new clarity on old experiences

I am [today] the first to admit that, when I met my ex wife, I was incredibly naive with regard to the ways of love and romance. I'd just moved from Cleveland to Pittsburgh, in the process leaving behind my puppy-love college GF, who I'd been seeing since our junior year. She broke up with me at the end of our junior academic year, and I spent the summer pining away, finally getting over it after my summer efforts to reunite us were met with unanswered letters. My favorite one I actually wrote to her dog.

As youth would have it, when school resumed, she suddenly became interested again. She was a nice girl, but neither one of us had any real sense of where we were going or what we were going to do with our expensive BA's...after trying to forge a career in something, anything (advertising was my hope, but it never went anywhere) in Cleveland for 2 or 3 yrs after graduating, my first professional gig materialized and I moved to Pittsburgh. Which pretty much doomed that r-ship. The thing was, it was my first *real* career opportunity, I loved it, was excited by all the new challenges and experiences, and pretty much was working 12-16 hour days, 6 days a week. Though I'd seriously asked my GF to consider moving to PGH to be with me, she just wasn't wired for that kind of change, so our r-ship went from daily, nearly non-stop involvement (we even shared the same position at the same company for a number of years, which we both hated, though it's fair to say I hated it more than she did, maybe a lot more, but you'd never be able to tell for sure b/c she was one of those many people at the time who was pretty good at living in the superficial drama of the moment as a means of maintaining her denial of real issues) to pretty much a long-distance phone r-ship. This was terribly frustrating to me on many levels. We hadn't lived together, or even taken the plunge at the time into a fully sexual r-ship. Though we'd pretty much "done everything but" intercourse, she wanted to "wait"...like, this was the late 80's. Today, knowing what I know now, it's not only difficult for me to believe but downright embarassing that I didn't see that as a sign of some type of weirdness back then, but, as I said -- I was totally naive. It wore on me b/c, as much as I loved her, I saw myself at the time finally beginning to make something of myself -- I was getting valuable experience and feeling like I was using my abilities -- and she was still living with her roommate (who she met through me), hating her job, and going home to Parma for dinner every Sunday, as much to avoid her Yugoslavian mother's guilt trips as to visit her family -- yet she'd get upset with me for not making the 2-hr drive back to Cleveland every weekend to see her, when she very well could have come to PGH every weekend to spend time with me.

Anyway, within a month of my move, I met a number of new people...while I resisted, there seemed to be no end of new romantic opportunities. The first was a brilliant, tall Irish girl named Meg. We kissed once. She would have been a catch -- but I passed b/c I was still in this puppy-love, long-term, monogamous, committed, unconsummated r-ship with my GF.

Number Two was a stunning blond, who was in line in front of me in the public library that was adjacent to the theater I was working for at the time. I was there to check out a copy of a play (either Arms and the Man or The Hairy Ape, I can't recall which) that was on the theater's performance schedule and I wanted to be familiar with it. I remember being honestly struck by her beauty, getting turned on by being close enough to her in line that I could smell her perfume -- when she stunned me by turning around and smiling and saying hi. We made some small talk, and then she asked me, "Have you had lunch yet?" My actual response to this Unsolicited Invitation from the Goddess: "Yes, I did." That was that. I had learned from our chat that she worked at a pretty cool restaurant that was only a short walk from the theater. So, I began to go there whenever I could, in the hope of running into her again and rectifying my utterly clueless behavior. I finally did, but -- while our initial meeting was still the fuel of active masturbatory fantasies for me, the moment had clearly passed for The Goddess. To. This. Day. I could still kick myself.

