere are hardly indicative of the quality of what I do. Sigh.

I find myself lately whistling this tune. The whole age of aquarius is apparently from Jung, but I didn't know that. What will future youth rebellions, 1968s, summer of loves, pattern themselves after? What will be their content? What old gurus will they borrow from? What indicators of that culture will appear in the previous ten years? Who in the 1950s could have guessed the 1960s? Who in 1955 could have guessed that this war the French were fighting for a colonial possession would become the life of their young boy, who was watching Howdy Doody at that moment. In ten years he's at Khe Sahn. Who could guess that these beat poets would begat Dylan? Or that Elvis would begat the Stones? That we'd go from Peggy Sue to Paint it Black? Or who would guess that segregation, which seemed so natural, so "the way it is" would come to an end. The 1960s didn't just happen. The seeds for it were in the 1950s and 1940s, even farther back.

Nothing remains in stasis. No era of prosperity or good feeling endures. Nor does depression - though depression digs further into the soul, sadly, than good things. Our country will come to an end - or at least the way we assume it is - and are we able to face it, to accept it (because certainly the ones coming after us will no more understand our "principles" than we understand such principles that preceded us as hoop skirts and using Thee and Thou) or will we pretend that we can stand upon the stream of change yelling stop. But it will be a flood.

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.