Just Like Suicide pt. 9

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Eighteen
Thomas J. Malinowski, known for his visceral and agitated abstract paintings which always included subtle, sly elements borrowed from his childhood drawings, died accidentally of positional asphyxia, the direct result of combining alcohol with an antidepressant. Malinowski along with Hondo Hines, Alex Garcia and Lori Milligan were the hot LA flavor internationally for three years until the art market crashed and Hines died from an overdose. In addition to impressive solo shows in Los Angeles, New York and Berlin, Malinowski’s oil and semen paintings were displayed in the Venice Biennale, the Younger than Thirty exhibit at the Walker Art Center, and in the Subjectivity exhibit at the Hammer. Always clowning around to amuse his friends even at the risk of jail time, he was best known on the West side as the guy who tiptoed his way across the top of the railing along the Santa Monica Pier during the first Glow extravaganza, balancing a flash light on his head while juggling and reciting poetry. In November, he would have been twenty nine.


Nineteen
Repetitive mindless action always soothed Maggie. She stood on the ladder applying paint in overlapping and intersecting diagonals, one dip through the tray at a time. There was a certain humility inherent in painting: the activity itself, the awkward angle of leaning on the ladder, balancing up and down in increments of inches. A slow, solitary dance mid air.
Maggie liked the sucking sound the paint made as the roller left swathes of stark white on the wall. The previous show had needed a cool white, a pale moon green, to set off the colors of the paintings. She volunteered to return the walls to bright white. Doing this didn’t require thinking, just a visual alertness. She could trust her eyes to register any neglected areas, could trust her hands to repaint, while her mind could wander off, reflecting on something she had just read. She was always carrying home discarded books and the one she found last night in the median of the freeway was filled with quotes. During the SigAlert, she had sprinted from her car to rescue it.
On page six, a previous owner had circled a Cicero quote, “Wage labor is sordid and unworthy of a free man, for wages are the price of labor and not of some art; craft labor is sordid, as is the business of retailing.” In the margin, someone had written a series of tiny exclamation marks in blue ink. The next quote was “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” That proverb actually was penned in 1849 by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr.
Whoever compiled the quotes had a sense of humor.
On the surface, Karr was dead wrong: things had changed since Cicero. Making money through high wages now was our culture’s ultimate virtue. Making enough money to live well was inextricably connected with happiness. Happiness was not only the goal of life, it was mandated as an inalienable right by the Declaration of Independence. As she rolled the paint on, layer after layer, she suspected that definitions had changed rather than human nature. Happiness for the Founding Fathers, influenced by the Enlightenment and its reverence for ancient Rome, was different than simply having a good time in life.
In ancient Roman culture, workers by definition could not have happy lives: happiness was not possible without virtue. And their virtuous life had nothing to do with abstaining from carnality. Virtue revolved around contemplation and fulfilling duty. Those struggling to survive had no time for contemplation, no time for serving the state. Even with free time, the plebeians had no entry into government. Virtue and happiness, therefore, were only possible for wealthy patricians.
The Romans carried it even further. Vivere est cogitare – to live is to think. Only those who were the master of their own time could be fully human and alive. Those without the time to think were ipso facto only partially human. Designating so many as subhuman always makes a great rationalization for slavery. Rome was built on slavery.
Maggie dropped a big glob of stark white paint on her left shoe. Shit. Now Barbara would scowl at her all evening for coming home with paint on her shoes. Barbara’s mother had raised her daughters to be worthy patricians. Rina, by all accounts, had been gifted at abjuring all physical exertion, at thinking that those around her had nothing better to do than facilitate her comfort. No wonder Rina had such an affinity for Neoclassicism, the revival of all things Roman. The Romans so perfectly reflected the narcissistic mindset of the ultra rich.
Barbara complained frequently about the hours her mother had forced her to waste in the Louvre. Rina would sit primly day after day in the nearly abandoned rooms of French Neoclassical paintings. Barbara hated every second. She thought the Neoclassical canvases were rigid and contrived schlock, but, as her mother pointed out, at the time it was called the “true style” and was regarded as a second Renaissance. “These works embody the same timeless, virile truths exposed in Pompeii and Herculaneum which were in the initial stages of excavation at the time and were welcome antidotes to the feminine excesses of the Rococo.” Barbara recognized it as a line from a catalog. Her mother sucked at having real conversations. But the alternative to Neoclassical was all those curlicues of the Rococo. Barbara hated the Rococo too. That whole century pretty much stank in her opinion.
The styles in the eighteenth century might have changed from one excess to another but the hierarchy remained intact. Even a poor aristocrat considered himself superior to any successful bourgeois, and both viewed themselves as vastly superior to those who painted. Soiled hands, even after the American and the French revolutions, bespoke labor and labor was still the fate of the inferior. New upstart money came from labor; old noble money came from land. This attitude held in Europe and the United States until well after the industrial revolution shifted the status quo. Land ultimately could not compete with vast incomes generated from machinery. Management of money gradually replaced management of land as the sign of superiority. Since the First World War wiped out most of the men in the aristocracy across Europe and bankrupted those few left, making money became everyone’s obsession, regardless of its origin.
With the rise of industry, it was psychologically brilliant letting the workers think they were virtuous while they worked themselves into early graves. But the fundamental prejudice against labor Cicero wrote about remains: those who work still fall into a caste system, white collar vs blue collar, management vs workers. Public hostility against unions and the poor is an extension of that Roman mindset. Dirty hands are still inferior. Only the definition of virtue has changed, focusing now on curbing sexual desire.
Christianity never made a dent in the Roman core values. It certainly tried. Jesus started out as a humble Shepherd caring for the poor and outcasts only to be transformed quickly into the King of Heaven who bestowed divine rights on earthly kings. Even the Protestant Reformation did little. The Calvinist work ethic and its presumption that financial success was evidence of God’s favor nicely reinforced the Roman prejudices that low income workers were less blessed, less human than the wealthy.
Arbeit Macht Frei was so Calvinist. Work Makes Free. Work Liberates. The slogan of the Nazis rendered in metal bars on the gates leading to the slave labor camps of Auschwitz and Dachau. Work liberated them all right. The Jews, homosexuals and political dissidents were liberated through gas and starvation into mass graves.

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