Number Three was a little pixie-ish art student named Jenn. She swung between bleached her hair and dying it black, sometimes mixing the two. She had a great ass, accentuated by the punkish torn leggings that she liked to wear, and she always smelled like patchouli oil. She worked for me, and we made each other laugh and became friends. One night, clueless me is alone with her in her ramshackle little bohemian apartment, having beers and watching a candle burn, playing with the hot wax. Thinking back, it's impossible for me to envision anything other than voracious kisses leading to hours of hungry, intense sex...my hands and seeking her breasts and ass, my lips on her nipples and taught stomach, the sound of her purrs and then moans as my mouth found her wet pussy... In reality, I freaked and said a number of things (I'm involved, I have a GF, It's serious, I can't cheat on her, I'm in love, I'm your boss, I'm too old for you) and awkwardly escaped. As it turned out, I think she really was bipolar, the incident ruined our friendship, she slipped into a depression and wasn't any fun to be around anymore, and eventually stopped showing up for work.

Number Four stuck -- finally. Also worked for me. Of course, with the exception of the Art Student, I probably picked the most dangerous of them all. But, god -- I was worn out. And I needed to get laid, for crying out loud! Two things that my sweet little college GF did wrong: One, she should have let me sleep with her. Wed' seen each other for over 4 years. I mean, come on! -- she let me lick her pussy, but she wouldn't let me fuck her! In her defense (and mine, I suppose), I -- nice, respecting, loving BF -- never pushed her. And never left her.

Though, shortly after I graduated, while my college GF was still living at home, and the bulk of our time together took the form of me meeting her for lunch when she was still working the campus job that she'd had as an undergrad, there was something. I worked with this girl named MJ. She was a music student. Vocalist. Not the prettiest face in the room, but she was smart and funny. And we got along -- there was a tangible and irresistible physical chemistry between us. So, we went out one night, drank some beers, inevitably wound up back at her place, and -- perhaps in a foreshadowing of my future frustrations -- I spent the night in her bed, slowly and passionately making out for hours. The image of her strong body writhing beneath me remains clear, smelling her scent, my mouth sucking her beneath her panties as she pressed my face down, moaning. She so wanted me to fuck her. I'd still fuck her today. I owe her a good fuck. But I didn't. Instead, I left in the morning, both of us feeling guilty and frustrated. The only mitigating factor for both of us I think was was that she was "involved" with someone, too, so we were both able to take solace in feeling like we did the right thing by denying ourselves, each other and the universe what inevitably would have been some really satisfying sex. Our friendship was never the same. Though it wasn't lost on me that, in one sweet, steamy night, in a stuffy upstairs attic apartment, I'd gotten farther with this girl from Oklahoma who'd known me for maybe two months than I had in over three years with my GF. Hmmm.

I held out for another few years, until I'd moved, and been tempted by a steady string of hotties. All of whom seemed quite open about wanting me, physically, sexually, lustily - while this girl to whom I'd been unflaggingly loyal (with one exception) continued to limit me to dry-humping her with my zipper down. Christ. It's no wonder that, by the time I met Number Four, I could no longer resist. We hit it off immediately, I remained naive and inexperienced, as should be painfully obvious to the reader by now, and my ex aggressively pursued me and eagerly seduced me. And she was neither naive nor inexperienced. I confessed to my GF -- much to the chagrin and ridicule of my new best (male) friend, who (wisely) advised me to just be quiet -- and the rest is history.

Today, it makes complete sense to me that my r-ship with the long-term GF would end. I needed to be free. It was like the universe was trying to help make it happen. I realize now that the r-ship ended because my GF took for granted that I would always be in love with her -- regardless of her annoying lack of self-confidence (good job, mom) and mood swings -- not to mention her prudent attitude towards sex -- and I took for granted that she would always understand me, or at least give me the benefit of the doubt when I would exercise my right to be an individual. Years later I realized that what we thought was love was more habit and getting along. Neither of us knew I guess, at the time, being in our mid-20's, that there is a difference between love and being *in* love. On her end, I think it's fair for me to say that she didn't "get" that you gotta fan the flames of romance if you want to keep it alive. On my end, I honestly thought she'd somehow understand that, for whatever reason, I felt I *had* to explore the possibility of the new r-ship. Who was the bigger dumb-ass? I think it was fairly even, though I probably won the contest for insensitivity in that one. I truly thought we'd be able to still be friends. Duh.

I've come to think that a lot of life is being in the right place at the right time, though I don't still feel like I've developed a knack for that. I do believe that it's an invaluable talent to be able to recognize signs, when the universe presents them to you......but like I Ching readings........so much is open to interpretation, and your mileage may vary. Examples: During the time of this spurt in my individuation process, I remember two signs very clearly. One was sitting on the floor of a temporary apt I'd rented, with my new love, both of us sharing how badly we felt for my poor GF, and how neither of us knew what the best decision would be -- break off our new thing and chalk it up to an unplanned and intense fling, or take the plunge and leave the past behind. We did a little thing -- I tore a piece of paper into many pieces, and wrote on them either "Stay together" or "Marry GF" (though we weren't engaged) -- and then we agreed to draw a slip and promised that we'd do what the piece of paper said. Can't remember which one of use drew the slip, but it said "Marry GF" -- and we laughed, and didn't do it. I wound up marrying my ex, instead.

Which, ironically or not -- certainly not surprisingly, in retrospect -- didn't work out. Threw a big August wedding in my hometown, was pregnant with our son by Halloween (she was supposedly on birth control), and when he was maybe a year and half old, as we were getting the house ready for a New Year's Eve party we were having for a bunch of close friends, she basically told me she didn't wanted to be married anymore. Threw me for a loop. I convinced her to see a counselor -- both on her own, and as a couple -- we did, but it didn't help. At her insistence, we separated, which she led me to believe was so we could get some space and work things out. Which maybe she meant, but she never did one thing remotely resembling an attempt to reconcile. After the separation she confessed to having an affair. And that was really it. She cheated, and I couldn't get past it. I was miserable for about 6 months, then got sick of feeling miserable, and started to recover. I do have a low tolerance for misery, in the end. But I can put up with a high level of it, so it's been a bit of a catch-22 in my romantic life. Pretty sure I've gotten that under control. *crosses fingers*

Fought for custody of our son. She fought back. Being only the biological father, I didn't have a chance. So I dropped it. We switched custody weeks until my son started pre-school -- though I always had him well over 50% of the time -- then he lived with her, and I saw him weekends. Was very hard for me. Both to accept the "injustice" of the whole situation -- here, she was the one who was "wrong," but I was the one who had to suffer. And the system clearly favored her, as the mother. America hasn't evolved much at all, I learned up close and personal, with regard to its beliefs about M/F roles. Anyway, eventually I did get custody, but only after she agreed to it for reasons I still don't understand, but really don't care to -- my son's been with me since he was 7, he lives with me now, his mom's still in PA and rarely if ever spends any time with her son. I've never interfered. She has quite possibly damaged that r-ship beyond any hope of repair.

So, no -- we're not on good terms, if by that you mean do I care and respect her. But we don't have any ongoing "issues" b/c we've both moved on, and she lives far enough away to not be a menace, and she no longer has the power to disrupt my emotional or financial existence. I've made my peace, and I can only hope that my son will be able to, before it's too late, b/c, while to me she's just a bad r-ship that ended, to him she's his mom.

Turns out it's a lot to write, this life I've been living.

Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist

May 14, 2008, The New York Times
Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the Manhattan gallery that represents Mr. Rauschenberg.

Blue Urchin, 1974
Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. "Canyon," for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. "Monogram" was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. "Bed" entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged, during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture.

Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated.

“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a St. Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians.

A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky, small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations.

Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, off southwest Florida, these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on one that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he felt, and risk sometimes meant failure.

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”

He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Mr. Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.”

A Wry, Respectful Departure

That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.

But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 1950s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings.

At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension.

Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.

There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” (1955) was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric akin to bandages, from which paint dripped like blood. “Interview” (1955), which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photos of bullfighters, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message.

There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected sites; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation.

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” (1955-59) and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

“So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Growing Up With Scraps

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where “it was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting,” he said. (In adulthood he renamed himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who emigrated from Germany, had settled in Texas and married a Cherokee. His father, Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother was buried in. She didn’t want the material to go to waste.

For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-made shirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A decade or so later he made history with his own assemblages of scraps and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and paintings like “Yoicks,” sewn from fabric strips. He loved making something out of nothing.

Mr. Rauschenberg studied pharmacology briefly at the University of Texas at Austin before he was drafted during World War II. He saw his first paintings at the Huntington Art Gallery in California while he was stationed in San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps. It occurred to him that it was possible to become a painter.

He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the G.I. Bill, traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil, a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers, then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved enough money to join her.

Mr. Albers was a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg. He was, on the other hand, recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.”

“He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it,” Mr. Rauschenberg added. “Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me.”

Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward materials and new mediums, which Mr. Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool.

For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black Mountain. During the spring of 1950 he and Ms. Weil married. The marriage lasted two years, during which they had a son, Christopher, who survives him, along with Mr. Rauschenberg’s companion, Darryl Pottorf.

Being John Cage’s Guest

Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery.

“Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, since Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.

“We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events, like passing shadows.

“I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well — hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”

Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly for a few months after that, Mr. Rauschenberg began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title “scatole contemplative,” or thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic suggested that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. He thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. “‘I took your advice,” he wrote to the critic.

Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage for bigger, more elaborate assemblages, like ‘“Monogram.” Back in New York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings, then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase, a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art world.

Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown, who had a studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had a loft. The intimacy of their relationship over the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art.

In Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous words, they gave each other “permission to do what we wanted.” Living together in a series of lofts in Lower Manhattan until the 1960s, they exchanged ideas and supported themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones.

Along with the combines like “Monogram” and “Canyon” (1959), Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process, used for works like “34 Drawings for Dante’s Inferno,” created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secret. Perhaps there was an autobiographical and sensual aspect to this. It let him blend images on a surface to a kind of surreal effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas.

Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he made prints at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles, producing lithographs like the 1970 “Stoned Moon” series, with its references to the moon landing.

His association with theater and dance had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and costumes for Mr. Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In 1963 he choreographed “Pelican,” in which he performed on roller skates while wearing a parachute and helmet of his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This fascination with collaboration and with mixing art and technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and others, he started Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster joint projects by artists and scientists.

A World of Praise

In 1964 he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennale as the United States representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as “the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.” He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an institution.

Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997 and yet another at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.

When he wasn’t traveling in later years, he was on Captiva, living at first in a modest beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became that Gulf Coast island’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village in New York. He acquired the land in Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors whom he let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, including a 17,000-square-foot two-story studio overlooking a swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on the island.

After a stroke in 2002 that left his right side paralyzed, Mr. Rauschenberg learned to work more with his left hand and, with a troupe of assistants, remained prolific for several years in his giant studio.

"I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop," he said in an interview there. "At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore."

He added: "Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations."

r.i.p. Albie

sad news.


Albert Hofmann, 11 January 1006 – 29 April 2008

An Obituary by Dieter A. Hagenbach and Lucius Werthmüller

At the age of 102 years, Albert Hofmann died peacefully last Tuesday morning, 29th April, in his home near Basel, Switzerland. Still last weekend we talked to him, and he expressed his great joy about the blooming plants and the fresh green of the meadows and trees around his house. His vitality and his open mind conducted him until his last breath.

He is reputed to be one of the most important chemists of our times. He is the discoverer of LSD, which he considers, up to date, as both a "wonder drug" and a "problem child". In addition he did pioneering work as a researcher of other psychoactive substances as well as active agents of important medicinal plants and mushrooms. Under the spell of the consciousness-expanding potential of LSD the scientist turned increasingly into a philosopher of nature and a visionary critical of contemporary culture.

Until his death Albert Hofmann remained active. He communicated with colleagues and experts from all over the world, gave interviews, and showed great interest in the world's affairs, although he decided to retire from public life already a few years ago. Nevertheless he welcomed visitors at his home on the Rittimatte, and opened the door for late in the evening.

He managed to keep his almost childlike curiosity for the wonders of nature and creation. In his "paradise," as he would call his home, he enjoyed being close to nature, especially to plants. During one of our last visits he said to us with luminous eyes: "The Rittimatte is my second most important discovery." It was always a unique experience to stroll with him over his meadows and to share his enjoying the living nature all around.
Gratefully and lovingly we grieve for an outstanding scientist, an important philosopher, a dear and true friend, and our member of the board.

Albert Hofmann was born on January 1906 in the quiet small town of Baden, Switzerland, as the eldest one of four children. His father is a toolmaker in a factory where he meets Albert’s mother-to-be; when he falls seriously ill, Albert has to support the family. That’s why he decides for a commercial apprenticeship. At the same time he starts studying Latin and other languages, since he wants to take his A-levels, which he succeeds in at a private school, paid for by a godfather.

In 1926, at the age of twenty, Albert Hofmann begins to study chemistry at the University of Zurich. Four years later he does his doctorate with distinction. Subsequently he works at the Sandoz pharmaceutical-chemical research laboratory in Basel, a company to which he proves his loyalty for more than four uninterrupted decades. (In 1996 Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy merged to become Novartis.) That’s where he mainly works with medicinal plants and mushrooms. He's specifically interested in alkaloids (nitrogen compounds) of ergot, a cereal fungus. In 1938 he isolates the basic component of all therapeutically essential ergot alkaloids, lysergic acid; he mixes it with a series of chemicals. He then tests the effects of the thus derived lysergic acid derivatives as circulatory and respiratory stimulant – among others LSD-25 (Lysergic acid diethylamide). Because the effects observed fell short of expectations, however, the pharmacologists at Sandoz quickly lose interest in it.

Five years later, following a "peculiar presentiment," Albert Hofmann devotes himself again to LSD-25. On 16 April 1943, while synthesizing, he is overcome by unusual sensations – "a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness," – which prompt him to interrupt his laboratory work. "At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxication like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight too unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away."

Three days later, on 19 April 1943, Hofmann sets out for the first voluntary LSD trip in the history of man. Because he cannot yet judge the enormous efficacy of the drug, he takes, at 4:20 pm, with 250 microgram a relatively high dose – and gets to know the hallucinogenic power of the substance with all its intensity.
With his discovery of LSD Albert Hofmann has caused a snowball effect, which turns into an avalanche in no time. It influences the late second millennium – at least in the Western world – to an extent, comparable only to the "pill". Consciousness researchers respectfully spoke of an "atom bomb of the mind."

To worldwide setting-in research Albert Hofmann makes essential contributions. So he is, in 1958, the first one to succeed in isolating the psychoactive substances psilocybin and psilocin from Mexican magic mushrooms (Psilocybe mexicana); in Ololiuqui, the seeds of a climbing plant, he finds substances related to LSD. He isolates and synthesizes substances of important medicinal plants in order to study their effects. His basic research blesses Sandoz with several successful remedies: Hydergine, an effective one in geriatrics, Dihydergot, a circulation- and blood-pressure stabilizing medicament, and Methergine, an active agent applied in gynecology. Hofmann stays with Sandoz until his retirement in 1971, last as head of the research department for natural medicines. From then on he devotes more and more of his time to writing and lecturing. He increasingly wins recognition for his scientific pioneering ventures: he is given honorary doctorates by the ETH Zurich, the Stockholm university, and the Berlin Free University; and he is called into the Nobel Prize Committee.

Here, outstanding contributions to research were honored – but Albert Hofmann's life's work comprises much more. From the start he took a favorable view of efforts by physicians and psychotherapists to include LSD into new approaches for the treatment of manifold chronic diseases. But LSD isn't only useful with special diagnoses – it's Hofmann's firm belief that the "psychedelic" potential of this "wonder drug" could be beneficial to all of us. In LSD-induced altered states of consciousness its discoverer doesn’t only see psychotic delusions of a chemically manipulated mind, but windows to a higher reality – true spiritual experiences during which a normally deeply buried potential of our mind, the heavenly element of creation, our unity with it reveals itself. "The one-sided belief in the scientific view of life is based on a far-reaching misunderstanding," Hofmann says in his book Insight – Outlook. "Certainly, everything it contains is real – but this represents just one half of reality; only its material, quantifiable part. It lacks all those spiritual dimensions which cannot be described in physical or chemical terms; and it’s exactly these which include the most important characteristics of all life."

It’s not the single consumer alone who profits from chemicals which help to understand these aspects of the world; for Hofmann it could help to heal deficits the Western world chronically suffers from: "Materialism, estrangement from nature (...), lack of professional fulfillment in a mechanized, lifeless world of employment, boredom and aimlessness in a rich, saturated society, the missing of a sense-making philosophical fundamentalness of life." Starting from experiences as LSD conveys them, we could "develop a new awareness of reality" which "could become the basis of a spirituality that's not founded on the dogmas of existing religions, but on insights into a higher and profounder sense" – on that we recognize, read, and understand "the revelations of the book which God's finger wrote." When such insights "become established in our collective consciousness, it could arise from that, that scientific research and the previous destroyers of nature – technology and industry – will serve the purpose of changing back our world into what it formerly was: into an earthly Garden of Eden."

With this message the genius chemist turns into a profound philosopher of nature and visionary critical of contemporary culture. The critical distance from the LSD euphoria of the hippie- and flower power-driven ones Albert Hofmann has never given up, however; that he has fathered a "problem child" he already emphasizes with the title of one of his most known works. He always underlines the risks of an uncontrolled intake. On the other hand he never tires of emphasizing what's the basic difference between LSD and most of the other drugs: even if used repeatedly, it doesn't make addictive; it doesn't reduce one's awareness; taken in a normal dose it’s absolutely non-toxic. The total demonizing of psychedelics, as pursued by the mass media, conservative politicians, and governments from the sixties onward, he never could understand; for him, there is no reason why mentally stable persons in the right set and setting shouldn't enjoy LSD. All the more disappointed Albert Hofmann was when, in the late sixties, he had to see it happen that the use of LSD was worldwide criminalized and prohibited – even for therapeutic and research purposes

The impetus for a change emanating from the impact of the international Symposium "LSD – Problem Child and Wonder Drug" in 2006 in Basel, at the occasion of his 100th birthday, quickened him to say that "after this conference my problem child has definitely turned into a wonder child," and he regarded this development as his most beautiful birthday present.

And after just shortly before his 102nd birthday, he enjoyed taking notice that the first LSD study with humans has received the permission from the Federal Office of Public Health in Bern, which he called the "fulfillment of my heart's desire."

His life has become an ideal for many for how we can reach a great age in mental and physical vigor by retaining a childlike curiosity.

Albert Hofmann repeatedly expressed his conviction, that his mystical experiences and his trips into other worlds of consciousness, which he experienced first spontaneously as a child and later during his experiments with psychedelic substances would be the best preparations for the last journey which everybody has to go on at the end of her or his life. He has retained his curiosity for himself for his last journey.

spring is here

thank GOD!

and i really do need to get back on the stick, here. logged in today pretty much just to see if i still would remember how. i did. small miracles.

realized that i apparently have my "comments" set up to be approved first -- gotta change that. sorry, folks. please keep 'em coming. together, we can breathe new life into the good ol' bitchin' hats site.

i'll try to be more topical. and consistent.

we'll see.

peace.